n a recent visit to St. Petersburg I was privileged to view the Egyptian Collection of the Hermitage Museum in the com-pany of the Curator, Dr. Andrey O. Bolshakov, who also showed me some material from the reserves. Among the latter was the scarab of prince K£-¡n, which I published as my first Egyptological article many years ago.1 At that stage I was unable to assign a precise date to this hitherto unattested Byblite ruler, and terminated my brief paper with the hope that new evidence would be forthcoming to date him more closely. Such evidence has now emerged in a rather curious fashion.
Examination of the back and sides of the scarab in question surprisingly revealed the fact that these crucial diagnostic features, shown on photo-graphs generously supplied to me in 1968 by the then State Hermitage Museum, Leningrad, were of an entirely different scarab-seal. On the illustrations published in my article the accession number of the scarab (5945) can be discerned twice: below the photograph of the base, and on one of the wing-cases, of the object. Unless there are two scarabs in the Collection bearing the same number, it appears that in this instance some confusion has arisen at an earlier stage in the history of the Collection. At any rate, the photographs illustrating the back, profile, front and rear of the object have nothing to do with the scarab-seal of prince K£-¡n. Personal examination has shown that the typological details2 are in reality as shown in the accompanying fig. 1, and these have important chronological implications, revealing that the scarab is of a common and well-documented Thirteenth Dynasty type. The back conforms exactly to my Type 6c, with a single line separating the pro-thorax from the elytra, with a double line between the elytra, and a single line below.3 The profile is identical to my Type 5d, where the
1 Geoffrey T. Martin, “A new Prince of Byblos,” JNES 27 (1968), pp. 141–42, with pl. II.
Subsequent publication in idem, Egyptian administrative and private-name seals (Oxford, 1971), no. 1689, with pl. 20 [37].
2 The drawings are published in lieu of new photographs, which cannot at the moment be supplied.
O
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front leg only is hatched or “feathered.”4 The height of the scarab is 10 mm. With these details to hand a date for K£-¡n, prince (¢£ty-™) of Byblos, can confidently be suggested, since numerous royal name scarabs exhibiting precisely these diagnostic features are extant, covering the reigns of Sekhemre¯™- swadjtowe Sobekhotep III,5 Kha™sekhemre¯™Neferhotep I,6 and Kha™neferre¯™ Sobekhotep IV.7 According to the Turin Canon, the first of these ruled a little over 3 years, the second rather more than 11 years, while the regnal years of the last are not extant in the Turin Papyrus. The reigns in question fall roughly between 1750 and 1720 B.C.8 We shall see below how prince K£-¡n is to be fitted into the existing Byblite “king-list.”9
Another Byblite ruler, prince ⁄ntn, whose name figures on three scarabs,10 is firmly dated to Neferhotep I,11 but might, of course, have begun his rule under one of this king’s predecessors and could have sur-vived into the reign of one of his successors. One of the scarabs of ⁄ntn (no. 262 in my catalogue) is of the same basic Thirteenth Dynasty type as that of K£-¡n, though the base has a scroll, rather than a plain, border.
Another scarab of ⁄ntn (no. 261) likewise dates to the same period, though typologically it is slightly “debased,”12 raising the faint possibil-ity of the existence of a second ⁄ntn, distinct from the prince of no. 262, reigning later in the Thirteenth Dynasty. Generally speaking, the scarab of K£-¡n now falls into one of the most easily recognizable and datable Thirteenth Dynasty types.13
3 Typology in Martin, Egyptian administrative… seals, pl. 53; cf. p. 5.
4 Op. cit., pl. 55.
5 Jürgen von Beckerath, Untersuchungen zur politischen Geschichte der Zweiten Zwischenzeit in Ägypten (Glückstadt, 1964), pp. 240–243 [XIII.21].
6 Ibid., pp. 243–245 [XIII.22].
7 Ibid., pp. 246–250 [XIII.24].
8 All conveniently in Sir Alan Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs (Oxford, 1961, repr. with corrections, 1962), p. 440. The chronology is that of William J. Murnane, The Penguin Guide to Ancient Egypt (Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 352.
9 For a list of Bronze Age Byblite rulers, see W.F. Albright, “Further light on the History of Middle-Bronze Byblos,” BASOR 179 (Oct. 1965), p.42, updated by K.A. Kitchen, “Byblos, Egypt, and Mari in the early Second Millennium B.C.,” Orientalia 36 (1967), pp. 40–41. Cf.
