Tenth International Congress of Egyptologists Abstracts of Papers

XICE – Abstract of Papers
A new magical text: the Papyrus of the Seven Utterances of Mehet-Weret
(pLouvre 6838-6841+ 6848)
Yvan Koenig
This important hieratic document of the Ramesside Period is now part of the papyrus
collection of the Louvre Museum. It consists in nine pages of text (11 cm x 34 cm),
written on both sides; apparently dome are missing. It is meant to cure a sick person
who, strangely enough, first remains anonymous, then is referred to by his name,
“Bakenkhonsu son of Ta-Weretemheb”. The magical invocationuses series of
Speeches that involve several aspects of the Theology of Mehet-Weret.
On further examination, the composition of this text is very similar to the one of a
poem, with verses and stanzas. Each stanza contains a Speech built on the same
pattern. The climax of the text is the solemn evocation of the Seven Utterances of
Mehet-Weret; at this particular moment the recreation of the world excudes the
sickness and the suffering is cured. This papyrus renews deeply our knowledge of
magical texts.
The North Village at Malkata: a typical New Kingdom village community?
Aikaterini Koltsida
The palace city of Amenhotep III at Malkata is located at the west bank of Thebes and
was constructed to house the three jubilees that the king celebrated there at the 30th,
34th and 37th years of his reign. Malkata is a remarkable site for the study of
domestic architecture, since, inside the walled part of the city, all types of domestic
buildings are present, namely palaces, villas and tripartite houses. Of particular
interest is an agglomeration of small sized houses that the excavators called the North
Village, which seems like an organically created village. The houses located at
Malkata were seemingly closely related to and dependent on the palace. They
arguably housed palace employees and / or the workmen occupied in the construction
of the palace city’s buildings, but also the workmen who created the numerous faience
and glass objects that were discovered at Malkata. Those were doubtlessly presents of
the king to his subjects during the jubilee celebrations. This paper will focus on the
architectural features of the buildings within the north village.
The north village was excavated by Ambrose Lansing during the Metropolitan
Museum of Art excavation at Malkata that took place in the second decade of the 20th
century. However, besides the plan of the buildings there are no notes or excavation
diaries concerning the north village, which was never published. Today the village is
not visible, as it is covered with the debris that came from the excavation of its
neighbouring temple of Amun. The detailed plan of the village presented in this paper
is based on Lansing’s plans, that Dr Dorothea Arnold, Lila Acheson Wallace Curator
in Charge of the Egyptian Department of the Metropolitan Museum, allowed me to
study together with all the excavation material from the site. The plan is rather
complicated and its study clearly demonstrates that the village was not planned, as
were the workmen’s villages of Amarna and Deir el-Medina. There are several
narrow alleys between the buildings, most of which lead to a dead end. The houses
are comparable in shape and size to the small houses excavated in the Amarna main
city. They have not the uniformity in plan that we find in the workmen’s villages, and
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