Ancient Egypt Prosopography Research Papers (original) (raw)

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- Ancient Egypt Prosopography
- by Ad Thijs
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- Egyptology, Egyptian Archaeology, Egyptian History, History of Egyptology
- by Benedict Davies
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- Prosopography, New Kingdom (Egyptology), Ramesside Period, Deir el-Medina

This essay gives an overview of the structure and the organisation of the court society of Ramesses II and deals on one hand with the tools of power to regulate them and on the other hand with the chances and risks of members of the court.

- by Christine Raedler
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- Ancient History, Egyptology, Courts, Prosopography

The present volume seeks to indicate novel methods and approaches to analysing and interpreting the agency of individual officials in different periods of ancient Egyptian history. Their activity and careers are observed using different methods of complex network analysis and put into a broader framework of more general trends operating the society at a given stage of its evolution. We are confident that this is one of the most promising and proven ways to gain deeper insights into day-to-day lives of the people of the past. The story of civilisations is above all a story of ideas and thoughts, and social/complex network analysis is one of the most efficient tools we can use. It enables us to view known data anew and assess them from new perspectives that significantly expand and deepen our knowledge of the past civilisation.
In recent years, this research approach has evolved independently at several institutions exploring ancient Egypt. We were very pleased to host most of these scholars at a joint meeting and offer them an opportunity to present and communicate their individual approaches, methods, points of view and observations. The contributions in this volume, originally presented at a workshop in Prague in September 2018, cover selected periods of ancient Egypt (the Old Kingdom, the New Kingdom, the Greco-Roman Period). Cyber-Egyptology, a new area of research in Egyptology, appears to be a justified approach with its own methodology, philosophy and a vast potential to answer complex questions relating to this fascinating civilisation and its diachronic dynamics. Moreover, this method of cyber-research can be applied universally across most archaeological and historical specialisations.

- by Veronika Dulíková and +3
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- Ancient History, Social Change, Social Networks, Social Networking

The aim of investigating “the relationship between palace and temple” can be approached in different ways. I intend to concentrate on one aspect of social connections in the relationship between “temple” and “palace” as institutions, focusing on prestige and social function. Thus, this paper deals with specific aspects of social structure, which I will highlight using the early Ramesside High Priests of Ptah in Memphis (HPM).
On one hand, these priests directed the temple of Ptah and its staff. As “Great Director of Craftsmen” they also managed the workshops of the “House of Gold” where the statues of the king and the gods were produced. They were also responsible for the cult of the Apis bull. Ex officio, they were also Sem-priests, responsible for the highly important ritual of the “Opening of the Mouth”.
On the other hand, the HPM were members of Pharaoh’s court society, where the king’s favour ruled. The Temple of Ptah at Memphis being one of the most important institutions of the Ramesside period, the office was intrinsically a very high social position laden with prestige.
Some famous and important individuals of the early Ramesside period acted as HPMs – for instance the king’s son Khaemwaset and the viziers (Pa-)Rahotep and Neferrenpet. Being members of the “elite” court society, they conveyed a special kind of culture, articulated in their monumental buildings, stelae, statues and other items. In terms of prosopography, what remains of this court culture today are the sources revealing their social rank, partly through titles and epithets expressing their proximity to the king. Together with their monuments, these features testify to a complex system that distinguished them from lower levels of society.
Aside from prosopographical and chronological problems, we will try to focus on the social context. Particularly important in this case is the ranking of the HPM in the court society, reflected in their proximity to the king which allowed them a role as mediators for subordinates.

The Karnak Cachette, excavated by Georges Legrain between 1903 and 1907, is one of the most fascinating discoveries of Egyptian archaeology. The first reason lies in the very high number of objects found in it (statues, stelae, furniture of various kinds), some of them still unpublished, all of which are documents of major importance for the religious life of Karnak, but also more generally for the history and art of Pharaonic Egypt between the Middle Kingdom and the Ptolemaic period. The second reason is that the raison d'être of this cache and the historical circumstances surrounding its creation remain mysterious. Even if some comparisons can be made with other caches found in Egypt and the Sudan, its magnitude and wealth are exceptional.
Building on a research program launched by the IFAO and the Egyptian Ministry of State for Antiquities to improve our knowledge of the Karnak Cachette and its content, this book comprises twenty-four contributions by international scholars studying objects found in this deposit, analyzing the Cachette itself, or investigating other Egyptian caches from an ideological or archaeological point of view.

