Les termes englobants utilisés pour désigner les armes en égyptien ancien

A discussion of the sense of the collective noun ḫꜥw in ancient Egyptian. The paper focusses on the relationship between the chariot and the ḫꜥw ('weapons, equipment') in administrative and literary contexts

Papyrus Anastylosis and Paleography: Case Studies from Deir el-Medina

Online lecture as part of the series "Egypt, Land of Writing(s)" organized by Gaëlle Chantrain (Université de Liège). Thousands of papyri fragments dating back to the Ramesside Period (ca. 1295-1069 BE) were discovered in the village of Deir el-Medina, on the West Bank of the Nile, near the ancient capital of Thebes. A large part of those fragments were collected at the beginning of the XIXth century by Bernardino Drovetti, and are now kept in the collection of the Museo Egizio, in Turin. Two centuries later, in the framework of the ‘Crossing Boundaries’ Project, it has been possible to propose new reconstructions for some of those documents, based notably on the identification of individual handwritings. In this talk, several examples are discussed, together with the role of paleography used as a tool for “papyrus anastylosis”

Horus-Shed hunting on his Chariot: Forgotten Monuments

Among the large corpus of Horus Cippi depicting the child-god on the crocodiles, some rare monuments include a scene showing Horus-Shed on his chariot. The god is figured shooting arrows against dangerous animals like lions, snakes, scorpions or others, neutralizing crocodiles with lassos, sometimes helped by the dwarf-god Bes driving the chariot. These scenes has been studied in the past notably by Jocelyne Berlandini-Keller: around twenty monuments showing the holy hunt of Horus-Shed are known and quoted in the egyptological literature. In the context of my doctoral research, I collected the documentation about the iconography of Horus-Shed on his chariot: some of the stelae are still unpublished and new samples can be added to the corpus. The purpose of this paper is to discuss especially about two forgotten monuments belonging to this kind of iconography

Remarks on a reused block from the temple of Khonsu in Karnak and on New Kingdom's royal horses names

peer reviewedThis article concerns a reused block in the Temple of Khonsu at Karnak. The block is inscribed with two columns of hieroglyphs, giving the beginning of a ḥtr ʿȝ tp(y) n(y) ḥm=f formula and the name of a horse’s team, Ptpt(w)-ḫȝs.wt. Royal horse names and their presentation in monumental scenes are discussed, as is the question of the dating of the block

Figurines satiriques de singes en calcaire peint

editorial reviewedReport about a quick survey in Magasin 25 at Deir el-Medina which allowed to locate and gather a total of 27 painted limestonefigurines belonging to the same corpus, i. e. ‘figurines depicting monkeys imitating human activities’, such as playing music or driving a chariot. Most of those figurines are known thanks to Bernard Bruyère’s notebooks and publications. All of them have been documented in 2021. The 'monkeys driving chariots' subcorpus will be published in details in a future article

À propos d’une lame de poignard inscrite au nom d’un roi Menkheperrê : notes sur un objet singulier conservé au Louvre (AF 13446)

Le département des Antiquités égyptiennes du musée du Louvre conserve dans ses réserves un objet singulier, portant le numéro d’inventaire AF 13446. Inscrit au nom d’un roi Menkheperrê, il adopte la forme générale d’une lame de poignard. Le présent article comporte une description détaillée de cet objet atypique, dont on connaît deux parallèles auxquels sont également consacrées quelques lignes. Une discussion portant sur l’authenticité de ces trois objets à l’aspect inhabituel est ensuite proposée. Enfin, des hypothèses sont formulées au sujet de leur datation, nature et fonction éventuelles, en admettant que leur caractère antique soit établi.There is a remarkable object, bearing the accession number AF 13446, in the reserve collection of the Department of Egyptian Antiquities at the Musée du Louvre. Inscribed with the name of a certain King Menkheperre, it takes the general shape of a dagger blade. The present article includes a detailed description of this atypical object; a few lines are also devoted to the two analogues that are known to exist. The authenticity of the three unusual-looking objects is then discussed. Finally, hypotheses are formulated about their dating, nature and function, assuming that the objects are indeed ancient

Les tessères onomastiques de Deir el-Médina : recherche en cours dans les collections de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale du Caire

Short presentation of a work in progress on the 'name stones' from Deir el-Medina now kept in the IFAO's archives.Action spécifique 17432 - IFAO - Etude des ostraca non littéraires de Deir el-Médin

Altering writing. Neutralizing and re-activating the agency of animate signs in less or non-figurative graphic registers

Since the seminal publications of Lacau (1914, 1926), the avoidance, replacement, alteration, and annihilation of hieroglyphic signs representing animate beings in funerary contexts has been intensively investigated (e.g., Iannarilli 2017, 2018; Pierre, 1997; Roth 2017; Thuault 2020). In this paper, we suggest to look at other types of contexts and to consider graphic registers (Ragazzoli & Albert 2021) that are situated lower on the figurative scale (Vernus 2019, Polis 2020). Indeed, if the statement made by Russo (2010: 252) generally holds true — “la mutilation des signes concerne l’écriture figurée, dite écriture hiéroglyphique, l’écriture non figurée, dite écriture hiératique, n’étant pas sujette à un tel traitement, ce qui s’explique par la nature et le statut des deux types d’écriture” — there are exceptions that shed light on this practice as a whole. In a first step, we situate the phenomenon among the different types of taboos (Polis 2013, Vernus 2020) affecting the written performance in Ancient Egypt and show that alterations of writing do indeed occur most often in cases of high figurativity, i.e., when the hieroglyphic signs can be equated with actual visual images (Schenkel 2011) and thereby have the potential to be deactivated (Winand & Angenot 2016). In a second time, we propose a typology of the different kinds of sign replacements and alterations, illustrating the practice with examples that belong to non-funerary contexts. This allows us to analyze how this practice transfers to less figurative registers and to show that the Egyptian cursive scripts only inherited from some types of alterations to the exclusion of others, but also developed new strategies (color, orientation, degree of cursivity) in order to neutralize or, conversely, to reactivate agentive signs in specific contexts.Crossing Boundarie

Analyse et restauration des superstructures du complexe funéraire attribué au Scribe de la Tombe Amennakhte (v) – Saison 2022

editorial reviewedRapport de la mission 2022 concernant le monument funéraire d'Amennakhte (v) dans le cadre des travaux archéologiques de l'Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale à Deir el-Medina (dir. Cédric Larcher). L’objectif du projet, dirigé par Andreas Dorn (Uppsala) et Stéphane Polis (Liège) est de mieux comprendre le complexe funéraire situé dans le cimetière de l’Ouest de Deir el-Médina qui fut attribué au scribe Amennakhte (v) par Bernard Bruyère et de voir si, parmi les puits associés à cette structure, il est toujours possible d’identifier des fragments de papyrus ramessides permettant d’éclairer l’histoire des archives manuscrites de la famille de ce scribe de la XXe dynastie.Crossing Boundarie