IFAO

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.