- by Etienne M H Vande Walle
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- Ancient Egypt Prosopography

Hitherto sparse evidence on Khentytjenenet has been markedly enlarged owing to new excavations of the Czech archaeological mission at Abusir. A recently discovered cluster of individuals holding priestly titles and/or epithets referring to Khentytjenenet has given us an impetus to scrutinise this deity.
Records of Khentytjenenet are closely connected with a specific geographical part of the Memphite necropolis – Abusir and North Saqqara. The appearance of this deity was obviously associated with social, religious and administrative changes during the reign of Nyuserra. The title hem-netjer-priest of Khentytjenet appeared for the first time in the titulary of the high priest Ptahshepses, buried at North Saqqara (C1), and simultaneously within personal names of individuals who held offices under Nyuserra and were buried at Abusir or North Saqqara. Whereas personal names compounded with the element Khentytjenenet were characteristic for the mid-Fifth Dynasty, the title hem-netjer-priest and epithet imakhu kher linked with Khentytjenet occurred in the Sixth Dynasty. His name was also the component of several names of royal domains and estates in the late Fifth and early Sixth Dynasty.

- by Veronika Dulíková and +1
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- Ancient Egyptian Religion, Egyptology, Prosopography, Ancient Religion

Based on the compilation of prosopographical data from larger archaeological contexts such as cemeteries, settlements and temples, Sai, Soleb and Amara West, three towns that were successive administrative centres of Upper Nubia in the New Kingdom, are evaluated. e prosopographical method is used to undertake a comparative “sociography” in assessing who inhabited and frequented these Pharaonic foundations, discussing the respective social fabric and describing particularities and commonalities. Based on the evidence, only a speci c and quite small group of the ancient people can be characterised. On the one hand, there are the residents, mainly priests and administrative personnel including the deputies of Kush, who were also buried in the elite cemeteries. ey can be considered permanent inhabitants of the towns. On the other hand, there are the viceroys of Nubia, who were only temporarily present at these sites, while they particularly represented themselves in the temple spaces. Although the three sites and the larger contexts provide particular prosopographical data sets, they can be jointly evaluated and compared. e aim of the paper is to provide a general overview of the prosopographies of Sai, Soleb and Amara West. is is then used as basis for drawing a more comprehensive picture of their people and the social fabric of the places.

- by Johannes Auenmüller
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- Egyptology, Egyptian Archaeology, Prosopography, Nubian-Egyptian Relations

In all pre-industrial societies, storage allowed consumption to be postponed
and spread over time in order to prevent food insecurity. Methods used for storage therefore provide information on the technical choices made by various human groups, on the volume of stocks available, on the spatial distribution of foodstuffs and on the populations capable of collecting and centralising surpluses. Such information is particularly evident not only in the prosopographical and textual sources that document the institution of the Šnw.t in the Middle Kingdom, but also in recent results of urban archaeology. Such elements make it possible to draw up the socio-economical features of cereal storage during that period.

- by Julien Siesse
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- Egyptology, Ancient Egyptian History, Middle Kingdom, Middle Kingdom (Egyptology)
- by Marion Claude
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- Ancient Egyptian Religion, Art, Onomastics, Prosopography

A comprehensive illustrated reference guide to Egyptian funerary cones, including the transliteration and translation of the hieroglyphic texts of over 600 examples, together with a note of the tomb number where known. A detailed discussion on theories about the use and purpose of funerary cones, their geographical distribution and other salient aspects also receive attention.

