Tenth International Congress of Egyptologists Abstracts of Papers

XICE – Abstract of Papers
glance at their own past, cast by those priests, and reveal a propagandistic use of the
religious feelings and of the membership sense, that an intelligent use of the art of
rhetoric, could usefully recall from oblivion, to control the power in a so troubled
epoch in the history of the country. In effect, the parcelling out of the Delta territories
and the military interventions in the Lower Egypt by many foreign peoples, like
Libyan, Nubian and Assyrian, gave rise to a need for unity and to a feeling of
belonging that, in a former moment of division, were expressed in the call for
tradition and ancient culture, and later in nationalism and archaism, keeping together
and supporting the Egyptian nation, united again. It’s precisely from that need that
priestly local and specific titles came to represent one of the most important
manifestations that lived on in this cultural and historical reality.
They were titles with allusive and evocative names, relating ceremonies and
mythological recounts, relevant to the divine characters worshipped in the most
important religious centres of the Lower (but also of the Upper) Egypt. Although they
were used and studied very much, above all in order to determine the geographical
origin of the artefacts, it has never been drawn a big picture for them, to analyse their
more interesting general aspects and the cultural and political role they played in the
complex situation of those days. Their occurrences are numerous in the Lower Egypt
priests’ monuments with epigraphs, starting from the Twenty-fifth Dynasty on, but
they are not reflected in the same way (neither studied with sufficient intensity) in the
other documents, in the papyri containing rituals, in the demotic documentation, in
literature and celebrative texts.
This lack of information has often let the scholars call them factitious, formal,
honorific. The research to understand how they were assigned, revoked, handed
down, and what kind of prebends, benefits and privileges they provided to their
holders, is still in its first steps but is very badly needed. Therefore, the forthcoming
discussion represents a little contribute to the study of the whole of these titles, in the
great variety of the documents that have anything to do with them. The presence,
although marginal, of the discussed offices in the contracts of donation, in the rituals
on papyri, in the regulations of religious societies and all the indirect evidence, all this
compared, will enable us to deepen our knowledge of their functions, attributions,
profits they were bound to and authority they were granted, in a diachronistic
perspective as well. The results of a research that constitutes a Ph.D. thesis are
anticipated here as a basis to attract attention to this section of the religious
geography, in the drift of a tradition of very important scholars as Sauneron, De
Meulenaere and Yoyotte.
Harpocrates statuettes: alloys and colour
Hedvig Győry
The authors studied a group of Egyptian Harpocrates, in the collection of the Museum
of Fine Arts in Budapest, from the stylistic and the compositional point of view. The
statuettes can be grouped into different iconographic types, the standing or striding
Harpocrates and the sitting or half reclining Harpocrates. The statuettes are of
unknown provenance, while the typological examination seems to indicate that most
of the pieces are to be dated to the Late Period. The analyses of the pieces showed
differences in the chemical composition which seem to indicate that the Egyptian
artisans deliberately used alloys of distinctive kind for different types. The
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