Tenth International Congress of Egyptologists Abstracts of Papers

XICE – Abstract of Papers
My first example is the decoration of palace floors, known mainly from Amarna,
but with enough evidence to suggest similar decoration in the palace of Amenhotep
III at Malqata. At the center of these formally laid out palace floors are rectangular
pools of water filled with fish, water lilies, and ducks swimming or flying over the
surface of the water. In bands around the pool are growing stands of papyrus, reeds,
poppies and cornflowers, above which pintail ducks fly. DAVID O’CONNOR has
argued that when the king appears enthroned in his palace, he is the embodiment of
the sun god, and just as the sun god renews the created world at dawn each day after
the darkness of the night, so “the king “illuminates” a representation of the terrestrial
universe.” Thus, the floor represents the world at dawn brought into being once more
after the darkness of the night by the appearance of the king in the role of the sun god.
Since every dawn repeats the creation of the cosmos, the floor must also refer to the
primordial landscape. The choice of the flying pintail duck as one of the major
inhabitants of this landscape to the exclusion of almost all other birds must surely be
significant. Its connection with the inundated and therefore primordial landscape may
be one reason but I would suggest that there is a second reason that makes this bird
particularly appropriate. The flying pintail duck was used as a hieroglyph to write the
verb pA “to fly”, and then, through the rhebus principle, to write a large number of
words containing the phonetic value p3. One of these is pA(w)t “primordial time”. The
repeated representation of the flying pintail duck is literally spelling out the notion
that we are looking at the primeval landscape brought into being by the ritual
appearance of the king in the palace.
My second example is a scene on the small golden shrine of Tutankhamun. There
is good evidence that the shrine came originally from a palace context. I have argued
elsewhere that it functioned in the cult of the divine aspect of the king, performed in
the palace by the queen as ritualist, with the purpose of constantly renewing the king’s
divine aspect through the female agency of the queen. In many of these scenes, the
king plays the role of the creator god. One of them shows the king standing in a
papyrus boat with his rear arm raised and his hand grasping a throwstick; his forward
hand holds by the legs a group of four pintail ducks with spread wings. Behind him is
a figure of the queen. In front of the boat is a clump of papyrus in which is placed a
nest holding two fledglings. Because omA means both “to throw” and “to create”, the
king by throwing is engaged in the act of creation, thus taking on the role of the
creator god. The queen represents the female aspect of the creator which is combined
with the male within the creator god but separated out when the first male and female
pair of deities, Shu and Tefnut, are created, thus enabling the development of the
ordered cosmos. Shu and Tefnut are here represented by the two fledglings in the nest.
The pintail ducks with the spread wings grasped in the king’s hand are not just an
allusion to pA(w)t “primordial time”, but also to pAwtj the primordial god who came
into existence of himself and created the world. Their presence, therefore, underscores
the king’s role as creator god in this scene.
The language of the Qeheh
Alessandro Roccati
A long known papyrus, belonging to the collection of the Egyptian Museum at Turin,
where it arrived in the early 19th century, contains what remains of a number of spells
against snakes, said to be uttered in the language of the Qeheq. We know through the
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