- by Julie Masquelier-Loorius
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- Religion, Prosopography, Funeral Practices, New Kingdom (Archaeology)

Egyptology is becoming a strategic scientific discipline in that it is instructive for contemporary civilization and makes it possible to avoid critical mistakes in its development. However, classical Egyptology tools need to be supplemented by modern procedures that are more efficient in terms of the speed of the production of results and the processing of much more extensive data volumes, delivering more accurate and reliable evaluation of the findings. Since the time of Plato, cybernetics has been providing methods by which models based on observations of the environment or sensor data are created to reflect the properties of systems and environments, and actions that change the environment are generated. Many of these practices, which include elements of learning and deduction techniques, are developed within the field of artificial intelligence. Methods that specialize in analyzing relationships that can be modeled by graph theory are now widely developed within the framework of complex network analysis. To emphasize the increasing rate of application of these scientific methods to cover new challenges in processing ancient Egyptian data, the concept of cyber-Egyptology has been introduced recently. Cyber-Egyptology deals with the interpretation of ancient Egyptian data and Egyptologists’ observations using techniques based on the principles of cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and complex network analysis that might be modified to cope with a limited amount of complex structures containing uncertainties and missing entries. We offer an overview of a selected set of such methods and their application to Old Kingdom data.

- by Veronika Dulíková
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- Social Change, Social Networks, Social Networking, Complex Networks

Ce troisième volume consacré à la zone minière du Sud-Sinaï a pour objectif l'étude des expéditions envoyées par l'État pharaonique vers la Péninsule, des origines de l'histoire égyptienne à la fin du Nouvel Empire, en utilisant l'ensemble de la documentation qui est actuellement à notre disposition. Celle-ci s'est largement renouvelée ces dernières années, à la fois grâce à des missions de prospection effectuées au Sinaï, et grâce à l'abondant matériel obtenu lors de la fouilles des sites portuaires récemment identifiés sur la côte de la mer Rouge, à Ayn Soukhna et au ouadi el-Jarf, qui ont servi de points d'embarquement à certaines de ces expéditions. La première partie de cette étude s'intéresse de façon générale à l'organisation de ces opérations, en examinant tour à tour les lieux qu'elles parcouraient, les différentes catégories de main d'oeuvre qu'elles incorporaient et les produits qu'elles étaient susceptibles de rapporter dans la vallée du Nil. Un catalogue de l'ensemble des missions attestées – plus d'une centaine au total-est ensuite établi période par période, en regroupant à chaque fois l'ensemble des sources connues. This third volume, devoted to the mining zone of South Sinai, aims at studying the Pharaonic expeditions sent to the SouthWestern part of this Peninsula, from the beginning of Egyptian history to the end of the New Kingdom. All available sources were used, notably material uncovered during the excavations of the newly discovered Red Sea harbours of Ayn Soukhna and Wadi el-Jarf (used as departing points for these expeditions), but also evidence found during our survey of a large area surrounding the Serabit el-Khadim plateau. The first part of this study presents a general approach to the organisation of these operations (where they went, the things they were looking for), then follows a catalogue listing all the known expeditions to Sinai – more than one hundred – as well as all the documents relating thereto. Présentation auteur : Pierre Tallet, ancien élève de l'Ecole normale supérieure (Ulm), agrégé d'histoire et ancien adjoint aux publications de l'IFAO, est actuellement titulaire de la chaire d'égyptologie de la Sorbonne. Depuis 2001, dans le cadre d'un programme consacré aux expéditions minières égyptiennes en mer Rouge il a dirigé ou co-dirigé les missions archéologiques d'Ayn Soukhna et du ouadi el-Jarf – deux ports pharaoniques récemment identifiés sur la côte du golfe de Suez – et mené une prospection au sud de la péninsule du Sinaï. Les expéditions égyptiennes dans la zone minière du Sud-Sinaï du prédynastique à la fin de la xx e dynastie-: HSMHME= \U\VX\: i n s t i t u t f r a n ç a i s d 'a r c h é o l o g i e o r i e n ta l e

