Intertextuality in Egyptian visitors' graffiti

ORIENTALIA LOVANIENSIAANALECTA

————— 189 —————

UITGEVERIJ PEETERS en DEPARTEMENT OOSTERSE STUDIESLEUVEN – PARIS – WALPOLE, MA

2011

NARRATIVES OF EGYPT AND THEANCIENT NEAR EAST

Literary and Linguistic Approaches

edited by

FREDRIK HAGEN, JOHN JOHNSTON,WENDY MONKHOUSE, KATHRYN PIQUETTE,

JOHN TAIT and MARTIN WORTHINGTON

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CONTENTS

FOREWORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IX

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XIII

2400–1500 BC

1. Chris H. REINTGES (CNRS-LLF/UMR 7110 – Université Paris 7)The Oral-Compositional Form of Pyramid Text Discourse . 3

2. Bendt ALSTER (University of Copenhagen)Variation in Sumerian Myths as a Reflection of Literary Crea-tivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

3. Graham CUNNINGHAM (University of Cambridge)Hero and Villain: Analyses of Sargon and Ur-Zababa . . . 81

4. Roland ENMARCH (University of Liverpool)Of Spice and Mine: The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor and Middle Kingdom Expedition Inscriptions . . . . . . . 97

5. Laura FELDT (University of Copenhagen)Monstrous Identities: Narrative Strategies in Lugale and Some Reflections on Sumerian Religious Narrative . . . . . . 123

6. Gerald MOERS (Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen)Broken Icons: the Emplotting of Master-narratives in the Ancient Egyptian Tale of Sinuhe . . . . . . . . . 165

7. José-Ramón PÉREZ-ACCINO (Birkbeck College, University of London)Text as Territory: Mapping Sinuhe’s Shifting Loyalties . . 177

8. Joan Goodnick WESTENHOLZ (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)Narrative and Framing Strategies in Old Babylonian Akkadian Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

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VI CONTENTS

1500–500 BC

9. Joanna KYFFIN (University of Liverpool)‘A True Secret of the House of Life’: Prosody, Intertext and Performance in Magical Texts . . . . . . . . . . 225

10. Hana NAVRÁTILOVÁ (Charles University, Prague)Intertextuality in Ancient Egyptian Visitors’ Graffiti? . . . 257

11. Aaron SMITH (University of Auckland)Narrative Methodologies in Ancient Egyptian Art History: the Military Reliefs of Ramesses II at Luxor . . . . . . . 269

12. Jacqueline E. JAY (Eastern Kentucky University)Examining the ‘Literariness’ of Wenamon from the Perspective of the Grammar of Narrative . . . . . . . . . . 287

13. Silviu TATU (Theological Pentecostal Institute, Bucharest)Systemic Functional Grammar and its Value for the Analysis of Plot in Biblical Hebrew Narratives: a Thematic Investigation of the Isaac Narrative Act (Gen. 25:19–28:9) . . . . . 305

14. Robert S. KAWASHIMA (University of Florida)The Syntax of Narrative Forms . . . . . . . . . . 341

500 BC – AD 2000

15. Ilya YAKUBOVICH (University of Chicago)Information Structure and Word Order in the Aramaic of the Book of Daniel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373

16. John TAIT (UCL Institute of Archaeology)The Sinews of Demotic Narrative . . . . . . . . . 397

17. Ilaria RAMELLI (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Milan)The Narrative Continuity Between the Teaching of Addai and the Acts of Mari: Two Historical Novels? . . . . . . 411

18. Ariel SHISHA-HALEVY (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)Rhetorical Narratives, Tableaux and Scenarios: Work-notes on Narrative Poetics in Shenoutean Sahidic Coptic . . . . 451

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CONTENTS VII

19. Ewa D. ZAKRZEWSKA (University of Amsterdam)Masterplots and Martyrs: Narrative Techniques in Bohairic Hagiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 499

20. Geoffrey KHAN (University of Cambridge)The Discourse Function of Independent Pronominal Subjects in North Eastern Neo-Aramaic . . . . . . . . . . 525

AFTERWORD

21. Wen-chin OUYANG (SOAS)Intertextuality, Ideology and Culture: Trajectories of Narrato-logical Inquiries in Ancient Near and Middle Eastern Literatures 539

INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 551

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1 This contribution is based on a research supported by the Czech Science Foundation no. 401/05/2128. The creation of the final version of the paper would never have been possible without the direct and indirect help of many individuals, especially Jaromír Málek, John Baines, James P. Allen, Ladislav Bares and Renata Landgráfová. The author’s gratitude is due also to the editors and referees of this volume.

