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FUZZY (HI)STORIES: ON CAT KILLING IN FRANCE AND EGYPT, THE MYSTERY OF A PRIEST AND THIRTEEN ASSYRIANS, AND THE BOUNDARIES OF THE PAST IN DEMOTIC LITERATURE1

THOMAS SCHNEIDER Manuscript of the contribution published in Hans Amstutz, Andreas Dorn, Miriam Ronsdorf, Matthias Müller and Sami Uljas (eds.): Fuzzy Boundaries. Festschrift für Antonio Loprieno. 2 vols. Hamburg: Kai Widmaier, 2015, 434-448. http://widmaier-verlag.de/index.php?content=issue&isbn=978-3-943955-60-6

Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, final lines

What is to us, we wonder, Egypt’s ancient civilization? Una ciudad de los espejismos, a

city of mirages, unrepeatable since time immemorial to those who decipher its traces on

the ancient parchments, forever exiled from the memory of men? Or rather, discernable to

various degrees of fuzziness and precision, una ciudad de los espejos, a city of mirrors

that would provide reflections of its past, at the very most distorted, as Carlo Ginzburg

believed in his positivist assessment of historical sources (Ginzburg 1999: 25)?

1. CAT KILLINGS AND THE DISTINCTION OF PRECISE AND FUZZY HISTORIES

In a historical bestseller published first in 1984, “The Great Cat Massacre and Other

Episodes in French Cultural History”, Robert Darnton has interpreted the account about a

massacre of cats given by Nicolas Contat, the former worker of a printing shop in Paris,

during the late 1730s (Darnton 1985). Tormented by their conditions of work, the rotten

food they were given (that even cats refused to eat), and prevented from sleeping by the

howling of the street cats, Contat and his co-apprentice, supported by the journeymen,

                                                                                                               1  The ideas about the interpretation of the “Struggle for the Benefice of Amun” were first presented at the 60th annual meeting of ARCE in Dallas, on April 24, 2009; and at the annual meeting of the SSEA in Toronto, on November 6, 2009. I am indebted to Richard Jasnow, Joachim Quack, Steve Vinson and Günter Vittmann for reading and commenting on early drafts of this contribution.

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took revenge on the owner of the printing shop, Jacques Vincent, and his wife, who

herself owned a favourite cat, la grise. They killed the grise and hid her in a gutter, and

then caught all street cats they could get hold of. The entire staff of the printing shop then

put them to a mock trail in the courtyard, including guards, a confessor, and a public

executioner, and after pronouncing them guilty and administering last rites, hanged them

on makeshift gallows. The men were delirious with laughter and joy, humiliating and

defeating the startled shop owner and his wife, and often reenacted in mime the trial and

cat slaughtering with relish over the next days. Walking the fine line between

subordination and rebellion, they used symbolic acts as a form of protest against the

bourgeoisie, e.g., implicitly violating Vincent’s wife by killing her cat, and liberated

themselves by their laughter.

Cats were also strangled in ancient Egypt, a fact known not through a cultural anecdote

such as the one preserved from Nicolas Contat. The systematic radiological examination

of cat mummies from Tuna el-Gebel has shown that the cats were deliberately killed by

breaking their necks or strangling (Armitage/Clutton Brock 1981, 185ff.; Kessler 2003,

59f.). In past scholarly assessments of Egyptian mass burials of animals, the scope of that

phenomenon was interpreted by the assumption of mass worship: It was posited that

animal mummies could be purchased by pilgrims and donated as votive gifts. The

enormous number of mummified animals seemed to require the assumption that the

burial sites had been places of pilgrimage visited by millions of individuals to whom the

animals would have served as mediators between them and the divine. The mass demand

for mummies would have necessitated the professional breeding and killing of animals, as

well as the production of fake mummies. A new view has been proposed more recently

that is again based on a systematic investigation of a site, the Ibis catacombs at Tuna el-

Gebel. This reassessment shows that there is no evidence for the presence of pilgrims, nor

a mass worship of animals or mass production of animal mummies. Quite to the opposite,

the suggestion is to see in the buried animals those used throughout Egypt in hundreds of

temple festivals and rituals, from where they would have been collected after they had

died or had been sacrificed, and transferred to the Isis catacombs as “gods”. As such, only

priests and cultic personal would have been in physical contact with them, and they

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would never have been a common commodity available to large segments of society as

postuled in the worship paradigm (for this reassessment, see Kessler 2003).