Die interdisziplinäre Forschung gehörte lange schon zu den „Steckenpferden“ des Jubilars Rolf Gundlach - zuletzt verstärkt auf dem Feld interdisziplinärer historischer Hof- und Residenzenforschung. Dies aufgreifend konzentriert sich der Beitrag auf den Kern des Phänomens „Hof“, den „kommunikativen Strukturen“ (Winterling) an einem Königshof, unter denen der Gunst des Herrschers die zentrale gesellschaftliche Bedeutung zukommt. In diesem Rahmen wird ein Aspekt pharaonischer Gunst aufgezeigt, der in eine kosmische Dimension dieses gesellschaftsregulierenden Systems weist.
Nach einführenden Bemerkungen zum altägyptischen Staat und der Rolle des Königs darin, werden ausgehend vom frühramessidischen Quellenmaterial der Beamte und sein Anteil bei der Verwirklichung von Maat betrachtet, um abschließend seine Motivation hierfür durch die Gunst des Königs zu beleuchten.
Fazit: Der Pharao ist zuständig für die Verwirklichung und Festsetzung der Maat, d.h. er setzt mit den durch ihn vorgegebenen Normen fest, was Maat ist.
Er verwirklicht Maat aber nicht allein. Der im Idealfall durch königliche Gunst angespornte Beamte hat direkten Anteil an Verwirklichung von Maat, indem er „Maat sagt und tut“. Der König kann daraufhin die ursprünglich gottgegebene Ordnung wiederum den Göttern gegenüber nachweisen und diesen in Form des Maatopfers zuführen. Dem gesellschaftsregulierenden System der königlichen Gunst kommt als Impuls für die Motivation des Günstlings zur Maatverwirklichung entscheidende Bedeutung zu; ein Faktum, das hier als „kosmische Dimension der Gunst“ bezeichnet wird. Als solches dient es dem immerwährenden Streben nach dem Gelingen des „Weltprozesses“ (ASSMANN, Heil und Herrschaft, 203) einer Inganghaltung bedürftigen Welt.

- by Edwin Dalino
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- Ancient Egypt Prosopography

Publication of five ushabtis stored in the Museo Archeologico di Udine. With the exception of one of them, which dates to the New Kingdom, the others date to the Late Period. The contribution of this study concerns the onomastic thanks to some names seldom attested. Moreover the comparison with some material discovered during excavations allows to replace this material in his archaeological context.

- by Federico Contardi
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- Egyptology, New Kingdom (Egyptology), Saite Period, 26th Dynasty (Egyptology)

The online database “Persons and Names of the Middle Kingdom and early New Kingdom” (PNM) is developed as part of the projects “Umformung und Variabilität im Korpus altägyptischer Personennamen 2055–1550 v. Chr.” and “Altägyptische Titel in amtlichen und familiären Kontexten, 2055-1352 v. Chr.”, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. The database contains Egyptian Middle Kingdom and early New Kingdom personal names, people, written sources, titles, and dossiers of persons attested in various sources. Version 5, currently available online, covers the sources from the reign of Mentuhotep II to the reign of Amenhotep III.

The present article studies the regional prosopography of New Kingdom Hermopolis based on two distinctive sources: temple statues and votive stelae. The documented provenance for some of these monuments is Hermopolis and􏰁or its temple area. For most, however, this information is lacking which makes attribution to the city difficult and provides a reason for briefly discussing potential indicators for assigning them to Hermopolis. The primary ob􏰂ective of assessing the prosopography of both statues and stelae is to identify and distinguish local from non-local elites in terms of their monumental evidence and in particular to understand the presence of the latter in Hermopolis. It will be shown that the city and especially its temple precinct were not only venues for votive display by the local society, but also for a certain number of non-local New Kingdom elite who set up statues of themselves there.

The significance of wine in the divine cult and as a special favor during festivities, as well as a marker of desirable lifestyle can be observed throughout the entire ancient Egyptian history. Production of wine was determined mostly by royal estate or by donations to institutions and temple estates. When looking at wine production during the Ramesside period with consideration of the eastern Delta, one can see that especially trained staff was hired. These chief gardeners acted as supervisors for complete wine-growing estates. As an example, the paper deals with the duties, responsibilities and the social ranking of a chief gardener of Syrian origin named Ibager who lived during the times of Ramesses II. There are two sources documenting his existence. One is a docket of a wine amphora, the other a well done shabti of faience. Both are the subject of an explicit examination.

