Egypt Exploration Society
The Earliest Dated Monument of Amasis and the End of the Reign of Apries Author(s): Anthony Leahy Source: The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 74 (1988), pp. 183-199 Published by: Egypt Exploration Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3821755 Accessed: 22/04/2009 07:09 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ees. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
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JEA 74
THE EARLIEST DATED MONUMENT OF AMASIS AND THE END OF THE REIGN OF APRIES By ANTHONY
LEAHY
Publication of a donation stela BM 952 (year one of Amasis) followed by analysis of the sources for the civil war with Apries (P. BM 10113, Elephantine stela, cuneiform tablet BM 33041, Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus). P. BM 101 13 and BM 952 together show that Apries was still recognized at Thebes in October, 570, over eight months after the first monument dated by Amasis. It is argued that Apries was in Egypt for the whole of that period and only went abroad after his defeat at 'Immw/Momemphis. His fortified palace at Memphis may have been his base, and it is suggested that Apries had more native support than hitherto supposed. The effectiveness
of Amasis' subsequent propaganda, reflected in Herodotus, has misled historians in this respect.
AMONG the less prepossessing
treasures
of the British Museum
is a stela (BM 952),1
dated to year i of Amasis (pl. XXV and fig. i). It is of limestone and measures 53.8 x 30 x 8 cm. Although no information on its provenance is available, its dedication to Horus, 'lord of hwt-nsw', suggests that it comes from el-Kom el-Ahmar el-Sawaris/Sharuna, a site on the east bank of the Nile, some twenty kilometres south of el-Hibeh, and currently being studied by an expedition from the University of Tiibingen.2 The offering scene is unexceptional. The rounded top of the stela is echoed by an arched, elongated pt hieroglyph, from the tips of which framing lines drop vertically to the bottom of the text section. Beneath the sky-sign is a conventional winged disc. Below this, the king, who faces left and is described as 'The Good God Khnemibre, living for ever', presents a field symbol to Horus, 'Lord of hwt-nsw', behind whom stands Isis, 'Lady of hwt-nsw'. The king wears a wig encircled by a fillet and falling almost vertically onto, or behind, the shoulder. Traces of the uraeus can just be seen on the forehead. The cartouche is slightly damaged, as is the king's head, and the nomen in line two of the main text, but similar surface pitting is observable elsewhere on the stela, in quite innocuous places, and is certainly not deliberate. The text of six and a half lines is crudely incised, and somewhat obscured by a repaired diagonal break across the lower half. A blank section at the bottom of the stela would have allowed it to be inserted in the ground. 1 The stela is published by kind permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. I am grateful to Dr M. L. Bierbrier and Mr T. G. H. James for access to the stela, and to P. BM 10113 (discussed below). For its brief bibliography, see D. Meeks in E. Lipinfiski (ed.), State and Temple Economy in the Ancient Near East, ii (Louvain, 1979), 679. Study of the Elephantine stela of Amasis in Cairo (n. 27 below), in the context of preparation of a corpus of Saite inscriptions, was made possible by a grant from the British Academy which is gratefully
acknowledged here. 2 For the site, see F. Gomaa, Die Besiedlung Agyptens wdhrenddesMittleren Reiches (Wiesbaden, 1986), 343 -4, and P. Vernus, RdE 37 (I986), 146 n. 40. For preliminary reports on the work of the Tiubingen expedition, see L. Gestermann et al., GM 104 (I988), 53-70.
ANTHONY
184
LEAHY
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