2 Although Lachmann (1988) presents a sample only, a useful overview of material on modern graffiti is available at <http://www.graffitiforschung.tk>, accessed 7 May 2008.

3 Compare Fischer-Elfert (2003: 131–133) and Wildung (1969).4 An overview of the distribution of graffiti (including those of visitors): Peden (2001).

INTERTEXTUALITY IN ANCIENT EGYPTIANVISITORS’ GRAFFITI?1

Hana NAVRÁTILOVÁ

Charles University, Prague

The ancient Egyptian graffiti, created by visitors or otherwise, are fre-quently seen as very short informal texts, because they give the impres-sion of being just random jottings. Certainly, they have no coherent plot which might be described as narrative. Although they may have included a performative aspect, they nevertheless represent a class of text which may be analysed to some degree as containing a narrative element. Fur-thermore, it would appear that they are more than mere haphazard scrawls. They reveal similarities with modern graffiti, which are often alleged to contain a meaning understandable to those who made the graf-fiti and those within their group.2 However, ancient Egyptians probably had —at least in part— different motivations if compared to modern graffiti writers.

The particular class of Egyptian graffiti —those created by visitors to a site— are often complex texts. Their writers provided us with informa-tion, which we can interpret only by way of reference to the context of contemporary culture and social position of these people.

Visitors’ graffiti can be considered as a source for the study of Egyp-tian uses of the past, including the use of knowledge of presumed his-torical deeds of past kings.3 Graffiti can be found, although not exclu-sively, at important necropoleis, such as the cemeteries of Memphis and Thebes, and there is the special case of the graffiti in the pyramid com-plex of Djoser at Saqqara.4 The interpretations of the graffiti often remain

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258 H. NAVRÁTILOVÁ

5 Compare the opinions of Fischer-Elfert (2003:131–133); Helck (1952: 39–46); Negm (1998); Peden (2001); Philips (1986); Sadek (1984a); Sadek (1984b); and Wildung (1975).

6 The corpus of graffiti used for the study is being prepared for a publication. See Navrátilová (2007).

7 This is derived from the author’s unpublished corpus.

ambiguous5 and it is, therefore, important to endeavour to learn more about the authors of the graffiti and their reasons for writing on the walls of ancient structures.

This paper considers the graffiti of Dynasties XVIII and XIX, found on the monuments of Abusir, Saqqara, Dahshur, and Meidum.6 It does not aim at a final answer as to why the graffiti were written. Rather, it aims to consider tentatively how the culture and education of the graffitists were apparent in their writings.

In the pyramid complex of Djoser, the situation allows for a more detailed description. It seems that the graffiti were written by people who were both standing and sitting or crouching in the chapel, because the elevation, at which graffiti are placed, ranges from 0.5 metres to over 2 metres; the walls were literally covered with graffiti in some places. Furthermore, the chapels must have been free of sand; otherwise the blocks near to the ground would not have been accessible. It is therefore possible that these places were intentionally kept clean, were frequently visited, with the people spending some time inside, perhaps even social-izing there in some way. One might, tentatively, imagine groups of scribes boasting in front of their colleagues (see further laudatory expres-sions about the writers), sitting as excursionists —perhaps having just a break from work done nearby, or being there really on an excursion, pos-sibly on feast-days— inside the chapels and writing to prove their scribal abilities. The act of writing may have been of equal importance to the scribes as the fact that their inscriptions would remain as a memorial to their presence.

The visitors’ graffiti provide information about their authors, their authors’ kings, and past kings of Egypt (Firth and Quibell 1935: 78–85). The expressions that the graffitists used, either when writing about themselves, their king or a past king, could be inherited or influenced via intertextuality (Loprieno 1996: 39–43). Most graffitists defined them-selves as scribes and are, obviously, literate.7 The graffiti might be a reflection of scribal education, displaying knowledge of various literary texts or the stock phraseology of scribal administrative training (Assmann 1999: 12–13). If one can define the range of this knowledge, which may be revealed in analysing possible intertextual relationships of the graffiti,


INTERTEXTUALITY IN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN VISITORS’ GRAFFITI? 259

8 McDowell (1993: 29–30). Compare Firth and Quibell (1935: 78–85).9 This definition of archive —and consequently also archival sources or archival use

of anything— including a king-list, is of course different, compared to the modern use of this word. See Helck (1975) and Quirke (1996).

it may assist in establishing the reasons for its employment in these cir-cumstances.