- by Christine Raedler
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- Egyptology, Ramesses II, Ancient Near East, Acculturation

Anlass für diesen Beitrag ist die intensive Beschäftigung des Autors mit der Territorialität der ägyptischen Elite des Neuen Reiches. Die Fragen nach ,räumlicher Verteilung‘, ,raumbezogener Identität‘ und der ,Archäologie und Lokalisierung der Gräber‘ sind dabei besonders in Bezug auf die provinziellen Eliten dieser Zeit anzuführen. Spricht man von Hermopolis Magna und seiner Elitenekropole Tuna el-Gebel im Neuen Reich, betritt man altägyptische, aber in gewissem Sinne auch ägyptologische ,Provinz‘. Gegenüber der neuen Hauptstadt Echnatons, Tell el-Amarna und fern der anderen bekannten Landes- und Elitezentren Theben, Memphis und Pi-Ramesse, welche den ägyptologischen Blick und die Wahrnehmung des Neuen Reiches aufgrund ihres Reichtums an Denkmälern sowie ihrer kulturellen, historischen und politischen Bedeutung bestimmen, gelten Hermopolis und Tuna el-Gebel – gerade wenn es um die Archäologie des Neuen Reiches und seiner Eliten geht – gewiss nur als periphere Räume. Die genaue Vorstellung von der Präsenz von Eliten in dieser Region stößt dabei an einige Grenzen, die der archäologischen Erhaltung einerseits und andererseits der Dokumentation und Publikation der lokalen Nekropolen in der Vergangenheit geschuldet sind.

- by Johannes Auenmüller
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- Sociology, Egyptology, Prosopography, New Kingdom (Archaeology)

The Trismegistos platform (http://www.trismegistos.org/) offers an extensive set of metadata for all ancient texts from Egypt dated between 800 BC and AD 800. At present more than 110.000 texts are included, written in Egyptian (hieroglyphic, hieratic, Demotic, Coptic), Greek, and Latin, but also Aramaic, Phoenician, Arabic, and several other languages and scripts. Much of the initial work has been carried out in cooperation with the Semi- nar für Ägyptologie at the Universität zu Köln (Germany), in the course of the re- search project ‘Multilingualism and Multiculturalism in Graeco Roman Egypt’ (2005- 2008) sponsored by a Sofja Kovalevskaja prize (2004) of the Alexander von Hum- boldt-Stiftung. The Trismegistos database is currently hosted by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), where it is still being developed. Since October 2008, several new research projects on names and identities in Graeco-Roman Egypt use the Trismegistos platform as a starting point, expanding the database’s functional- ity to accommodate prosopo-graphic as well as onomastic information. For several languages the data collection can only be done manually in view of the lack of easily accessible full-text corpora, but for the largest group of about 50,000 Greek papyri this is fortunately not the case because the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri (DDbDP) has been put at our disposal. This article describes the historical develop- ment of the structure of the ‘People’ database, the procedure implemented to automate record collection on the basis of the DDbDP, and some first results of the project.

In Ancient Egypt, the administration of provincial worships exceeded the theological frame. Temples were economical regional centres due to the importance of their properties. In this way, besides being responsible for the liturgy, high priests had to administer a large land beyond the sacred temenos. In this context, of the New Kingdom’s ones (1539-1077 B.C.) were among the State’s most powerful dignitaries. Among them, the first prophet of Amun in Thebes soon became an inescapable representative of the State, for his worship's power and wealth continuously increased during the whole period. This omnipotence consequently led to the seizing of Upper Egypt as early as the end of the New Kingdom.
In spite of the predominance of Amun’s temple, other provincial worships continued to prosper due to their economic and geostrategic importance. This thesis goal is to bring to light the social mechanisms which allowed their administrators to advance and remain in the highest spheres of the Pharaonic state, and to understand in which ways the monarchy relied on these local potentates in order to guarantee their authority on the Nile Valley.
The kinship anthropology contributes to determining the vectors for keeping the power, such as marriage or the transmission of sacerdotal charges. But it also permits to put into perspective the reality of family relationships mentioned in the available sources. As a matter of fact, it appears that it is not always possible to precisely determine those links, which consequently limits the reconstitution of genealogies. However, the Social Network Analysis – a sociological discipline which studies social ties – allows to improve the understanding of family links. It also permits to bring to light the importance of some of these characters among those networks by the means of calculations.
From the study of a number of cases chosen from the whole period, it seems possible to enlighten the monarchy’s strategies to grant itself the fidelity of this sacerdotal elite, with more or less success. The evolution of the priests social networks, as long as the expansion of their properties and power, can also be sketched. At last, the aim is also to understand the peculiar importance of certain temples of Upper Egypt, which regularly emerge from the documentation.