These two examples of cat killing are presented here as paradigmatic to two types of

historiography that Peter Burke, in a recent sketch on “fuzzy histories”, has labelled

“fuzzy” and “precise” historiography, respectively, and the historians practising it,

“lumpers” and “splitters” (Burke 2012). The article abstract summarizes it as follows:

“This article is concerned with history that is fuzzy in the sense of impressionistic rather than systematic, using “soft” rather than “hard” data and concerned more with “lumping” than with “splitting.” It argues that there have been at least four phases in the two centuries of conflict between precise and fuzzy historians. In the first phase, in the nineteenth century, precise history, firmly based on documents, was defined, by Leopold von Ranke and the Rankeans, against an older fuzzy or “conjectural” history. In a second phase, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a new fuzzy history was defined against “positivist” history, by Karl Lamprecht in Germany, Lucien Febvre in France, and George Trevelyan in England, among others. In a third phase, in the middle of the twentieth century, practitioners of quantitative history (sometimes known as the New Economic History or more generally as “cliometrics”) condemned all nonquantitative historians as fuzzy. In a fourth phase, from the 1970s onward, a still newer fuzzy history, comprising historical anthropology, microhistory, and the New Cultural History, was defined against quantitative history by scholars such as Georges Duby in France, Carlo Ginzburg in Italy, and Robert Darnton in the United States. In short, there has been a gradual move from more or less unself-conscious imprecision to self-conscious antiprecision.” (http://commonknowledge.dukejournals.org/content/18/2/239.short)

On all accounts, the conflict between fuzzy and precise historians seems imaginary from

an epistemological viewpoint. The losses of evidence from the past are of such a scale

that any, even a quantitative historiography of ancient Egypt, will always remain fuzzy

(for an epistemological viewpoint of the preserved evidence, see Schneider 2015a and

Schneider 2015b). The hundreds of ruin mounds in the Nile delta destroyed within the

last century, the tens of thousands of lost letters of the second millennium exchanged

between Egypt and other rulers of the Near East, the millions of unpreserved

administrative papyri issued by temples, settlements and the state will never be regained

by modern scholarship. The conflict is also mistaken from a hermeneutical standpoint, as

fuzzy histories – such as the mentality behind the cat killings of the Rue Saint Séverin –

can indeed be a singularly precise lens to the past, more precise (and different) than any

quantitative assessment of the life data of all Parisian printing apprentices of the 18th

century could be, or the population history of its domestic and street cats. We should also

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emphasize that the knowledge base of historians of the caliber of Jacob Burckhardt or

Robert Darnton has been anything but fuzzy, even if their work is impressionistic. This is

not to invalidate certain types of historiographical approaches – Donald Redford has

argued that the quantities of data needed for “kliometrics” are simply not forthcoming

from Egypt but that there may still be areas where it should be attempted (Redford 1986,

17) – but rather to posit their equal validity where there is pertinent evidence. Antonio

(who, as a scholar and rector, famously refers to any of his singularly precise assessments

as his “impressionist view”) clearly follows in the footsteps of his fellow Basel citizen.

The purpose of the present contribution is to explore the historical pertinence of such a

historiographical lens, and to walk along the boundaries between history and literature.

2. A FUZZY (HI)STORY: THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BENEFICE OF AMUN

In his History of Ancient Egypt, Erik Hornung refers to the disaster of the Assyrian

conquest that was purportedly passed over in silence by the Egyptian texts (Hornung

1999, 134). As an event that did not comply with Egypt’s ideological view of history

which emphasized and celebrated the continuity of Maat, it would have been excluded

from Egypt’s retrospective view of its past. With reference to Hornung’s concept of

"history as festival", Jan Assmann has reemphasized this understanding, speaking of the

Egyptian approach as a strategy to cope with the imponderabilities of the present, of

Gegenwartsbewältigung (Assmann 1999, 85; Assmann 2005, 118). However, fathoming

history as a festival does not seem to conform with the Egyptian sense of the past

(Schneider 2014), nor was the Assyrian conquest passed over in silence in Egyptian texts,

unless we limit ourselves to texts contemporaneous with the conquest. Ryholt

emphasizes, quite to the contrary, that “the Assyrian invasion and subsequent occupation

of Egypt in the seventh century BC was a traumatic experience which gave rise to a rich

literary tradition in Egypt”, a tradition that took its origin at the time of the invasion and

was then re-edited and expanded over time (Ryholt 2004, 483.505; also Dalley 2001,

156f.). At the very least, Demotic literature is explicit about the Assyrian conquest, as has

been shown in recent studies by Kim Ryholt (2004, 2014), Günter Vittmann (2006) and

