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MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS· BOSTON NAGA-ED-DER STELAE OF THE FIRST INTERMEDIATE PERIOD BY DOWS DUNHAM Associate Curator of Egyptian Art PUBLISHED FOR THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS· BOSTON· U.S.A. BY THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON : HUMPHREY MILFORD 1937 PRI:\TED 1:\ GREAT BRITAIN AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD BY JOHN JOHNSON PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY NAGA-ED-DER STELAE OF THE FIRST INTERMEDIATE PERIOD PREFACE T HIS study, undertaken at the suggestion of Professor George A. Reisner, was originally intended to deal solely with the stelae of the First Intermediate Period found during his various excavating campaigns in the Naga-ed-Der group of cemeteries. That object has remained the primary purpose of the work, and the book includes all the stelae found by him and his assistants in sufficiently good preservation to warrant reproduction. In one case (stela from Sheikh Farag, Tomb 5005) a stone has been omitted because when found its surface was quite illegible through decay, and in a number of other instances fragments of broken and incomplete stelae have not been included because they showed only small portions of stereotyped text or parts of figures without noteworthy features. On the other hand I have added, as supplementary material, a number of stelae in American museums which, by their style, belong clearly to the Naga-ed-Der group. These, eleven in number, are listed separately in the Introduction, and are included at the end of the main body of the work under the numbers 77 to 87. I have thought it desirable to include these monuments, partly because they have not been published elsewhere, and partly because there seemed to me a certain advantage in studying these stones in conjunction with the larger body of material. It should be made clear, however, that this study makes no claim to being an exhaustive catalogue of the known stelae of this class: that has not been its purpose, and such a task would have entailed travel and research which I have not been in a position to undertake. I have little doubt that there are more than a few monu ments in the museums and private collections of Europe and America which might properly find a place in such a catalogue. I give here a few instances which have come to my notice during the course of the work, but which, for one reason or another, I have not been able to publish. Rijksmuseum, Leiden, No. F. 1902/7, I (Aeg. Sammlung, II, PI. I, I). PeIizaeus Museum, Hildesheim, No. 1884. Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City, D.S.A., a stela referred to in Commentary A 4 of my stela No. 12. Collection of Dr. Jacob Hirsch, New York, Nos. 634 and 635. I wish here gratefully to acknowledge the valuable and generously given help of a number of scholars. Dr. Alan H. Gardiner and Professor Battiscombe Gunn have both contributed liberally of their time and knowledge regarding numerous points of difficulty in the texts, and Professor Hermann Ranke has given me his counsel with some of the names, and has kindly allowed me to examine advance proofs of v PREFACE parts of his Die agyptischen Personennamen. I am much indebted to the authori ties of the Semitic Museum of Harvard University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, N ew York, for permission to publish the stones belonging to those museums, and for the excellent photographs of their stelae which they have pro vided. The late Professor James H. Breasted, Director of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, most generously placed at my disposal the nine stones belonging to that institution published at the end of the series, and I am greatly in debt to him, and to the members of the Egyptological Staff of the Insti tute for their collations of the texts on these stelae. I take pleasure also in express ing my thanks to Dr. J acob Hirsch of New Yark for allowing me to examine photographs of two stones in his collection. Finally to my friend and teacher, Professor George A. Reisner, I owe not only permission to use this material and encouragement in the enterprise, but the invaluable advantage of his unsurpassed knowledge of the funerary practices of the Old Kingdom, which has been a strong influence in my interpretation of certain formulae. D.D. MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON. 31 January 1936. VI CONTENTS I~TRODUCTION I THE STELAE 12 INDEX OF NAMES 109 INDEX OF TITLES 1I6 CONCLUSIONS AND CHRONOLOGY VII INTRODUCTION BEG I::\::\I::\G in 1901 Professor George A. Reisner has carried out a number of txc3.