Nina Jidejian, Byblos through the Ages (Beirut, 1968), pp. 209–211.
10 Martin, op. cit., nos. 261–263, with pls. 32[14], 9[19].
11 Kitchen, op. cit., p. 40, with previous bibliography.
12 Martin, op. cit., pl. 53 (Type 8); cf. p. 5.
13 To cite only two major sources: W.M. Flinders Petrie, Scarabs and Cylinders with Names (London, 1917), pl. 18; Olga Tufnell, Studies on Scarab Seals II (Warminster, 1984), pls. 54–55. Cf., however, the view outlined in William A. Ward and William G. Dever, Studies on Scarab Seals III. Scarab typology and archaeological context (San Antonio, 1994), pp. 18–10.
Fig. 1. Scarab of prince K£-¡n, Hermitage Museum, St. Peters-burg.
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Geoffrey T. Martin, A Late Middle Kingdom Prince of Byblos
A brief word may now be said on the reading of the name of the prince of the St. Petersburg scarab-seal. Originally I read the text as: “A boon which the King gives (to) Hathor, Lady of Byblos, (for) the Prince of Byblos, K£-¡n,” a translation to which I still adhere. H. De Meulenaere, in a generous review14 of my catalogue, queried the reading of the per-sonal name, and suggested the possibility of its being another form of the name ⁄n(tn). Unwittingly I may have caused the misunderstanding by erroneously printing a superfluous phrase, n k£ [n], in the translitera-tion in the catalogue (no. 1689). This expression, “for the ka of,” could not in any case be part of the standard ¢tp d¡ nsw formula here, since the sign k£ is inserted after the title (¢£ty-™) and the toponym (Kpn). The cor-rect transliteration of the text is therefore: ¢tp d¡ nsw Ìt¢r, nb(t) Kpn (n)
¢£ty-™ n Kpn K£-¡n.
In Kitchen’s “king-list” of Byblos15 the son(?)and successor of ⁄ntn is named as Ilima-yapi(?), the source being an amethyst scarab, now in the Louvre Museum (no. 25729). This seal features as no. 174a in my cat-alogue. The scarab has been assigned to Byblos Royal Tomb IV,16 but on no firm evidence, and the object merits a re-examination here, not least on grounds of date. Typologically, this naturalistically modelled scarab is certainly earlier than the Thirteenth Dynasty, where the owner finds a place in the currently accepted “king-list.” I would assign the seal to the early to mid-Twelfth Dynasty.17 Further, there are grounds even for doubting the seal-owner’s status as a ruler of the city-state of Byblos.
Although we need not doubt that the scarab was acquired in Byblos after Ernest Renan’s excavations, its precise find-spot is completely unknown.18 The owner bears common Egyptian titles, whether
execu-14 Herman De Meulenaere, CdE 47 (1972), p. 147. For foreign masculine names incorpo-rating the element k£, see now Thomas Schneider, Asiatische Personennamen in ägyp-tischen Quellen des Neuen Reiches (Freiburg and Göttingen, 1992), pp. 209–23, 278–81, 297, 391–92. Professor Kenneth Kitchen (personal communication) thinks that the name K£-¡n can feasibly be understood as West Semitic, either from the root + affix , or from the root + affix : hence, *Gur’an or *Kul’an. Cf. A Hebrew and English Lex-icon of the Old Testament… based on the LexLex-icon of William Gesenius, edited by Francis Brown with the cooperation of S.R. Driver and Charles A. Briggs (Oxford, 1892), pp. 323, 378.
15 Kitchen, op. cit., p. 41, no. 6.
16 W.F. Albright, “The Eighteenth-Century Princes of Byblos and the Chronology of Mid-dle Bronze,” BASOR 176 (Dec. 1964), pp. 39–41, accepting the position of Pierre Montet, Byblos et l’Egypte: quatre campagnes de fouilles à Gebeil (Paris, 1928), pp. 197–99.
Kitchen, loc.cit., assigns it to Tomb IV without demur. The paper of Alessandra Nibbi,
“The Byblos question again,” DE 30 (1994), pp. 115–41, came to hand as I was finishing this article. Page 136 is relevant here.
17 For the back type see Martin, op. cit., pl. 56 (type 4aq), cf. pp. 4–5. The remark concern-ing semi-precious stones needs to be revised in the light of the scarab under discussion.