Theben war in spätdynastischer und ptolemäischer Zeit immer noch eines der wichtigsten religiösen Zentren Ägyptens, dessen Prestige auf dem Kult des Amunrasonther in Karnak gründete. Zahlreiche Privatdenkmäler der thebanischen Priester belegen die Diversität und Lebendigkeit der thebanischen Kulte. Sie sind zudem Zeugen einer differenzierten Gesellschaft, die durch Familienbande getragen wurde.
Ralph Birk legt mit Türöffner des Himmels die erste umfassende Analyse der diachronen Entwicklung der hohepriesterlichen Familien Thebens vom 4. bis zum 1. Jahrhundert v. Chr. und ihrer unterschiedlichen Rollen in Karnak vor. Unter Einbeziehung von zahlreichen bisher unpublizierten Quellen, insbesondere der Statuen aus der sogenannten Cachette von Karnak, werden die Genealogien der Familien rekonstruiert und die Titel der Priester in ihren kultischen und administrativen Kontext eingebettet. Dabei zeigt sich ein tiefgreifender Wandel an der Spitze der thebanischen Tempel vom erblichen Amt des Ersten Propheten des Amun zur nicht erblichen Doppelspitze des Großen und Nachfolgenden Gouverneurs, mit dem der Kreis der hohepriesterlichen Familien erweitert wurde. Die Untersuchung leistet so, auch dank eines umfangreichen prosopographischen Registers aller zitierter Quellen, einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Rekonstruktion der Gesellschaft und Kultlandschaft Thebens in ptolemäischer Zeit.

The General Wendjebaendjedet was a man of prominence at Psusennes I's court. Even thought his origins are unknown, a possible family relationship with the royal family is being suggested in order to explain the unprecedented status that he attained: he was buried within the king's own tomb; his exceptionally rich tomb group consisted of the typical Eleventh-Tenth Centuries BC royal funerary goods; and his impressive titulary included high-ranking military, civil and priestly titles. Focusing the attention on his sacerdotal and administrative duties on behalf of Khonsu in Thebes Neferhotep, we are going to have a closer look to the official cult of the Theban triad at Tanis and the role played by Wendjebaendjedet within the cult of the son and heir of Amun and Mut. RESUMEN El General Wendjebaendjedet fue un hombre de vital importancia en la corte de Psusennes I. Aunque sus orígenes son desconocidos, se le ha vinculado con la familia real para explicar el estatus sin precedentes que adquirió: fue enterrado en la tumba del monarca, su excepcional ajuar funerario está compuesto por elementos propios de los ajuares reales de los siglos XI-X a. C. y, durante su carrera, ostentó una amplia titulatura, que incluía tanto altos cargos civiles y militares como sacerdotales. Centrando la atención en sus funciones sacerdotales y administrativas vinculadas al dios Khonsu en Tebas Neferhotep, vamos a analizar algunos aspectos de la veneración a la tríada tebana en Tanis y a valorar el papel que pudo desempeñar Wendjebaendjedet en el culto oficial al hijo y heredero de Amón y Mut.