K.-Th. Zauzich (2010). These stories include:

– the Inaros cycle (the Struggle for Inaros Armour; Esarhaddon’s letter to Inaros; the Duel between Inaros and an Assyrian sorceress; a visit to Esarhaddon’s sleeping quarters;

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Ryholt 2004, 492-495); – a story preserved on papyri in Berlin and Brooklyn, set in the reign of Psammetichus I and mentioning Esarhaddon (Ryholt 2004, 499f.; Zauzich 2010; Ryholt 2013a); – a story about Djoser, Imhotep and his duel with an an Assyrian sorceress, and the Assyrian defeat (pCarlsberg 85; Ryholt 2004, 500-502); – other relevant texts (not in Egyptian): the Sheikh Fadl inscription in Aramaic from the early 5th century BCE which preserves a romance containing the oldest occurrence of the literary protagonist Inaros and Esarhaddon (Ryholt 2004, 496f.; Holm 2007) and the story of Ahiqar (also preserved in Demotic; Ryholt 2004, 497-499). – I have excluded from this list the story about Naneferkasokar and the Babylonians that, despite Ryholt’s assertion to the effect that “the theme of the extant fragments, the conflict between an Egyptian hero and the king of Babylon, may suggest that also this was somehow based on the memory of the Assurian invasion” (Ryholt 2004, 503) more likely remembers the Babylonian attempt to conquer Egypt in 569 BCE. The focus of the following remarks will be on a text from the Inaros cycle that has not

usually been included in the dossier of Demotic texts on the Assyrian conquest, the

Struggle for the Benefice of Amun, preserved in a Late Ptolemaic papyrus from Achmim

(Pap. Spiegelberg), and fragmentary manuscripts from Roman times from Tebtynis

(Hoffmann 1995; Tait 2000; Agut-Labordère 2004-5; Quack 2009, 61-66; Ryholt 2014;

translations in Hoffmann and Quack 2007, 88-107; Agut-Labordère/Chuaveau 2011, 71-

94).

The plot of the text develops in five stages. At its focus is the contest for the benefice or

prebend of Amun, the revenue from holding the office of high priest of Amun at Karnak.

This benefice is claimed by two candidates who, together with their supporters, contend

for it through a long series of duels, negotiations, and oracle inquiries.

(1) In a first stage, king Petubastis who claims the benefice for his son Anchhor (Chayris), proceeds with his army from Tanis to Thebes, in order to celebrate the festival of the Valley. The rival delta princes Petechons of Per-Sopdu and Pemau, son of Inaros, have not been asked to join forces with Petubastis, only to be implored later to save him and to avert the impending defeat. At Thebes, Anchhor (Chayris) is given the office of high priest and thereby the benefice, and they prepare for the festival of the Valley. (2) The next day, a contender for the benefice of Amun appears on the stage: a young Horus priest from Buto who remains anonymous throughout the text claims that it is he who is actually entitled to the benefice of Amun. In a theological treatise, he attempts to demonstrate that all parts of the barge of Amun can be related to the Horus myth and that the Theban Amun is nothing but a form of appearance of Horus (cf. also Jasnow 2007, 440f.). He is accompanied by 13 shepherds – so again the translation of the respective term in the new anthology of Demotic literature by Friedhelm Hoffmann and Joachim Quack. To the dismay of Petubastis, Amun confirms the righteousness of the young

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priest’s claim. While Petubastis regrets that the priest did not announce his claim the day before, the Horus priest intends to take the barge of Amun as a security. Anchhor (Chayris), supported by the general Teos, and the Horus priest become enraged and prepare to fight. (3) Petubastis’ son Anchhor (Chayris) and his army from four nomes is opposed to the Horus priest and the thirteen shepherds. In the first two duels, the Horus priest defeats Anchhor (Chayris), and one of the shepherds, Anchhor’s general Wertepiamonnut. They are bound in fetters and imprisoned below deck on the barge of Amun. The priest and his supporters celebrate their victory. Asked for advice in an oracle, Amun advocates negotiations with the contenders rather than to fight. A first round of negotiations fails. (4) Petubastis, desperate, inquires with Amun about the future of Egypt. To avert defeat, he has the oracle select two heroes. The chosen ones are Petechonsis and Pemau, the very princes offended earlier when Petubastis did not invite them to Thebes. It is only by the agency of prince Pakruru of Persopdu that they can be persuaded to support Petubastis. In the meantime, Minnebmaat, prince of Elephantine and overseer of Upper Egypt, arrives to support Petubastis. He is able to reach, in four consecutive duels with four of the shepherds, draws. Then Petechonsis and Pemau arrive from the north and engage in more duels with the remaining shepherds. Although the text becomes very fragmentary towards the end of the story, it may be inferred that each of them fought another four times (1 + 4 + 4 + 4). (5) The end of the story and solution to the conflict is not preserved. In accordance with the oracles conveyed throughout the text, it seems likely that a solution respecting the interests of all sides was reached. The cast of protagonists points to an authentic or fictional setting of this tale in the second