\"3.ting campaigns in the Naga-ed-Der district (opposite modern Girga in the TI~:!1ite ::\ome), at first for the University of California (up to 1905), and there after for the I-Iarvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition. In the cour~e of these excavations there have been found a considerable number of limestone funerary stelae of the period from the Sixth to the Twelfth Dynasties, of which t\yenty-three pieces are now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Professor Reisner has asked me to make a study of these monuments, and has placed at my disposal the Expedition's negatives, not only of the material in Boston, but also of that nO\\- in California and that which was retained by the Cairo Museum. This material, although physically dispersed across half the world, belongs properly together since it all comes from a single site and a single period. Kaga-ed-Der is a village on the east bank of the Nile opposite Girga where there are important ancient cemeteries extending in time from the Predynastic Period to the IVliddle Kingdom. These cemeteries run for about six kilometres from Sheikh Farag on the north to lVIesheikh on the south, with Naga-ed-Der itself about one and a half kilometres south of Sheikh Farag. The whole area is loosely known to our Expedition as Naga-ed-Der (N.), and there is no dividing line between Naga-ed-Der proper and Sheikh Farag (S.F.). Mesheikh (Mes.), lying well to the south, is separated from Naga-ed-Der by the site of Mesa'eed, with which we are not here concerned, but, for the purposes of this study, the subdivisions of the site may be disregarded as they all form parts of a single large cemetery of the Thinite Nome.I The material at my disposal consists of the following stones excavated by Professor Reisner and his assistants in the N aga-ed-Der cemeteries: 23 stelae in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Nos. 1-23 (lVl.F.A., 12. 1475 &c.). 29 stelae at the University of California, published by Dr. Lutz;2 Nos. 24-52 (Lutz, 18 &c.). 12 stelae in the Cairo Museum which I have examined ; Nos. 53-64 (Cairo, 37737 &c.). I The work done on earlier graves of the site has mid Age, Naga-ed-Der, Ill. been published in the University of California 2 Henry F. Lutz, Egyptian Tomb Steles and Egyptian Series as follows: G. A. Reisner, Early Offering Stones of the l11"lIsellm of Anthropology and Dynastic Cemeteries of Naga-ed-Der, I; A_ C.lVlace, Ethnology of the University of California, Univer Early Dynastic Cemeteries of Naga-ed-Der, Il; sity of California Publications, Egyptian Archaeo G. A. Reisner, A Provincial Cemetery of the P)'ra- logy, vo!. IV, Leipzig, I927. B INTRODUCTION 12 stelae which I have been unable to locate, but presumed to be unregistered in Cairo, the publication of which is based solely on Expedition photographs; Nos. 65-76 (N. 235 &c.). To these I have added, as supplementary material, the following stelae in American museums, all of which I believe to be from the Naga-ed-Der district, and none of which have been previously published: stela in the Semitic Museum, Harvard University; No. 77 (Semitic Museum, I 2354)· stela in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; No. 78 (Metropolitan I Museum, 25 :2 :3). 9 stelae in the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago; Nos. 79-87 (Orinst., 16951 &c.). The stelae, all of which are of limestone, are in most cases quite irregular in over-all dimensions, although the effective field enclosed by borders is almost universally of approximately rectangular form. The stones are also uneven in thickness although the inscribed faces are relatively flat. These conditions arise out of the manner in which the stones were used. The tombs of the First Inter mediate Period at Naga-ed-Der were excavated practically without exception in the extremely bad rock of the river slope and side wadys. The offering rooms, which contained examples of the stelae under discussion, were usually found with their roofs collapsed. The walls were roughly hewn and in no case, as far as could be ascertained, bore any decoration other than the stelae themselves, set against or in the walls. The burial places were sometimes pits in the floor of the offering chamber and sometimes tunnels in its back wall. In the former case the stela was generally set up against, or in a shallow recess in, the wall of the offering chamber near the burial pit; in the latter it was commonly set into the blocking of the tunnel entrance. PI. I, and Fig. show an example of the former practice, with two I I stelae (no. 63 on the left and No. 14 on the right) set against the east wall (S.F. 5106). PI. I, 2 and Fig. 4 show a less common type of tomb, a small mud-brick ma$taba, mud-plastered, with the stela set into a niche in the centre of the face. In this tomb (S.F. 5005) the stela was so rotten with salt as to be illegible, and it has not been published. PI. I, 3 and Fig. 5 show stela No. 7I (N. 38°4) in position, set in the mud-plaster blocking the mouth of the entrance to the burial chamber. As these illustrations show, many of the stelae were imbedded in mud-plaster so that their irregular form was hidden and only the rectangular field and its framing border was exposed to view. In most of the tombs the stela was found displaced in the offering room, and its original place was only indicated by a recess or by the remains of mud-plaster on the walls. Where a tunnel tomb had been plundered practically no evidence of the 2 INTRODUCTION SHEIKH FARAG 5106 t 1:50 FIG. I -::- : :,:tion of the stela was left. But in a certain number of tombs the stelae were : ·.:::-,d in place, and I give here the descriptions of six tombs in order to show their ~:~~5 and the proved positions of the stelae. 3