A Problem of Pedubasts

Abstract

Although the fragment of the limestone stela Cairo J.E. 45530 (PI. XIII, fig. 2), found during the course of the 1915 season of the University of Pennsylvania's excavations at Memphis, has never been formally published, it is not unknown in the Egyptological literature, having been cited by J. Yoyotte in his brilliant and penetrating study Les frincifautes du Delta an temps de Vanarchie libyenne1 and also in his Etudes geografthiques.21 The three separate fragments (find numbers M-1611, M-2083, and M-2352) which originally formed part of the stela, preserve, when rejoined, the right-hand side and lower portion of the original showing the bottom part of a scene and beneath this, the beginnings and major portions of three horizontal lines of rudely incised hieroglyphic text. At the right of the scene a man stands and faces a human-bodied god holding a scepter in the center. The upper half of this vignette is los , the sto e having been broken off at the hips of the two figures, so that it is not possible to really identify them. However, we may assume tha the man at the right was a king, depicted in the act of making an offering to the god, since immediat ly behind him, at the extreme right end of the stela and set vertically one over the other, are he very lower portion of a cartouche con aining a royal name of which only the hie o lyph n is preserved, and a second cartouche with the nomen Mrj-Jmn-S ;-B ist.t-P 1dj-B st.t Micamun-Sabast-Pedubast. Both the prenomen and nomen of this king occur again in the first line of the accompanying text and will be discussed there. Worthy of note is the fact that here the second cartouche immediately follows the first without any intervening title preceding it. Although none of the three lines of text beneath the scene is complete, it is nevertheless clear from what is preserved that the stela is a donation stela, one of that well-known and relatively rare class of documents which records the gift of a small tract of land, usually from a private individual, but occasionally from the king himself, to the temple of a specific god. All together about sixty-five donation stelae have been published, although an additional number of unpublished examples is known.3 Of * portion of this paper was read under the title A donation stela of king Pedubast I from Memphis at the 175th Meeting of the American Oriental Society which was held at the Center for Continuing Education of the University of Chicago, on April 14th, 1965. I wish to acknowledge here with my deepest gratitude the kindness of the authorities of the Egyptian Section of the University Museum, Philadelphia, for allowing me to publish the stela Cairo JE 45530 which was found in their 1915-1923 Memphite excavations and for supplying me with the photograph of it which is reproduced in Plate XIII, fig. 2. I should also like to tender my thanks here to my friends, Drs. Labib Habachi, Jiirgen von Beckerath, and Jean Yoyotte, for their kindness in discussing, both orally and via the mails, many of the problems raised in the following text and for their many helpful suggestions. 1 Melanges Maspero I. Orient Ancien (Quatrieme Fascicule) = MIFAO 66 (1961) 135. 2 Revue d'Egyptologie 13 (1961) 93-94 and ibid. 15 (1963) 89-90. 3 For a list of these, see Appendix I. For the principal publications see E. Iversen, Two Inscriptions Concerning Private Donations To Temples = Det Kgl.