quarter of the 7th century BCE, the time of the Assyrian invasions of Egypt. In this

respect, it may suffice to single out two of the mentioned protagonists. Petubastis has

been identified with Petubastis II (ca. 680-665 BCE), the ruler of the principality of Tanis

at the time of the conquest of Egypt by Asarhaddon and Assurbanipal. The conquest finds

explicit mention in the Contest for the Breastplate of Inaros, in which the general Pemau

of Heliopolis (who also appears in our text) boasts having saved Petubastis from defeat

when “the king of Assyria, Asleshteni, son of Usechrenef, came in order to wrest Egypt

from the grasp of pharaoh” and he made the Assyrian king return to the east. Another

allied prince of the story, Pakruru (ca. 680-660 BCE), is historically attested as the ruler

of the principality of Persopdu who presided over a delegation to the last Kushite pharaoh

Tanwetamani during the invasion of Assurbanipal. The prince Petechonsu who fights on

behalf of Petubastis is identified with the identically named ruler of the principality of

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Pharbaithos in the Eastern Delta (ca. 670-655) who later acknowledges the kingship of

Psammetichos I.

Essential for any correct interpretation of the text is the identity of the young priest and

his 13 supporters, all of whom remain mysteriously anonymous. The 13 anonymous

supporters of the priest are denoted by the term ˛˚m. This term’s meaning shifted in the

first millennium from the historically older and etymological one of „Asiatic“ to the

younger one of „herdsman, shepherd“ which is usual in Demotic. By way of example, I

just mention, in the 19th dynasty, the dichotomy between ˛˚m “Asiatic” (e.g., in Pap.

Anastasi I, 20, 4) as opposed to ˛˚m “herdsman” (e.g., ˛˚my ¬k˚.w, “herder of ploughing

oxen”, in the Nauri decree of Seti I). Demotic administrative texts show the exclusive

meaning „herdsman“ (CDD, ˛, 36f.), while the toponym N˚w-˛˚m-p˚-nªs in

Ankhsheshonqi 4,6 preserves the older meaning (see also Schneider 2003, 7 with n. 25).

The genuine meaning „Asiatic“ was still current and widely used in historical, religious

and literary texts of the Late Period and Greco-Roman times where it was applied to

enemies from the Near East, including the Persians. I mention as an example the

biographical inscription of Nesuhor, Overseer of the Gates to the Southern Foreign Lands

under Apries, which lists ˛˚mw-“Asiatics”, the Greeks, and Sttyw-“Asiatics”, and Naos

CG 70021 of Nektanebo I for Sopdu which speaks of the Persians as ˛˚m.w (cf. also the

use of the term in Edfu: Wilson 1997, 138). This means that a more recent meaning in the

Late Egyptian-Demotic vernacular and administrative documents coincided with the

lexeme’s conventional meaning in high register texts („Late Middle Egyptian“), although

the latter at times can even be attested in Demotic documents – O. dem. L.S. 462.4 (l.3)

calls Antiochos II mr.w ˛˚m Prs “friend of the Persian ‘Asiatic’” (Popko 2008, 90 n.17).

The editor of the main manuscript of the Contest for the Benefice of Amun, Wilhelm

Spiegelberg, admitted both possibilities for the text in question, and saw in the use of the

term a veiled reference to the Assyrians. In contrast, Hoffmann and Quack’s Anthologie

der demotischen Literatur (2007) advocates the exclusive meaning “herdsman”. Quack

has maintained: „Die früher übliche Auffassung der Hirten als “Asiaten” hat den Blick

dafür verdunkelt, daß bei der Grundkonstellation des Streites um die Pfründe des Amun

in starker literarischer Brechung die Motivik des Osirismythos aufgegriffen wird” (2009,

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64). This explains, in Quack’s view, the presence of a Horus priest presenting his claim in

a story only superficially evoking the 7th century. Another reference to maybe 13 (reading

of the numeral uncertain) ˛˚mw “from the swamp of the East” in support of Horus can be

found in the texts for the Bastet festival (translated by Quack 2007, 308 as “Asiaten”).