The attribution ‘intertextual’ covers here both formulaic aspects (the scribe ‘borrowed’ a formula, a sentence structure, an expression used in another text) and informative aspects (the scribe used more or less cor-rectly a name of a past ruler, for example). In addition, scribes repeat the formulae in graffiti all over the Theban and Memphite necropoleis. Fischer-Elfert (2003: 132) supposes that the apprentice scribes might have even learned the phrases recurring in the graffiti purposefully. This is suggested by phrases present on O. Glasgow D.1925.88/O. Colin Campbell 22, which bears a short hymn to Amun, containing the lines: ‘The sky rained myrrh and coriander, it dripped incense…’.8 Whilst these lines are common in a number of Eighteenth Dynasty visitors’ graffiti, the ostracon is proba-bly Ramesside. Fischer-Elfert also cites an ostracon found in the tomb of Senenmut, bearing a phrase translated as ‘Did come the scribe Djeserka in order to see …’ (Fischer-Elfert 2003: 132). The same phrase, often employing the formula íwt pw ír.n ss X r m, is preserved upon many graffiti. In his corpus of Deir el-Bahri graffiti, Marciniak (1973: 109–112) detected an intertextual connection with a classic of Egyptian lit-erature, The Instructions of Ptahhotep. A relationship has, furthermore, been suggested between wisdom instruction phraseology and a graffito from the pyramid complex of Djoser (Fischer-Elfert 2003: 132).

It is perhaps too early to attempt to decide whether scribes learned certain formulae on purpose, in order to use them in a graffito, or whether they simply were influenced by texts they had studied. It may, however, be useful to consider those texts, other than instructions and hymns, which may have influenced the creation of graffiti.

THE ‘ARCHIVE’ OF EGYPTIAN SCRIBES

The word ‘archive,’ besides denoting a document storage place, can broadly designate the ‘hidden structure and condition of our use of words’ (Quirke 1996: 379–380). Such an abstract structure must have been the source of the use of words —and also information— in the graffiti as well, rooted in scribal training.9 ‘The level of literate culture was surprisingly



10 The basic publication is Gardiner (1937).11 BM EA 9994; text: Gardiner (1937: 112–115); translation: Caminos (1954: 419–

421). Compare Papyrus Anastasi I: BM EA 10247; see Brunner 1982.12 P. Chester Beatty II; see Griffiths 1986.13 Compare Quirke (1996: 381, 388).14 Helck (1952); Helck apud Ricke (1965–1969: vol. 2, 115–121); and Peden (2001:

58–59).

high’ (Baines and Eyre 1983: 89) and the training of scribes involved the necessity of working with a substantial corpus of textual material (Gardiner 1937; Quirke 1996: 382). Which elements of this textual archive, therefore, influenced the monumental graffiti? We can follow three recurrent graffiti themes: what did the scribes say about themselves, about their ruler, and about a past king?

The graffiti invariably incorporated the basic personal information, as might be expected: the authors’ names, and titles. They also frequently contain standard phrases for scribal skills and competence. Some of the graffiti authors had a high opinion of their own scribal practice —scribe Amenemhat or scribe Nakht in the complex of Djoser (Firth and Quibell 1935: 78, 91)— which was expressed in the formulae such as ‘scribe of skilled fingers’, ‘scribe that has no equals’, and so on; corresponding formulae can be found in scribal miscellanies,10 for example in the ‘Eulogy of the Teacher’ forming part of Papyrus Lansing,11 and even as an ending to a tale like Truth and Falsehood.12 The graffiti in question are dated to Dynasty XVIII; however, the miscellanies are Ramesside. Were there similar school texts before the Ramesside era? Dynasty XVIII manuscripts contain literary texts13 and it is also presumed that copies of the Kemit were in widespread use (Brunner 1988: 368–369). Scribal ‘anthologies’ parallel to the Ramesside miscellanies are not attested in Dynasty XVIII. It remains as a hypothesis whether there were any similar compositions or standardised texts that might have influenced scribes in producing common professional locutions, or whether Kemit and copied instructional texts were a sufficient textual source.

