The Easiest Solution

By Johannes Jüngling (Vienna)

Sometimes, the easiest solution is also the best. The simple truth behind this statement struck me once again when in the course of preparing my PhD dissertation – and a few other manuscripts – I was assessing the 4^th dynasty of Egypt.

Kings and Names

The names of its kings, that is. From antiquity on, an awful lot of ink has been spilled about the ‘great pyramid builders’ – about their deeds, their hubris, and their onomastics. It is the latter that has provided us with graecised names like ‘Cheops’, ‘Chephren’, or ‘Mykerinos’ that we still use today and attribute to specific Egyptian kings who ruled more than 4,500 years ago (and, of course, to their monumental tombs).

Most of the interested public might know that there exist alternative ‘Egyptological’ forms of these names – ‘Khufu’, ‘Khafra’, and ‘Menkaura’, respectively. But probably only few are aware of how both traditions connect to the reconstructed ‘original’ Old Egyptian forms, which, to us, look weirdly unfamiliar. Or what else to call a form like *Ḫăwi̯ằf-wĭj-H̲ănā́mŭw, which does not exactly resemble either of the usual names of the king who commissioned the Great Pyramid at Giza?

I think, what we can conclude from this is that while none of today’s common names are correct in the strict sense, and none can claim to be ‘more true’ than the other, both forms have a distinct and unique right to be used. Both can be understood instantly, and both are derived from faithful original sources.

Egyptian Roots, Greek Roots

But then again, are they? – Well, with most of them, this certainly is the case. Nobody would nowadays seriously doubt that the Greek name versions Χέοψ (Herodotus), Χέμμις (Diodorus), and Σοῦφις (Manetho according to Eusebius) are all distant descendants of the Egyptian form Ḫwi̯⸗f-wj(-H̲nmw) (unnecessary vowels removed) found in the contemporary sources. The same goes – mutatis mutandis – for pretty much all of the kings of the 4^th dynasty.

But there is one exception: Between Khafra and Menkaura, there was an ephemeral king whose name appears as Βίχερις (Manetho according to Africanus) or Βιΰρης (Pseudo-Apollodorus and Pseudo-Eratosthenes) in the Greek sources, whereas in every single one of the known Egyptian kings-lists, it is not preserved. The only contemporaneous traces of his existence are to be found at the abandoned construction site of his pyramid at Zawiyet el-Aryan (زاوية العريان) near modern-day Cairo. And this is where our issues begin.

Zawiyet el-Aryan

Today, the area around the site is occupied by the Egyptian military; so, at this place, there will be no systematic excavations in the foreseeable future. This, of course, was different when Italian architect and archaeologist Alessandro Barsanti (1858-1917) was overseeing fieldwork at the site in the first decade of the 20^th century.

Among the material used to build the ‘Grande excavation’, as the construction site of the pyramid came to be known, he recorded some stones bearing workers’ inscriptions in red ink. These ‘dipinti’ typically served to organise and structure the ongoing work at a monumental construction site, and to assign specific tasks and materials to groups of workers. Therefore, the names of these groups were written directly on, say, blocks of stone to be carried to the emerging building.

Luckily for us, these names were often composed with one or more names of the then-reigning monarch – and this is also what Barsanti’s team found at Zawiyet el-Aryan. Samples of these inscriptions would be published by Barsanti in a 1906 article in the journal of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities, the Annales du Service des Antiquités de l’Egypte:

Source: Barsanti, A.: Fouilles de Zaouiét el-Aryân, in: ASAE 7 (1906), p. 270, no. 20

A New Royal Name: Attempt #1

And there it was, in plain sight and encircled by a cartouche: the name of the mysterious king who allegedly succeeded Khafra to Egypt’s throne.^[1] But how to read it – that is, how to translate the cursive (= hieratic) shapes into standardised (= hieroglyphic) signs?

At least to Gaston Maspero (1846-1916, the then retired-and-returned Director General of the Department of Antiquities), who wrote an introductory note to Barsanti’s article, the case was clear:

‘En effet, les graffiti tracés sur les blocs retirés de la grande cavité centrale sont tous au nom d’un roi appelé tantôt , Nofirka sans Râ, pour , Nofirkarî, selon un usage assez fréquent à toutes les époques. Le premier signe est écrit le plus souvent d’une manière cursive (nos 1, 19, 20, 38, 41, 45, 46, 47, 52, 54), qui en a rendu la valeur incertaine pendant quelque temps ; mais la variante vraiment hiéroglyphique qu’on rencontre au no 35 a confirmé la lecture , nofir, nafir, que j’en avais donnée dès le début, après avoir essayé un moment d’y reconnaître le signe , déterminatif de , ka.’^[2]

‘As a matter of fact, the graffiti written on the blocks retrieved from the large central cavity all contain the name of a king sometimes called , Nofirka without Râ, for , Nofirkarî, following an at all times frequent custom. The first sign is written more often than not in a cursive manner (nos 1, 19, 20, 38, 41, 45, 46, 47, 52, 54), which made its value uncertain for some time; yet, its true hieroglyphic variant which we encounter in no. 35 confirmed the lecture , nofir, nafir, which I had assigned to it in the beginning, after having considered to read the sign , determinative of , ka, for a moment.’