Given the simultaneous existence of the word in its two meanings in the first millennium,

it seems inevitable to posit that throughout the first centuries of the tale’s history, its

audience could have been well aware of this fact (see in this sense also Vittmann 2006,

313f. and personal communication, refering to the same ambiguity of ethnic and

professional denotation apparent in hgr “Arab; messenger” and mdj “Mede; soldier”). A

comparable word history in English is the word „slave“ (Pohl 1999). Etymologically, this

word is identical with the ethnonym „Slav“, tracing its origin back to the subjugation and

deportation of Slavs from Otto I the Great onward. Both the ethnonym and the derived

secondary term denoting a person of any ethnic origin held in servitude could be written

identically with final –e until the late 19th century. The patterns of use of either term

altered significantly. Whereas „Slav“ remained the more frequent and widely known term

for centuries and the meaning of „slave“ as the more erudite word had to be explained to

readers until early modern times, this pattern is now reversed.

While Quack maintains that the principal protagonists of the Petubastis cycle, in

particular those in the Contest for the Breastplate of Inaros, are indeed historical

characters of the 7th century (see his recent demonstration of this for Inaros himself,

Quack 2006), he sees in the „herdsmen“ a reference to marauding shepherds in the

marshes of the Nile Delta during various times. This suggestion was reemphasized most

recently by a classicist, Ian Rutherford, who reviewed the occurence of a band of rough,

marsh-dwelling warriors, the boukoloi, in two ancient Greek novels (Heliodorus’

Aithiopika, and Achilles Tatius’ Cleitophon and Lucippe) and the existence of rebels in

the Egyptian countryside in Roman times (Rutherford 2000).

What raises serious doubt about the boukoloi as a clue for understanding the Aamu of the

Struggle for the Benefice of Amun is the discrepancy in their appearances. The boukoloi

are described as wild, frightening, hairy or bareheaded, large and black-skinned

barbarians who sacrifice humans. No mention is made of any kind of armour or of any

adherence to rules of combat. In contrast, in 4,15, the Aamu of our text are described as

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„clad in their armours, with their bull-faced helmets on their heads, their shields attached

to their arms, their hands lifted with their sickle-shaped swords (4,15).“ The specific type

of armour and weaponry mentioned here reduces the possible identities behind the Aamu

in a significant way. Sickle-shaped swords or scimitars are prominent weapons of gods

and kings (Schrakamp 2009-11, 450). Bull-faced helmets – probably helmets with the

horns of a bull – are like all Near Eastern crowns, caps or headgear with horns – an

unequivocal indicator of divinity (Calmeyer 1975, 313ff.; Berlejung 1998, 40; Seidl

1957-71, 486; Seidl 1989, 116f.; Boehmer 1980-3, 203; Hrouda 1957-71, 492; helmets

with the depiction of bulls are not attested, see Weszeli 2006-8, 403f.). In contrast,

helmets with horns as worn by humans are, to the best of my knowledge, only attested

from outside the Near East, such as the Aegean Sherden, one of the groups of the Sea

Peoples. This seems sufficient proof to suggest that we are inded not dealing with

unusually equipped and adorned shepherds but, at the very least for the historical time of

the tale’s protagonists, with divine Asiatic warriors in full armour. Such an assumption

does not preclude that Greco-Roman readers could see in the ˛˚mw a reflection of the

Boukoloi in Greco-Roman times. If the text was subject to a long history during which an

original plot was overlaid with other motifs – the Osarsiph and Hyksos narratives as well

as the Greco-Roman tradition of the Boukoloi are explicitly adduced as such later text

layers by Quack (2009, 65) and Vittmann (2006, 313) –, this urges us to look at a text

whose preserved final text is the result of change and reinterpretation.

Equally equipped with bull’s head helmets, again scimitars, and spears are the female warriors of Sarpot, the queen of the land of women, somewhere between Syria and India, who seem to have been modeled after the mythical Greek Amazons, in the Demotic romance about „Egyptians and Amazons“ (II 33: Hoffmann 1995, 48f.; Hoffmann/Quack 2007, 110; Vittmann 2006, 312; Hoffmann 2010, 25). In this respect, it is important to note that scimitars were no longer in use in Mesopotamia and Syria in the 1st millennium and that similar curbed weapons attested at that time and used by genii and heroes must be kept apart from them (Schrakamp 2009-11, 450). For the sickle-shaped sword see Müller 1987 and the most recent comprehensive study by Massafra 2012; in New Kingdom Egypt see Vogel 2006. A number of additional statements throughout the text are equally apt to corroborate the

idea of an Asiatic provenance of the 13 supporters. In his anxious inquiry to Amun in