We also can suppose that scribes, being well versed in the praises of the king, and possibly also knowledgeable of the inscriptions their king had commissioned, might have reproduced, perhaps deliberately, the phraseology of eulogy and royal inscriptions in the graffiti.

This idea is supported by those graffiti that seem partially to resemble royal inscriptions (e.g. Thutmoside stelae), as their authors left a descrip-tion of what their king was doing at that time and they also wished to commemorate the achievements of their ruler in the graffito. This is sug-gested in one of the graffiti in the Sun temple of Userkaf at Abu Sir:14



15 Information on Dahshur courtesy of J. P. Allen.16 Unpublished archive materials in the Griffith Institute Archive: South Chapel/Build-

ing: Gunn MSS. Xii.1–4, B.2.S; xiii, 4; xiii, 4.8; xii, 7, 8; Gunn Notebook, 31, pp. 45–50, 72–79, with sketch-plan; B.2.N; B.2 (tracings); Cerny, Notebook 13/ 3, 4, 5, 7. North Chapel/Building: Gunn MSS. B.I.A; Gunn MSS xii, 23, 25; Gunn MSS xiii, 5.2; Gunn MSS B.I.B–H (tracings), 24, Gunn Notebook 31, pp. 51/4; Gunn MSS xiii, 5.1,2; Cerny, Notebook 13/1, 2.

17 Hieratic original in Jéquier (1933: 10–15 and figs. 12, 13).18 Hieratic original, transcription and translation by Megally (1981: 218–240).

1/ … swt] bíty Mn-[Ìpr]-R¨ s R¨ ΔÌwtí-msw Nfr-Ìprw ¨nÌ ∂t r nÌÌ íst Ìm.f Ìr Δhí…

2/ tw fn]Ìw ÌbÌb Ìr.w Ìr st.sn Ìr w∂ ít.f Îmn-R¨ nswt n†r.w3/ íwt pw ír.n wÌm-nswt Îmw-n∂Ì r m mr pn p ¨tÌ Ìn¨ n n Ìríw n ¨t4/ ///// m-pt Îmn-Ìtp ss Mntw-Ìtp ss ΔÌwt-m-Ì.t Îwms 5/ remnants of signs … ss1/ […] under the Majesty of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Men-

[kheper]re, Son of Re, Thutmose-Neferkheperu, living for ever and ever. As his Majesty was in Syria

2/ [trampling the lands of the Fen]khu and devastating the Hurrians in their place upon the command of his father, Amun-Re, King of the gods.

3/ There came the royal herald Amunedjeh to see this pyramid. The Brewer and those of bread [production]

4/ … m-pet, Amenhotep, the Scribe Mentuhotep, the Scribe Djehutimhet, Humesh,

5/ traces of names and a title [scribe?]

Similar formulations can be found in the graffiti in the complex of Djoser (Firth and Quibell 1935: 78–81), and in the complex of Senusret III at Dahshur.15 In both cases the texts relate to Thutmose III and in the complex of Djoser also to Hatshepsut. These phrases are comparable to contemporary royal texts, such as the Annals of Thutmose III and other texts of this king. In this case the graffiti and their possible models are contemporaneous.

The naming (Aufrère 1989: 1–13) and titling of ancient kings in the graffiti can be compared to other New Kingdom records mentioning past rulers. How is the past ruler represented in these records and in the graf-fiti? How are his names and titles rendered?

The graffiti use the birth names of the kings (Djoser,16 Teti,17 and Sahure18). If the graffiti use any title at all, the preferred one is nswt bíty (Firth and Quibell 1935: 78–85). An exception appears in the graffiti at Meidum where Snofru is indicated as ‘Horus’, mostly without additional names and titles (Petrie 1892: 40–41). Graffiti also enclose the king’s name in a cartouche for the living and deceased king alike. However,



19 Compare Redford (1986: 5–7). Preference was given variously to the prenomen, the Horus name, or the throne name to be registered. The difficulties can be connected with the fact that sometimes the personal and the Horus or even throne name were identical; in different periods the ruler accepted his personal name, Geburtsname, as the Horus name etc. See Beckerath (1980: 540–542) and Beckerath (1984).

20 See Brunner (1957: 17–26) and Brunner (1984a) on schooling and its various aspects. See also Baines (1984).

graffiti do not always use a cartouche for a deceased king (Jéquier 1933: 14–15).

