Tenth International Congress of Egyptologists Abstracts of Papers

XICE – Abstract of Papers
The rock inscriptions belong to known West Bank workmen of the late Ramesside
Period. An inscription giving the name of a late “chief of the crew” makes an obscene
threat against “the one who will engrave these stones, and those who have made
report”; the nearby erased name of Meniounefer, son of Butehamun, reveals the zeal
of the threatening chief of the crew. Another inscription gives the name of the
southern fork as “the Valley of Amenemhat”. Other inscriptions mention a host of
well-known late Ramesside workmen; connections between these men and their
associates in other Theban inscriptions suggest that the mummy of a small child
named Amenemhat (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York)—whom
the Ramesside workmen believed to be a king Amenemhat—buried alone, near the
Deir el-Bahari cachette, is the Amenemhat for whom the Ramesside resurrectionists
named the wadi. The man who reburied him, and left his name on a small pectoral
attached to the mummy, was an associate of the chief of the crew who left the curse in
the northern branch. An inscription of Djehutymose, father of Butehamun, is dated to
the pontificate of Herihor and refers to Djehutymose as the butler (wdpw) of the
pontiff, a unique title for the official relationship between the chief workman and his
superior.
The tombs and inscriptions in the area of the Wadi of Amenemhat support
reconstructions of the end of the Ramesside Period that see an official plundering of
earlier tombs. In addition to providing a missing necropolis of the Second
Intermediate Period and early New Kingdom, the tombs, the remnants of their original
contents, and the assemblage of tomb contents removed to the embalmers’ caches
reveal the wealth and quantity of material removed from relatively small burials in the
northern fringes of the Theban necropoleis during the early period of official tomb
robbery. This search for ancient wealth may not initially have been a response to a
truly dire situation, however. Archaeological deposits at the Gebel Roma and Gebel
Qarn el-Gir caravansaries on the main desert road leading north and west from
Western Thebes reveal that at the same time that the state was looting the Theban
tombs and Thebes suffered famine, the state—far from impoverished and unable to
find income—was shipping unusually large quantities of grain in massive caravans to
Thebes. Earlier layers at the sites reveal constant traffic with a variety of ceramic
fabrics and forms, and plant remains dominated by—but not limited to—barley and
emmer. During the Late Ramesside Period, the caravansaries reveal periods of
infrequent use, with sand accumulation, and the remains of what appear to be less
frequent visits by large caravans, outfitted with a limited corpus of ceramic shapes
and fabrics, suggesting official sponsorship—the absence of private or semi-private
activities left the skeleton of governmental systems to take up the slack, and in terms
of the pace of grain shipment, the government was more than prepared. The
redistributive economic machines that were the Egyptian temples appear to have
continued taking in produce, but the release of their income into the rest of the
economy appears to have malfunctioned. Butehamun and his associates may have
participated in the terminal hoarding economy of the dying Ramesside state.
Projet de publication d'un répertoire prosopographique des monuments du
Département des Antiquités égyptiennes du Louvre
Elisabeth David
“Pharaon”, la base de données documentaire des monuments du Département des
Antiquités égyptiennes du Louvre, comporte pour chaque objet un champ “nom
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