10,20, Petubastis asks the question: “Those Aamu: are they going to take Egypt away

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from me on the campaign on which they are?”, and in 10,13f.: “Would it be a good thing

to prepare Egypt’s army for war against those Aamu and to have them fight against

them?” This seems to point to a foreign military campaign, all the more as the young

priest himself at no point strives for anything else than the benefice. That Egypt as a

whole is at stake and needs to be protected, is also made clear in the statements: “Look,

there is a young Aam, wo has come to the South. He captured the “First Shield of Egypt”

[of Chayris] and the “Great Steering Oar of Egypt” [the barge]. He caused Egypt to be in

turmoil like a ship that is shipwrecked and is not navigated by a sailor.” (9,18ff.) A threat

to the kingship, at least that of Petubastis, is expressed in 9,18: “Will the Aamu be

masters over the office of ruler” (10,21; reading Quack). “If Egypt’s army does not

prepare for war against those Aamu and if one does not make cease their conduct in

which they are, they will take away the work/post (wp.t) from Pharaoh (9,24ff.).”

In the context of the second quarter of the 7th century, it appears difficult not to relate the

scenario of Aamu taking Egypt away from Pharaoh and assuming kingship, and of the

Egyptian army as a whole considering war with them, to the Assyrian invasions of the

country. Inasmuch as its protagonists are concerned, the Inaros texts seem historically

reliable, as Kim Ryholt has again demonstrated on the example of king Wenamon of

Natho (Tell Muqdam; Ryholt 2013b, 53f.). But how to understand the number of ˛˚mw

fighting on behalf of the high priest in the multiple duels at Thebes? The number 13 has

no symbolic meaning in either ancient Egypt or the ancient Near East, and there have

been, to my knowledge, no explanations of its presence in the text, unless we follow

Spiegelberg’s idea that the number might refer to Jacob and his twelve sons. Since the

bull helmets and the scimitars are indicators of gods, I want to point to one possible

interpretation of those warriors.

In the small room of the rock sanctuary of Yazılıkaya near Boğazköy (now Boğazkale),

built as a mortuary temple for Tudhaliya IV by his son Shuppiluliuma II around 1200

BCE, we find a famous representation of the sword god, a depiction probably of Nergal,

the Near Eastern god of warfare and death, in the form of a sword (for the discussion see

Bittel 1978-80; Badali/D’Amore 1982; Alexander 1993; most recently, Seeher 2011).

The double-edged blade is plunged into the ground; the head emerging from the blade

and the double lions form the hilt. This idea is also well attested throughout Assyrian

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history (Güterbock 1965, 197f.); in the early 7th century, Nergal as a sword god is

mentioned in inscriptions of Sennacherib and Asarhaddon (Holloway 2002, 170) and

depicted as an upright blade on a standard (Bleibtreu 1992). Other texts and depictions

show a double lion scimitar instead of the sword (Wiggermann 2001). What is most

intriguing for our question, twelve gods are depicted to the left of the sword god who

accompany him. They are shown wearing a helmet with a bull’s horn, and a sickle-

shaped sword. In a Luvian ritual text published by Hans-Georg Güterbock, mention is

made of “the bronze swords of Nergal, of bloody Nergal, and the twelve gods of the

crossroads” (Güterbock 1965, 197f.). Nergal and his twelve divine warriors over whom

he presided inflicted death, in particular on the battlefield. In the form of a war standard,

Nergal accompanied the Assyrian army on campaigns and received worship in the camp

(for Neo-Assyrian depictions, see Moortgat-Correns 1988; Bleibtreu 1992; Mayer-

Opificius 1996). Fixed “rosters” of gods are attested are forming the battle entourage of

Neo-Assyrian kings (Hurowitz/Westenholz 1990, 34-38, some of which including

Nergal), as gods were widely seen as accompanying the armies in battle. It seems

therefore an option worth considering to see in the 13 warriors with bull helmets and

scimitars the Assyrian war god Nergal and his 12 divine warriors.  