Significant contemporary records of the kings of the past are the New Kingdom king-lists, although the full series of all the names a king pos-sessed was not always indicated there.19 King-lists used a range of names; the Horus names and even personal names are also present (Redford 1986: 6–26). The lists repeated some titles; nswt —the almost abstract term for kingship and for being a king (Barta 1980: 477–480)— was often used. Again there were no full title strings of individual sovereigns. The cultic list in the Akh Menu uses alternating or combined nswt bíty and n†r nfr (Barta 1980: 478; Beckerath 1984: 37–38). The (Ramesside?) Royal Canon of Turin labelled all kings with nswt bíty (Gardiner 1959). King-lists always use a cartouche, while graffiti, as already mentioned, do not.

Some similarities are noticeable between the Royal Canon of Turin and the graffiti: the consistent uses of nswt bíty; both sources mention birth names (Djoser, Snofru, and Teti). Dynasty XVIII graffiti, however, chiefly use nswt bíty and birth names. Dynasty XIX graffiti —coming from the era of the surviving copy of the Royal Canon— often do not mention the royal owners of the buildings visited at all.

Were the king-lists a part of education? How much of material, later transformed into king-lists, whether archival or cultic (Redford 1986), was accessible to scribes? What could have led them to peruse ‘archival’ king-lists? What helped them in identifying whose pyramid they had visited?

The role of the scribal ‘schools’ (or training groups led by a senior official) in transmitting this sort of knowledge of the past might again be suggested. The character of texts presumably used indicates also that the youngsters were not only taught to read and write but that they were taught the basis of Egyptian cultural code and ideals of behaviour20 and this must have therefore also included their attitude towards the king and royal ideology. Were they also taught how to deal with kings of the past?



21 Urk. IV, 1084, 6–7, and Redford (1986: 166). 22 Kings compare their deeds to those registered in the annals: see the Stela of Thut-

mose I at Tombos, Urk. IV, 82, 3–86, and Redford (1986: 83). 23 Borchardt (1935: 92–114); compare the overview on the Wadi Hammamat by Gund-

lach (1986).24 Redford (1986: 1–64) on various assemblages in private tombs and private genea-

logies.

Generally speaking, we can find evidence of interest in the past. Red-ford noted that the knowledge of things past seems to have been praised and was therefore culturally and socially acknowledged during the New Kingdom. The king (Thutmose III in this case) is praised as follows: íst Ìm.f rÌ Ìprwt. ‘Behold, His Majesty knew what happened (= history)’ (Urk. IV, 1074,2). Further, Ën¨ m [n∂n∂] rÌ Ìwt pw nb{.wt} s∂m.tj.fj ∂tt n tpjw … ‘The wise one is knowledgeable of all such things that he might hear said by the ancestors …’.21 This quotation from the inscription of Rekhmire points at the source: ‘said by the ancestors’. It is also known that kings used annals as a standard of comparison for their deeds.22 Thus it may be presumed that one could have looked into the annals, if infor-mation on the past was wanted.

* * *

What about the presumed use of the king-lists? The knowledge of the scribal community might have been supported by a variant of king-lists as well —there were undoubtedly more king-lists than we know— other-wise the tradition of cultic assemblages, and later even private genealo-gies, with ancestors grouped under their kings,23 is hardly imaginable. So the perception of the royal line stretching back into the past must, clearly, have been present, and in some cases it was connected with one’s own longer or shorter personal and family history, whether genuine or fabricated.24 The Royal Canon of Turin is usually a likely candidate for being an example of an archival list. However, the actual use and purpose of the surviving exemplar of what we call an ‘archival’ (meaning ‘stored for an official use’) king-list —the Royal Canon of Turin— is also doubted and could be revised (Redford 1986: 5). The aforementioned graffiti using royal titles and names corresponding to the Canon might point at the scribal acquaintance with a similar sort of material.

However, even without annals and king-lists, one encountered names of kings in other pieces of scribal education. New Kingdom scribes knew texts such as the Tale of Sinuhe, Instructions for Merikare or



25 See the list of literary manuscripts preserved from the New Kingdom: Quirke (1996: 388–389).

26 Kings portrayed as figures accompanied by cartouches.

Instructions of Amenemhat I,25 and therefore surely noticed the past kings there. Hypothetically, this might have even prompted some scribes to look up a king-list to see how many years ago or how long the king in question ruled.