A New Royal Name: Attempts #2-7

Maybe fuelled by the fact that there were no photographs of the actual inscriptions (and by Maspero’s initial insecurity), his reading would soon be challenged. Suffice it to say that in the course of the 20^th century, not fewer than seven (!) different alternative readings would be suggested for the crucial first sign (from the right; the reading of the second one being pretty straightforward).

Of these, Jürgen von Beckerath’s (1920-2016) proposition of reading the sign of a stork (Gardiner G29: ) has found the most approval among Egyptologists. It was featured in major reference publications on the topic, and it came with one captivating advantage: With its phonographic value bꜣ, it went along nicely with the graecised name forms Βίχερις and Βιΰρης, all of which feature Βeta at the onset.

Palaeographical Problems Occur

And yet, there was a fundamental problem with this approach: The shapes of the actual hieratic signs did not match those of the known loosely contemporary specimens of G29. (Nor those of the other proposed readings, for that matter.) Was it possible that there was no stork involved? Was it possible that one of the other readings was the correct one, after all? If so, how to prove or disprove it?

In order to come to terms with this problem, the first thing I did was putting up a whiteboard near my desk, then drawing the debated sign, large and centred – and accompanied by some heavy curses. Obviously, there was no obvious solution to this. So, the sign stayed where I had put it, while the rest of the whiteboard saw inflectional paradigms, shopping lists, and calculations come and go. Over the weeks, I learned to live with the illegible, curse-laden symbol behind my left shoulder, and was about to give up altogether.

Enter Ahmed Fakhry

Then, eventually, my rescue came in form of something similar, but entirely unrelated. When I was browsing Ahmed Fakhry’s publication of the excavation works at the Bent Pyramid (Dahshur) in search of dated inscriptions, I found a photograph of a hieratic dipinto whose importance I recognised immediately:

Source: Fakhry, A., The Bent Pyramid. The Monuments of Sneferu at Dahshur 1 (Cairo 1959), pl. 21, A

Sneferu’s Name as Game Changer

The name in the cartouche is that of Sneferu, the first king of the 4^th dynasty – nothing particularly special given that it was this king who commissioned the construction of the Bent Pyramid.

What is remarkable, though, is the shape of the -sign (phonographic value: nfr) at the upper left corner of the cartouche. While it deviates markedly from the other known old hieratic samples of the sign, it shares some striking features with the mysterious specimens recorded by Barsanti at Zawiyet el-Aryan: the vaguely triangular shape of the lower part, the slightly downwards-bent horizontal stroke at the top, and, above all, the flat line at the bottom.

Suddenly, that ‘mysterious’ sign seemed not so mysterious anymore. The simplest, yet at first sight not most convincing solution proved to be correct. And justice was done to old Monsieur Maspero.

Implications

But still, with this knowledge gained, there remain a lot of issues to be tackled.

First, of course, this is the question how the graecised names Βίχερις and Βιΰρης came about. If we accept the reading (hence: Nfr-kꜣ), there must have been some onomastic interference between this king’s reign and the Greek historiographers recording it.

And then, what does this reading mean to the context of the cartouches: the workers’ groups’ names, their structure and coherence? And what about that recent theory that not all of the inscriptions found at the ‘Grande excavation’ refer to the same monarch?

– Important questions, indeed, but certainly too many to be answered at length in this post. So, stay tuned for more OK Egyptology!

Footnotes

[1] The minutiae of the order of kings in the 4^th dynasty constitute an entire story on its own. Someone should write a blog post about it …

[2] Barsanti, A.: Fouilles de Zaouiét el-Aryân(1904-1905), in: ASAE 7 (1906), p. 257.

Disclaimer

This contribution is based on data collected as part of the ERC Starting Grant ‘Challenging Time(s) – A New Approach to Written Sources for Ancient Egyptian Chronology’ (GA № 757951), which has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme at the Austrian Archaeological Institute (Department of Classical Studies) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The results published are solely within the author’s responsibility and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the funding agencies or host institution, which must not be held responsible for either contents or their further use.

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