Let us turn our attention to the identity of the Horus priest himself. The priest introduces

himself in the main manuscript of Pap. Spiegelberg 2,4 as follows: “(2,4) I am the

prophet of Horus of Buto in Buto whom Isis has born in Achbit (Chebi/Chemmis)”. This

appears to be his title, a priest of the Horus of Buto, supplemented by the mythological

information that Horus was born in Chemmis near Buto. I would like to propose, though,

that we are dealing here with the personal name of the priest in disguise. What I am

suggesting is not a different reading of the Demotic group as “Horus of

Chemmis” (as misunderstood by Jeremy Pope 2014, 269) but an implicit pun between the

protagonist’s title in the tale and the name of the historical character. In historical reality,

we would not be dealing with a “prophet of Horus [...] in Chemmis” but the personal

name “Horus in Chemmis” = Horachbit (Horchebi), the name of the last high priest of

Amun of Karnak in the final years of Kushite rule and the time of the Assyrian conquest

of Egypt, precisely the historical context of the other protagonists of the tale.

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In his 2014 edition of Pap. Carlsberg 565, a fragment from the beginning of Pap. Spiegelberg, Kim Ryholt has tentatively suggested that an (otherwise unattested) personal name “P˚-w˚ª-˚s.t, son of Wr-[...]” in line 2 of the fragment might possibly provide the identity of the otherwise anonymous young priest. Ryholt further suggests that if the patronym is to be restituted as Wr-m˚˚, the title of the high priest of Heliopolis (on the basis of another unpublished version of the story in Pap. Carlsberg 483), this could even hint at prince Bokennife of Athribis, the father of Inaros, who wore that title, as the father of P˚-w˚ª-˚s.t (Ryholt 2014, 273f.). It is too early to decide whether this new name solves the problem of the priest’s identity; at any rate, a high priest of Amun by this name did not exist. It can also be noted with regard to metonymy that “The (child) whom Isis has put down” (P˚-w˚ª-˚s.t) par excellence was her own son Horus and that this could be seen as another hint to “Horus in Chemmis”. Horchebi’s personal biography leads us into the end of the Kushite dynasty, the conflict

with Assyria, and the early years of the Saite kings. Horchebi’s father Harmachis, a son

of Shabaqo, was installed as high priest of Amun at Karnak under Taharqo and continued

to serve under Tanwetamani. Hermann Kees speculated that he did not survive the end of

Kushite rule in Upper Egypt and the conquest of Thebes by the Assyrians (Kees 1964,

164). It is likely that Horchebi, as the grandson of the Kushite king Shabaqo, was

installed as high priest before the ultimate end of Kushite rule in Upper Egypt in 656; he

continued to officiate in the 26th dynasty when he is attested until the 14th regnal year of

Psammetichus I (651 BCE) who acknowledged him as legal heir to his father’s priestly

office despite his Kushite descendance (Kees 1964, 163-169; Török 1997, 168 mit n. 287;

358; 188 mit n. 387; Morkot 1999, 219; Jansen-Winkeln 2001, 153-182; Morkot 2014, 9;

for the inscriptions of Harmachis, Jansen-Winkeln 2009, 347-351). According to Kees

(1964, 165), Harmachis may not have survived the Assyrian invasion of Thebes and

Horchebi would have been placed in office at that time, but this is conjectural. Under

Psammetichus I, Horchebi appears listed among the priestly officials of Amun on the

adoption stele of the God’s wife Nitocris and is portrayed as a Kushite in the Saite Oracle

Papyrus (see also Leahy 2011, 67). Given the historical circumstances, it may well be

that he followed his father in office as a young man which could be reflected in the tale’s

emphasis on the priest being a young man. The fact that the young priest’s father

possessed the benefice before him is clearly stated at the beginning of the Benefice of

Amun and would be corroborated by this identification.

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A problem may be seen in the support that the high priest receives in claiming the office

at Karnak from the thirteen ˛˚mw, if I am indeed right in identifying them with divine

figureheads of the Assyrians. It had been the political goal of the Assyrians to put an end

to the Kushite dynasty, so lending their support to the claims to the office of high priest

of Amun of a Kushite royal descendant might at first seem illogical. However, the

abolition of Kushite political rule in the North and the continuity of the strictly religious

priestly office in the South may have been kept separate by the Assyrian overlords and

their Saite allies. Hermann Kees has commented on the acceptance of Horchebi under

Psammetichos I (whose rise to kingship was owed to the Assyrian support of the Saite

dynasty):