To sum up, we are able to determine that the New Kingdom scribes had a possible reason and chance to learn about past kings, and that they were likely to express adequately their knowledge about these past rulers, regarding their titling and naming, in the graffiti. During Dynasty XVIII, however, we can only guess at the existence of archival king-lists. The era of Dynasty XIX had the Royal Canon of Turin. The Dynasty XIX scribes also had a tendency for making another sort of lists —those of famous scribes and scholars like those portrayed on the so-called ‘Daressy Frag-ment’ (Fischer-Elfert 2003: 128–129).

* * *

One question still remains open: how did the scribes obtain information as to which pyramid belonged to whom? It was not automatically to be read on the walls, and the Dynasty XVIII graffiti precede any known attempt at putting labels on the pyramids. Dietrich Wildung suggested that the authors of the visitors’ graffiti ‘Können jedoch schwerlich als “Touristen” bezeichnet werden, da es sich meist um Ortsansässige han-delt, für die alten Denkmäler nicht Sehenswürdigkeiten sind sondern Monumente nationalen Selbstverständnisses … und Konkretisierung des erwachsenden Geschichtsbewusstseins’ (Wildung 1975: 766–767). The scribes who left the graffiti were likely to be local people (though not exclusively), who might have connected their knowledge of the past, rooted in their scribal education, with their local knowledge about monuments. This local knowledge may be confirmed by a king-list of a special type: by the cultic assemblage in the tomb of Mahu (Dynasty XIX; Wildung 1969: 74–76 and Taf. V 2). This tomb included in its decoration a king-list,26 in respect of a group of kings, but these seem to have no chrono-logical order. But their composition suggests it was a group of kings that had their pyramids near each other on the fields of the Saqqara necropolis (Gomaà 1973: 64). However, a difficulty arises again: this list from Dynasty XIX is comparable to graffiti of Dynasty XVIII.



27 At the time of the completion of the editorial process, two important papers were published by Jochem Kahl on the graffiti in Assiut containing Egyptian wisdom texts: see Kahl 2006 and Kahl, El-Khadragy and Verhoeven 2007.

28 Compare Guksch (1994).

PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS

Visitors’ graffiti could have been strongly influenced by the context of the standard scribal education of that time by cultural texts like instruc-tions and by administrative texts, including ‘archival’ (= stored for official use) sources.27 The scribal education and culture moulded the self-presen-tation of scribes in the graffiti. The loyalty to their king is present in the Dynasty XVIII graffiti, copying royal eulogies.

A particular and surely deliberate use of some phrases is plausible when some authors included testaments to their loyalty and adherence to their king by noting his particular deeds of the moment. Most of these graffiti (hitherto known) date to Hatshepsut and Thutmose III (the pyramid complex of Djoser) and Thutmose III (the sun temple of Userkaf, Abu Ghurob; the pyramid complex of Senusret III at Dahshur). This might reflect strong personal devotion to contemporary royalty,28 combined with reverence shown to past rulers.

The relationship towards past rulers, as expressed in the graffiti, is, then, explicable by the presence of information about them in the afore-mentioned educational texts as well. But we still lack more conclusive evidence for a number of important details. The presentation of past kings does not stand in contradiction to the king-lists. In some cases, however, the material for comparison does not exactly fit into the time-scale of comparable graffiti production. The ‘historical’ graffiti of Dynasty XVIII, correctly naming a king and titling him nswt bíty fit with the posited archival king-list better than with a cultic assemblage, although they are removed in time from the existing example of a possible pattern —a king-list of the Royal Canon of Turin type.

The Egyptian graffiti in many ways prove the existence of the scribal education and confirm the niveau of the literate culture. The scribes dem-onstrated their qualities in the inscriptions; thus graffiti must have been of special importance to them, and may even have been formalised.

The fact that we find similar formulations in the Dynasty XVIII graffiti and the Dynasty XIX scribal miscellanies might point to continuity in scribal education tradition. The Ramesside organisation of scribal educa-tion (Brunner 1984b) might have had forerunners.



ABBREVIATIONS

LÄ Helck, W. and Otto, E., 1972–1992. Lexikon der Ägyptologie, 7 vols. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Urk. IV Sethe, K. 1906–1914. Urkunden der 18. Dynastie, 4 vols. Leipzig: Hinrichs.

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Intertextuality in Egyptian visitors' graffiti

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