IFAO

During a systematic inventory of headrests carried out for a PhD thesis, two atypical artefacts stood out from the whole corpus. Both contain an almost identical magic -inscription, mentioning protective deities.

Republication of a papyrus fragment which was published without transliteration or translation as "Brief (Eingabe an Götter)". This article corrects misconceptions and produces a new understanding and interpretation, concluding that it is a hierodule document. The present papyrus fragment in the Cairo Museum is a further contribution to the study of hierodules, hitherto published only in a few pieces. It is one of the latest, if not the latest, in date; it is probably very late Ptolemaic, found in the Fayyum.

The present P. Vindob. D 6850 (Papyrus Collection of the Austrian National Library in Vienna) from the regnal year 1 of Caesar Augustus (30 / 29 B. C.) refers to a late demotic "receipt of payment" (ỉw) for the royal wȜty-tax, whose exact character is still rather unclear. The collectors of the tax are two "administrators of the King" (nȜ sḥn.w pr-ʿȜ) as well as the wʿb-priests of the island of the great god Soknopaio. The five persons taxed are "the administrators of the weavers (nȜ sḥn.w nȜ mḏḳn.w) of the island of the great god Soknopaio".

This article briefly describes a group of thirteen hieratic papyri of the Egyptian Museum of Turin. These papyri have similar characteristics. In addition to the hieratic scripts, they all have an initial and single etiquette, which represents the deceased adoring a divinity, and which contains chapters of the Book of the Dead. The presentation of a list of the well-dated papyri of the Third Intermediate Period – which mostly come from the different cachettes of Deir el-Bahari – will help us in studying the paleography, the etiquette, the sequences of the chapters of the Book of the Dead during this period, in order to try to place them in a social and historical context.

The tomb of Mehu in Saqqara shows a further representation of the hunting of birds using clap nets. This representation confirms conclusions the author had reached in a previous article («Du disque de Hemaka au filet hexagonal du lac Manzala. Un exemple de pérennité des techniques de chasse antiques», BIFAO 101, 2001, p. 237-248) and shows, on the one hand, that there were nets of six perches, the majority possessing four, and, on the other hand, that these nets could be represented laterally.

The stele Aberdeen 1619 (ABDUA 21697) is indeed the funeral stele of the mother of a bull Bouchis, but it is not in the name of Maximin DaĪa as has been suggested by J. Capart and H. Grégoire. It is the funeral stele of the mother of the dead Bouchis 8 Hathyr of the year 57 of Diocletian (November 4, 340) known as the stele Bucheum 20. These dates should be calculated from the actual taking of power of these emperors in Egypt; they correspond to the years 316/317 and 331/332. Besides the addition of two new names to the Book of Kings of late Roman Egypt, the significance of this stele lies also in the rare and invaluable testimony it brings regarding the survival of traditional cults well into the IV-th century.

Discussing a series of regular phonetical oscillations and reconstructing their respective lexical contexts, this paper brings out the transformations undergone by the Akkadian etymon burāšu (cypress) first through different Semitic idioms, then in Greek and Latin, and ending in the current Albanian and Romanian vocabulary. The state of the research on these lexemes is also established.

This article deals with decoration, polychrome or monochrome, of Deir el-Medina burial chambers from the reigns of Sethi I and Ramses II. In these two kinds of contemporary sepultures, many thematic differences are noticed in the decoration programme and discussed here. Finally, hypotheses explaining these thematic differences are presented, and two religious conceptions are showed in the beginning of the Ramesside period.

Prohibition of music is only known by six documents; three date from the Ptolemaic period and three come from Hellenistic literature. Despite several hypotheses proposed in earlier studies, the reasons for this taboo remain unclear. After a review of all the -documentation, this paper analyses the set of musical instruments that are forbidden and reaches the conclusion that none of them seems to have been banned because of a specific liturgical taboo concerning the material they are made of, nor do the restrictions stem from an exclusive profane or military purpose, or from a use that was restricted to certain festive rites, or because there was an instrumental practice which would be reserved to either men or women. However these instruments have a common character: the noise they make when people play them. So the solution seems obvious when we realise that in five documents these restrictions are related with Osiris and his abaton: Osiris as the ruler of the domain of the dead, Lord of the West, of the necropolis and of Silence loathes noise. But this cannot account for it entirely since other sources indicate that this god has a privileged relationship with music. Nevertheless, this contradiction seems to be resolved in the Osirian doctrine and its funerary practices. Indeed, the rite of reviving Osiris’ body apparently begins after a period of sepulchral silence during which all music is banned in order not to disturb the repose of the god. With the crucial act of mummification music the songs first play a prophylactic role and, during the ritual of the Opening of the mouth, they finally participate in the rebirth of Osiris. So the prohibition of music has its roots in the oldest Egyptian beliefs in a cycle which endlessly opposes nothingness to creation, death to life and silence to noise; emerging from this eternal fight, Osiris – with all the deceased whom he embodies – triumphs over death forever.

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.