A History Of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2 by John Romer

Author:John Romer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

All along the chapel’s lengthy walls and wrapped round many of the columns that are not engraved with text, there are the usual scenes of Memphite tomb chapels: Ankhtifi and his family hunt in the marshes and oversee the harvest, fine bulls and cows sway to the slaughter, and the governor’s family, seated on the fine furniture of their household, feast from the wealth of their estates. But all these scenes are displaced from the positions that they had previously held within the Memphite tomb chapels

Whilst seven of the columns chatter and brag in lively hieroglyphic the words and phrases of Ankhtifi’s unique biography, the wall scenes illustrate some of the same themes in images of festival and conflict. Lively archers jog along in rows. There are remnants also of a broken scene of fighting in which a man has been hit by an arrow, and of a festival in celebration of a local god that is overseen by Ankhtifi, his wife and his beloved daughters, his four sons and the family dogs. Further images show the celebrations that had followed the grain harvest, which was stored in the ten great granaries that Ankhtifi tells us he controlled.

A rococo variation on earlier examples, Ankhtifi’s tomb chapel re-sets the traditional versions of such scenes in joyous celebration of life lived in a different age. Such is their confusion, however – quite frequently, snippets of scenes flit from wall to column and from column back to wall again – that some of their subject matter can only be identified by comparison to earlier, more sober-sided versions of the same activities.

The tomb chapel’s lengthy inscriptions, alternatively, that wobbly encolumned library, are the longest continuous texts which are known to have survived from the First Intermediate Period and are unique. And from the first days of their discovery translations of their vivid, if perhaps to modern tastes rather vainglorious, prose have been a prime source of information – and misinformation – about the times in which Ankhtifi lived and ruled.

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