For the profile: pl. 55 (Type 3b), a type which cries out for a date in the Twelfth Dynasty.
KL
£
an-GR
£
an-42 MARTIN Page 597 Thursday, July 22, 2004 1:04 PM
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tive or honorific, conventionally translated as “hereditary prince and count.” It is noteworthy that there is no qualifying toponym, “of Byblos.”
Most of the epithets engraved on this seal, larger than normal, are those that feature on other private-name scarabs.19 The epithet s£m∂d
†bwt ¡t≠f, “a son who presses his father’s sandals,” i.e., who follows his father obediently, or in his footsteps,20 is unusual, but need not indicate that he was the heir to a princely throne. The same observation applies to the title ¡ry p™t, “hereditary prince.” The epithets could apply to any dutiful son, not least in the early Middle Kingdom, when such senti-ments seem to be commonplace,21 in inscriptional form if not in real life. The personal name on the scarab (fig. 2) which I read as ⁄mpy, is a common Egyptian one, cited for the Old and Middle Kingdoms.22 In short, the seal seems to be that of an Egyptian official, but whether he had any function at the Byblite court, or whether his seal found its way to the Levant by chance,23 cannot of course be known.
On these grounds, and unless further evidence emerges, “prince Ili-ma-yapi(?)” should be ejected from the “king-list.” This apparently rad-ical move would leave a vacancy for prince K£-¡n at an appropriate time in the Thirteenth Dynasty, but whether as the immediate successor of
⁄ntn only future discoveries will show.
It is sobering to reflect how tenuous is our hold on these historical personages, powerful and influential no doubt in their day, now mere names surviving for the most part on small and fragile objects such as scarabs and seal-impressions.24
18 Citing Ernest Renan, Mission de Phénicie (Paris, 1864), p. 854: “A Gébeil a été trouvé, depuis la mission, un scarabée en améthyste dont la base est couverte d’hiéroglyphes. Ce scarabée est en la possession de M. Péretié.” The statement is reiterated by Pierre Montet, op. cit., p. 197: “Ce scarabée a été acquis à Gebeil peu après le départ de Renan par Péretié.”
19 Especially k£, nfr, and w£¢, for examples of which see Martin, op. cit., pp. 187–88.
20 Cf. related epithets in Jozef Janssen, De traditioneele egyptische autobiografie vóór het Nieuwe Rijk,Erste deel (Leiden, 1946), p. 71. Our epithet is cited thereas Bc 28; cf. Tweede deel, pp. 103–105.
21 For an overview see Janssen, loc. cit.
22 PN I, 26, 13. I interpreted the first sign as a yod¢, but even if it is an ¡m£ it does not lessen the force of the argument, since there are plenty of Egyptian personal names incorporating this element, cf. PN I, 25; II, 263. The name ⁄m£-¡py, citing this scarab, is PN II, 263, 7.
23 Cf. my remarks in Tufnell, op. cit., p. 147. A fairly comprehensive list of scarabs and sealings of officials found in Western Asia generally can be made by consulting the index in my catalogue, pp. 189–90. Material continues to emerge: see, for example, Raphael Giveon, “Hyksos Scarabs with Names of Kings and Officials from Canaan,” CdE 49 (1974), pp. 222–33. For a recent study, see Daphna Ben-Tor, “The historical Implications of Middle Kingdom scarabs found in Palestine bearing Private Names and Titles of Officials,”
BASOR 294 (May, 1994), pp. 7–22.
Fig. 2. Facsimile drawing of the scarab of ⁄mpy or ⁄m£-¡py, Louvre Museum, Paris.
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Geoffrey T. Martin, A Late Middle Kingdom Prince of Byblos
b
This reassessment of part of the “king-list” of Byblos is offered as a small tribute to an admired scholar and friend, whose enviable output of monographs and articles has illuminated so many aspects of Egyptian civilization and its interconnections with neighboring cultures, not least in the Middle Kingdom.
24 Of many examples of officials of rank known only from such material, cf. the sealing and scarab of the vizier Sbk-™£ (called) Bb¡, Martin, op. cit., nos. 1383–1384. A fuller treat-ment of his seal impression and of many others from Lisht South is in preparation by the writer. Finally, it may be suggested that when times are more propitious a facsimile corpus of all the crucial Egyptian texts from Gebeil might be undertaken.
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