IFAO

This ostracon, belonging to the Ifao collections, is a loan agreement drawn up for Apa John, "the Father of the hospital" of the monastery of Apa Mena, south of Assiut. The writer, Apa Victor, son of Baruch, lives in the neighbourhood of Sbeht. Not far from the well-known monasteries of Wadi-Sarga and Bala’izah, this long forgotten town was once the main city of the Apollonopolite Parva nome and a bishop see. This monastery is termed a "petra", a community clusterd in a peculiar lanscape of caves running far up the limestone cliffs overhanging the Nile. The pilgrims, especially the sickmen, crowded the "petra" on the feast day of Saint Mena. This text contributes to our understanding of everyday life in Coptic Egypt.

The identity of the character depicted in the Coptos colossi and their chronology have become two controversial points in the study of these works of art. Soon after they were discovered, the idea that they could be a primitive representation of the god Min was proposed. Their location within the perimeter of the temple of Coptos, as well as the presence of certain iconographic motifs, led a priori to that conclusion. Nevertheless, some later works have opposed that hypothesis. Whether these statues belong to the Egyptian artistic environment or not has been the starting point of the formal and comparative study developed in the first part of this paper. Within the iconographic field we have, in the second part of this study, evaluated every one of the motifs inscribed on the statues. Through the results provided by the evidence, we have concluded that the Coptos colossi were early representations of the god Min. Early because they belong to a chronological period situated between the end of Naqada II and the beginning of Naqada III. The differences in content with historical images of the god Min arise from representing an entity that ruled over the desert and the sea; a different Min, pertaining to the so-called "Preformal tradition", that we consider a former sculptural symbol of the same principle, namely Fertility.

The deification of Amenhotep III has often been considered as a means of enhancing the king’s status and legitimacy. The present study analyses his deification as a social phenomenon linked to the general evolution of religious concepts and attitudes of the mid-XVIIIth dynasty. The available documentation (without Nubia) is classified according to its origin, stemming either from the sphere of official state religion and traditional royal ideology, or from private initiative within the emerging display of individual religiosity. These two spheres merge mainly through the activity of the elite. Images of the king as representative of a deity, in human or animal form and often of colossal size, were made accessible to the entire society and were approached as a means of direct contact with the divine. Very humble documents attest to the veneration of the king as saviour, healer and personal protector. People of higher social status combine the expression of piety with the display of loyalty. Rather modest funerary stelae represent the identification of the king with Horus – son of Isis. None of these documents shows any clear chronological or ideological relation to Amenhotep’s sed-festivals. Many aspects find close parallels during the reign of Ramesses II.

At Dendara, some compositions are difficult to read if one does not take into account the ornamental dimension of the writing. The heavenly personality of the gods in the -hypostyle is represented by the abundance of birds used. The banners of the ouâbet, the theater of the rite of the New Year, the ideograms of the gods themselves – Hathor, Ra, Thoth, etc. – are discussed.

Publication of a newly discovered fragment of a statue of Amenhotep son of Hapu represented as a scribe. It was found in Esna but the inscription shows that it came from Karnak. The papyrus is inscribed with a short hymn to Amun-ra.

The point of departure of this paper is a fragmentary ostracon from Krokodilo, a letter addressed by a curator praesidii to an §pãrxƒ ˆro]u ka‹ fid€ƒ §pãrxƒ. This document raises a discussion of the rare use of the possessive pronoun in connection with military grades of which I list the occurrences, of the use of ‡dio! in the prescript of letters, and more generally of the progressively mounting use of possessive pronouns, ‡dio! or the like, in the epistolary prescript. This must be due to Latin influence. In Egypt ‡dio! with the name of the addressee is used specifically for «agent» or «employee», as if Greek writers, unlike Latin ones, were unwilling to use a possessive pronoun with a personal name, when no real possession was involved. Similarly ı §mÒ!, etc. + name in the papyri is used about slaves but not about friends or family as it is the case in Greek literature, mostly of the imperial period (probably by an imitation of Latin).

The last decades of the 20th century were characterized by the development and exponential growth of new techniques and methods that are very useful to geographical and geo-archaeological research. Among these are techniques related to remote sensing and geographical information systems.

This article discusses the set up of Sigad, a geographical information system for the archaeological site of El Adaima and its surroundings. Sigad incorporate data having a multi-dimensional aspect: multisource (cartographie documents, aerial photographs, satellite -images, statistics, field data, etc.), multi-scale (global to local), multi-altitude, multi-temporal and multi-spectral.