Late Middle Kingdom Temple Bakery at South Abydos

Recent excavations have exposed the original bakery belonging to the mortuary temple of Senwosret III at South Abydos. Initially founded as a six-chambered building, the bakery was expanded in several phases to become a larger complex that housed a series of chambers dedicated primarily to large-volume hearth baking. Associated ceramics show that baking practices involved parallel use of rough-ware trays (aprt) and cylindrical bread molds (bDA). The bakery was linked by a walkway system with adjacent buildings also involved in the production and supply of offerings to the temple. One of the neighboring buildings appears to have been a companion brewery that was removed and replaced during a phase of alteration to the production area. The bakery and related structures are components of a larger shena or production zone that once extended nearly 300 meters along the edge of the Nile floodplain between the temple and town at the site of WAH-swt-¢akAwra-mAa-xrw-m-AbDw. Evidence from the bakery and neighboring structures shows that the layout of the shena was an extension of the urban plan of the town of Wah-Sut. Flanked by the main institutional buildings, the site was spatially organized around this multi-activity production zone which formed the site’s economic and industrial nucleus.

"النار العاتية التي ذاقت من طعم وهج اللهيب:"

This article offers the first Arabic translation of a praise hymn dedicated to Ramsess II (d. 1213 B.C.E.), with philological and poetic commentaries. The text was carved on the facade of Abū Simbel temple twice because of its exceptional literary nature, as this study demonstrates. I discuss why Euro- American scholars were unable to separate the literary dimensions of the praise hymns from its political framework, and also tackle the pictorial nature of ancient Egyptian writing, providing the Arabic reader with the necessary instruments for understanding the several visual features that were creatively deployed by the writer to enhance the reading process of this particular praise hymn. I then trace the early foundations of premodern Arabic khiṭāba and its close relation to constructing oral/aural arguments in comparison with balāgha that deals with the literary devices of the Qur’ānic text. This study breaks new ground in the discipline of comparative literature by establishing a collation between the two praise hymns of Ramsess II (d. 1213 B.C.E.) and Senwosret III (d. 1839 B.C.E.). This collation makes it possible to rediscover the way each eulogist built unique or similar images to describe the praised king. The article discusses several problematic questions of loanwords to pave the way for further research on ancient Egyptian words that were incorporated inside the classical Arabic dictionary, and the analysis ends with an ancient Egyptian-Arabic lexicon of the hymn under study. It is hoped that this may encourage the new generation of Egyptian Egyptologists to generate a comprehensive dictionary of the ancient Egyptian language based on direct engagement with ancient Egyptian literary texts.

"النار العاتية التي ذاقت من طعم وهج اللهيب:"

This article offers the first Arabic translation of a praise hymn dedicated to Ramsess II (d. 1213 B.C.E.), with philological and poetic commentaries. The text was carved on the facade of Abū Simbel temple twice because of its exceptional literary nature, as this study demonstrates. I discuss why Euro- American scholars were unable to separate the literary dimensions of the praise hymns from its political framework, and also tackle the pictorial nature of ancient Egyptian writing, providing the Arabic reader with the necessary instruments for understanding the several visual features that were creatively deployed by the writer to enhance the reading process of this particular praise hymn. I then trace the early foundations of premodern Arabic khiṭāba and its close relation to constructing oral/aural arguments in comparison with balāgha that deals with the literary devices of the Qur’ānic text. This study breaks new ground in the discipline of comparative literature by establishing a collation between the two praise hymns of Ramsess II (d. 1213 B.C.E.) and Senwosret III (d. 1839 B.C.E.). This collation makes it possible to rediscover the way each eulogist built unique or similar images to describe the praised king. The article discusses several problematic questions of loanwords to pave the way for further research on ancient Egyptian words that were incorporated inside the classical Arabic dictionary, and the analysis ends with an ancient Egyptian-Arabic lexicon of the hymn under study. It is hoped that this may encourage the new generation of Egyptian Egyptologists to generate a comprehensive dictionary of the ancient Egyptian language based on direct engagement with ancient Egyptian literary texts.

At the Hands of Senwosret III? The Iconography and Style of the Reworked Colossi Cairo JE 45975 and JE 45976

Two colossal quartzite statues from Ihnasya el-Medina, now Egyptian Museum Cairo JE 45975 and JE 45976, dating to the late Middle Kingdom but reworked under Ramesses II, were recently attributed to Amenemhat IV. Examining the inscriptions, iconography, and style of the statues, it is argued here that they represent Senwosret III. Remarkably, the statues depict the king with both hands lying flat on the thighs, an iconographic detail that is not attested until the reign of Amenemhat III.