“Auch hier erweist sich die Konsistenz im Hohenpriesteramt. Der Saitenkönig hat nicht gewagt, den äthiopischen Prinzen aus seiner Stelle an der Spitze der Amonspriesterschaft zu verdrängen, so wie er auch die Ablösung des Gottesweibes durch seine Tochter Nitokris erst für das Ableben der Äthiopin Schepenupet festgelegt hatte. Er erklärte ja ausdrücklich: „Jedenfalls werde ich es unterlassen, einen Erben zu vertreiben vom Platze seines Vaters, denn ich bin ein König, der die Richtigkeit liebt und mein heiliger Abscheu ist Unrecht“, Alles das trägt die Zeichen eines politischen Kompromisses. Man konnte ja auch nicht wissen, ob nicht die Äthiopen eines Tages wiederkommen würden! Auch die Äthiopenkönige waren seiner Zeit ähnlich vorsichtig verfahren: keine erzwungene: keine erzwungene Ablösung des amtierenden Gottesweibes, sondern feierliche Adoption einer Erbin, – und der erste Hohepriester äthiopischen Geblütes Harmachis erscheint ebenfalls nicht zufällig erst in der Zeit nach Schabaka.“

The confirmation in office of Horchebi was safe for the reason that, ever since the 25th

dynasty, the high priests of Amun no longer possessed any political or military powers.

By the same token, Psammetichos I’s explicit commitment to the principle of not

infringing on hereditary rights to a position is a clear indication that such infringements

(or at the very least, claims to the abolishment of such rights) existed, and such opposing

aspirations are precisley professed by the Libyan princes challenging the priest’s

entitlement.

This proposed identification of the anonymous protagonists of the tale lends the story

more credibility and internal coherence. With the Assyrians attempting to put an end to

the Kushite dynasty, the death of the Kushite high priest Harmachis must have been an

opportunity for those Libyan princes of the Delta who were opposed to the Kushites to

gain influence in the south. It seems that Petubastis II did not partake in the revolt of

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Delta princes against Assyrian rule, as opposed to the Pro-Kushite princes Petechons and

Pemau. This is reflected in the conflict between the two factions in the story. The

installation of Horchebi as high priest of Amun conincided with or followed the Assyrian

conquest of Thebes, a conquest aptly visualized in the story by the 13 possible Assyrian

gods of warfare and death on the battlefield. It is with them – divine warriors –, and not

herdsmen that the Egyptian elite soldiers fight and whom they fail to defeat. The ones

who reach a draw and ultimately, a truce, are the pro-Kushite princes from the north and

the Kushite prince Minnebmaat, lord of Elephantine and Upper Egypt, who is ridiculed as

“gum eater from Kush” by the Asiatics. This also can be seen as reflecting the Assyrian

objections to Kushite rule. If we are allowed to speculate that the Contest for the Benefice

of Amun ended with an agreement that both prevented the delta princes from being

militarily defeated, and granted the priest his rightful claim, we are not very far from the

historical situation. Only seven years after the conquest of Thebes, in 656 BCE, a Delta

prince had regained control over the whole of Egypt and initiated one of the most

glorious epochs of Egyptian history. At Thebes, the high priest Horchebi had already

enjoyed his benefice for several years. As to the Assyrians, they had for many years not

only no longer posed any threat to Egypt, they had even been a veritable catalyst to the

Saite Renaissance. Why should the ephemeral defeat by the hands of the Assyrians be

commemorated now that history had overcome them?

3. REACHING THE FINAL LINE Like the account on the cat massacre in the Paris of the 1730s, the Demotic tale provides us with a genre picture from a historical period for which other evidence, in particular about the Assyrian conquest (for a recent reassessment, see Kahn 2006), is missing. Here we are coming full circle to the initial reflections about precise and fuzzy histories. It is a property of the text deciphered by Aureliano Babilonia to present one hundred years in time loops, where the boundaries of the past are overlapping – a peculiar device of its language (Brink 1998, 244f.):

“Melquíades' final keys were revealed to him [Aureliano] and he saw the epigraph of the parchments perfectly paced in the order of man's time and space: The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants.… Melquíades had not put events in the order of a man's conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant.”

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The present Demotic text assembles such features through allusions in names and titles.

The precision of the fuzzy history revealed by the Demotic text lies in the fact that it

concentrates upon the one papyrus of the Benefice of Amun one hundred years of

Egyptian history – from the fall of the Libyans, whose princes are still combatants on the

scene, through the triumph and demise of the Kushites, whose last priest regains a

prebend, the conquest of the Assyrians, whose gods continue to raise their scimitars in

Thebes, to the tale’s conclusion with the Saite renaissance. It concentrates their struggle

of armies, dynasties, and men for the possession of Egypt, their lives and mentalities,

their voices and their sorrows, on the papyrus in such a way that they coexist, and are

evoked to us, in one instant.

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