The assertions as to whether two historical sources refer to one and the same person or two namesakes are the building blocks of all prosopographies. Researchers often highlight the problem of adequately expressing the ambiguities inherent to such scholarly assertions in formal ontologies. Lawrence and Bodard (2015) foresaw solving the problem in a next iteration of the SNAP:DRGN ontology, while adherents of the factoid approach address the related issue of ambiguities in biographical facts as related in different sources subject to different interpretations in the Factoid Prosopography Ontology (Pasin and Bradley 2015 and https://www.kcl.ac.uk/factoid-prosopography/ontology). The degree of certainty about a prosopographical identification is a meaningful factor, useful in quantitative analyses. In the poster, I would like to present an approach for codifying these (un)certainties in an ontology devised for a prosopography of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (https://pnm.uni-mainz.de/ontology/), based on a set of formal criteria for estimating the probability of a false identification in a specific historical setting.

- by Alexander Ilin-Tomich
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- Linked Open Data, Ancient Egypt Prosopography

Egypt's capital and royal residence – Memphis – and its exceptional rich inventory of textual sources forms the main focus of my dissertational project. The remaining epigraphic material dating to the New Kingdom, mainly originates from Memphite burial contexts and contains therefore high quantities of prosopographic data (e.g. names, titles, geneaological relations), which provide information about the administrative and cultic personnel belonging to different Memphite institutions. Nevertheless, investigations of the people, who are recorded in inscriptions they left intentionally on objects and monuments in the Memphite region have occurred only sporadically. Moreover, the relevant works consist mostly of bare compilations of personal data and their arrangement to prosopographic lists. That\'s why it is the aim of my thesis to document all individuals attestested on inscribed monuments as well as their relationship with each other marked by social and genealogical ties. Based on that I\' like to attain a regional prosopography for the whole New Kingdom, which is for the first time not limited to specific groups of people, but illuminates all identifiable social classes of the Memphite society.

- by Adeline Bats
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- Ancient Egyptian Religion, Egyptology, Ancient Egyptian History, Middle Kingdom

The purpose of this article is to review an Egyptian wooden funerary stela (File number 3519) housed in the Museo Arqueológico Nacional (Madrid) dated at the beginning of the I millenium BC. We shall study its iconographic and epigraphic features in order to find information about the family tree of a Theban high priest who lived during the Third Intermediate Period.
Key words: Egypt. Priestly elite. Third Intermediate Period. Theban Onomastic. Prosopography. Opener of the Doors of the Sky in Karnak.
Revisamos en el presente trabajo una pieza egipcia del Museo Arqueológico Nacional en Madrid: la estela de madera nº inv. 3519, datable a comienzos del I milenio aC. Realizaremos un análisis iconográfico en profundidad, previo a su estudio epigráfico. La combinación de ambos permitirá conocer la familia de un alto cargo sacerdotal tebano del Tercer Periodo Intermedio.
Palabras clave: Egipto. Élite sacerdotal. Tercer Periodo Intermedio. Onomástica tebana. Prosopografía. Abridor de las Puertas del Cielo en Karnak.

This paper aims at presenting my current post-doctoral research project. In the last centuries of the pharaonic period in Egypt, Akhmim was a very important city and its temple of Min, Horus and Isis was one of the largest sacred areas of the country. Unfortunately, the history of this sanctuary and its priests is not very well-known, mostly because the many objects belonging to the priests that were found during excavations at the end of the 19th Century are now dispersed throughout the world. As a part of my doctoral thesis, I endeavoured to gather many of these objects in order to study the temples, divinities and priestly titles of the city. But the funerary material of the priests also allows for a reconstruction of the families and a prosopographical study of the priests through an analysis of their career, the inheritance of their titles from father to son and mother to daughter, their matrimonial strategies and so on. In this paper I will give you an overview of the results of this study and highlight the importance of prosopographical research for the field of Egyptology and the knowledge of the Egyptian society.

