The Royal Scribe and Chief Steward of Memphis, Amenhotep
BM EA 632, 18th Dynasty, Reign of Amenhotep III.
This statue was discovered by the EES (then the Egypt Exploration Fund) in the ruins of the temple of Osiris at Abydos, in 1903. Osiris was the mythical first king of Egypt, and a centrally important figure in the mythology of kingship and Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife. His temple at Abydos, an important place of pilgrimage for the ancient Egyptians, was one of the most important in Egypt, and had been built and rebuilt over the centuries by a succession of pharaohs each wanting to ensure that the cult of the lord of the underworld was maintained in an appropriately glorious setting.
The temple was excavated by the great Flinders Petrie, the 'father of archaeology', and one of the first excavators to work for the EEF.
Flinders Petrie at Abydos with his wife, Hilda's sister Amy Urlin.
Petrie had wanted to work at Abydos for a number of years before finally being granted permission to do so in 1899. After excavating the crucially important cemetery of the very earliest rulers of Egypt, Petrie turned his attentions to the temple area which would prove to be one of the most complicated sites he had ever worked at. Barry Kemp, when revisiting Petrie's work several decades later, described the undertaking as follows:
"One suspects that the work carried out on the Osiris temple at Abydos in 1902 and 1903 must have been the most difficult of all the excavations which Petrie undertook. With a depth of over six metres of stratified debris, and with the whole site littered with heavy stone blocks, Petrie's achievement in making some sort of sense out of the wreckage will remain a very considerable one."
Petrie's work at the temple was published soon after its completion as 'Abydos II', and circulated to EEF subscribers.
The statue of Amenhotep was found by the pylon of Tuthmosis III (18th Dynasty) but would originally have been set up along the causeway leading up to the temple.Statues such as this one were the preserve of the relatively wealthy; it is made of a fine, hard stone - granodiorite from the Aswan area, a few hundred miles up the Nile - and finely carved both in terms of the features of the individual and the text inscribed on the front (see below). For those who could afford it, pious acts such as setting up a statue in an important temple context were something of a priority. They were a way of demonstrating devotion to the god, symbolically allowing the individual to present offerings in perpetuity, while also creating a monument to themselves. The placement of a statue in a prominent setting, such as along a causeway, the scene for festival processions and 'traffic' of various other kinds, provided the individual with maximum exposure, revealing his piety to large numbers also involved in acts of devotion to the god.
For more photographs of the object at the time of its dicovery please see here.
It is the inscription on the front of the statue that allows us to identify the individual concerned. The text is read from left to right, and begins with a common formula. It reads, ‘An offering given by the king, to Osiris Wennefer the great god in Abydos’. The offering is made by the king and not by the statue owner as it was the king alone who had such privileged access to the god. Certain sections of the text are of particular interest:
The name of Osiris, here in the form of 'Osiris-Wennefer', is written here with signs representing an eye, a throne in profile, and a seated male deity, with divine beard. The final five signs highlighted in yellow represent the name of Abydos, known as ‘Abdju’ to the Egyptians (‘Abydos’ is the Greek form of the name). The very last sign is a ‘determinative’, representing a walled settlement in plan, with two main roads running through the centre, forming a cross, which confirms that the signs preceding it are the name of a town.
This formula is followed by the name and titles of the individual himself: ‘the king’s scribe, steward of (line 2) Memphis, superintendent of the treasuries of silver and gold, Amenhotep.’
‘King’s scribe’, highlighted in green, is written with the word for ‘king’, nesu, which could equally be translated as ‘royal’ here, followed by that for ‘scribe’, a single sign representing the basic tools of ther trade: a water pot, a brush, and a palette of two colours, connected by a cord so that everything could be carried over the shoulder.
The next title, highlighted in blue, reads literally ‘the one who is over the house of Memphis’ but is usually translated as ‘Steward of Memphis’, a role which gave the holder oversight of certain aspects of the administration of the locality. Memphis was the capital city of Egypt for most of Dynastic history; sites such as Giza, Abusir, Saqqara and Dahshur were the cemeteries used for the burial of kings and the high ranking officials who lived and worked in the capital. We know the ancient city now as Memphis, the name given to it by the Greeks, but the Egyptian name for it here is ‘Men-nefer’ meaning 'Enduring and Beautiful'. Note that along with the ‘town’ determinative, the toponym here ends with a Pyramid sign, indicating that even though the Pyramids built at the various cemeteries associated with the capital city were centuries old by this point, they provided a mark on the landscape as distinctive then as it remains today.
After another important title, that of ‘superintendent of the treasuries of gold and silver’, the name of the individual is given, and is highlighted here in red. ‘Amenhotep’ is written with the name of the god, Amun, followed by the hetep sign, which in this case means, ‘is satisfied’. Amun, particularly in his solar form as Amun-Ra, was the preeminent god in Egypt at this time and four pharaohs, were given this name during the Eighteenth Dynasty.
The full text of the inscription reads as follows:
(1) An offering given by the king, to Osiris Wennefer the great god in Abydos; the king’s scribe, steward of (2) Memphis, superintendent of the treasuries of silver and gold, Amenhotep, he says: “I have come unto thee, O lord of U-Pek, (3) my prayers are unto thy ka each day, I give thee glory, I exalt thee and glorify (4) the beauties of thy face. Let there be given unto me offerings of bread and beer, oxen and fowl, cloth and thread, incense and ointment, water, wine and (5) milk. May I be anointed with the best unguent and oil that has been cast off from the forehead of the god: may I receive (6) fillets in the feast of Uag, of green and red cloth. May I enter the Neshem-boat (the sacred boat of Osiris) (7) as a perfect spirit, may I not be parted from the servants of Horns. 1 am one (who loveth) (8) truth, detesting evil, without crime; for the ka of the sab, (9) on the right hand (?), who possesseth a burial and hath reached reward, the chief steward of the king, (10) one praised who came forth from the body of one praised, (11) excellent satisfier of the heart of his lord, the king’s scribe, steward of Memphis Amenhotep.”
The statue was exhibited at the society's annual end-of-year exhibition, at University College, Gower Street (London) in July 1903. Although the Society's principal aim was always the recovery of information about the history and culture of ancient Egypt, the recovery of material remains was an important part of the process. The 'dicision' of a proportion of the objects revealed to the EEF, for redistricbution to Museums around the world was also a fundamentally important part of the process of enhacing public understanding of the material which provided that information. Petrie was justifiably proud of what he had achieved on behalf of the EEF, explaining to those visiting the exhibition that:
"So far as the acquisition of material objects is needed to encourage the individual interests of museums, and to educate the public by actual contact with historical evidences—so far we have an interest in distributing a portion of what we find. ... Now, in view of these principles, look at the result of our four years at Abydos. They have been costly years, but could we have got more for our money? I certainly think not. I am well satisfied to have given four years of my life to that work; and I think that you may be equally satisfied to have each given four of your guineas to it."
The statue was divided to the British Museum after the end of the exhibition and is now on display in the Sculpture Gallery. For the relevant entry in the Museum's online catalogue please see here.