IFAO

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.

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.

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.

Publication of the archaelogical map of Dendara area. This territorial data available on digital medium allows for some remarks on the urban form and the limit between sacred and civil spaces. This limit, on the occasion of the construction of a new enclosure wall, should mark a place of urban restauration accompanied by important phenomena of tabula rasa in the civil districts.

Study of a row of four stone mausolea in the necropolis of Bashendi (Dakhla Oasis). The first one, leaning against the famous Kitynos’s tomb (1st-2nd c. A.D.) is built in pharaonic style. The three others, quite identical, display features of classical style, especially pilasters on attic bases. The layout being a square (around 7,5 m), they were covered by a dome as can still be seen on the well preserved tomb 4 reused as Sheikh Bashendi’s qubba. These mausolea date back to the 1st-2nd c. A.D. They provide a landmark of the spreading of graeco-roman architectural patterns in Egypt during the Early Roman Empire.

This article intends to look at the field of use of two related substantives, namely ḥȝwt and ḥȝwty, which both designate the divine face. The examples gathered here allow us to recognise various specific values. As evocation of a divine face, bearer of the uraei and of the crowns, the face ḥȝwt(y) appears in the private documentation as an object of piety. One wishes to «see» this divine face. It is also part of a theological reĠexion. In this respect we examine the values of the šf ḥȝwty epithet that usually refers back to the criocephalous manifestation of the demiurge. A collection of examples from the New Kingdom also reveals that the ḥȝwty (with graphies that bear witness of a duel), can be connected to the divine ship, bearer of the two prow and stern figures, criocephalic in the case of theban Amon, a manifestation of a divine face central to divinatory practice.

The transliteration «Piy» or «Peye» for the name formerly known as «Piankhy» was first suggested by Priese in MIO (1968). The present study aims at reviewing the arguments of Prise’s article, and showing particularly that the sign of life in the royal name actually had a phonetic value. This name was however not genuinely Egyptian. It was certainly Old Meroitic, as Priese had felt. The Egyptian name p(ȝ)-ʿnḫ(y) was pronounced in Demotic [āpo n