7e journée des jeunes chercheurs du Labex Hastec, 16 avril 2019

9e Journée Egypte gréco romaine 26 avril 2019

- by Holger Kockelmann
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- Demotic, Funerary Belief (Egyptology), Hieratic, Funerary Practices

This paper presents an adjustment to the ‘weighed dates’ method developed by Van Beek and Depauw in 2011, and which was updated by Depauw in 2015. By spreading the date range of sources across all respective years, it is thus possible to incorporate imprecisely dated material in detailed chronological overviews. Plotting individuals raises extra challenges, however, especially since many people mentioned in ancient source material are often only attested as genealogical identifiers. In these cases, the dates of the texts they appear in do not reflect the period in which they themselves were active. To remedy this, I have finetuned the weighed dates method by adding an extra step during which the date range of these individuals is recalibrated.

- by Yanne Broux
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- Ancient History, Digital Humanities, Graeco-Roman Egypt, Ancient Egypt Prosopography

While excavating the Royal cemetery around King Pepy II 's Pyramid in the 1920's, Swiss archaeologist Gustave Jequier brought to light the monuments of three wifes of the sovereign. Within the complex of Queen Iput II, he uncovered the funerary equipment of another Queen, named Ankhnespepy. At the end of the XXth Century, the Mission Archéologique Française à Saqqara (MAFS) discovered eight resting places of VIth Dynasty Queens around King Pepy I's Pyramid, mostly wives of this king. But two complexes at least belong to wives of of Pepy II, one of them bearing the name Ankhnespepy. Do we have only one Queen, or two different women ? Opinions of Egyptologists differ here. The purpose of my paper is to demonstrate that there are two different homonymous ladies, each of them a King's Mother. The first part will review the evidence, which is scarce. The second part will run through the different hypothesis and to conclude, I try to demonstrate that at least three, maybe four successors of Pepy II weere his sons, by different wives.

Beyond the methodological issues studying social network in Ancient Egypt, - presented last year in a poster for HNR14 in Gent - we managed to spread light on new interesting aspects of the particular network, developed from the group statue of Imeneminet, kept in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli.
This presentation will begin with a quick recalling of the methodological issues presented in the 2014 poster. Among them, it was noteworthy that the reading of Egyptian kinship terms does not always reflect biological links. Almost all of them can be understood, in their own context, as social links more than kinship terms. The most ambiguous term is probably the word “sn” which can be translated as “brother”. In many cases, the sn is obviously not the biological brother of ego. Thus, it is particularly awkward to restore genealogical trees in this context. That is one of the reasons which led us to prefer social network analysis over classical genealogical studies. Indeed, SNA is less interested in the value of the links between people than genealogical studies. Thus, to build graphs is more accurate than reconstructing genealogical trees to understand Egyptian social structures. Rebuilding networks with fragmentary data and heterogeneity of the documents were part of the methodological issues encountered using SNA
Furthermore, this paper aims at presenting the two methods employed to reconstruct networks. Studying 2-mode networks was the first one. In this case, nodes were divided in two categories: people and documents. When an individual was mentioned in one document, he was connected to it in our graph. Then, this 2-mode network was converted in a 1-mode, driving to create artificial links between individuals. As a consequence, centrality measures were distorted. Finally, this method was abandoned. Using Egyptian linking terms is the second method. It leads to study relationships by means of 1-mode networks. These links - inventoried in the documentation - are systematically recorded in our database. Thus, a quantitative and qualitative study can be led from them. Contrary to the first way, it does not consider all the characters in a same document as linked each other. Also, these networks are not ever connected. Regarding this, structural holes do not necessarily witness real gaps between individuals. Only gaps in the documentation are reflected, maybe due to its fragmentary state or the incompleteness of the documentation relative to the network.
At last, preliminary conclusions concerning Imeneminet’s network will be presented. In our opinion, centrality measures are the most suitable analysis because, in our study, networks are small and not very dense. We will especially present closeness and betweenness centrality which are the most relevant statistics in our problematic. Indeed, these measures aim at pointing out influential individuals, because of their specific position in the network. That is leading to one unexpected conclusion: one particular actor appears to be more central than the others whereas he is not very well documented. We will attempt to explain it by replacing the study in the political and economic context of this period. Also, it may allow us to spread a new light on relationships between the royal power and elites, which is one of the problematic of our PhD thesis.