Die chronologische Fixierung des agyptischen Mittleren Reiches nach dem Tempelarchiv von Illahun.

• Author: Ward, William A.

Almost a century ago, two large caches of papyri and fragments were discovered in the funerary temple of Sesostfis ll at Lahun. One, known as the Petrie Papyri, was published almost immediately; the other, mostly in Berlin, has never been fully published. That the Berlin texts contain much information relative to Middle Kingdom chronology - Egyptian festival-days, lunar dates, and the like-has long been known and used, usually by scholars who have had access to the original material. But there has never been a systematic presentation and study of this valuable chronological evidence. The author, already recognized as an expert on Egyptian chronology, here offers the long-awaited examination of this evidence. There is far more than many of us realized.

The present work is concerned only indirectly with absolute chronology, though the one clear conclusion drawn at the end of the book is an important one. Luft is more interested in setting out what can be gleaned from this material regarding the festival calendar kept at the funerary temple of Sesostris ll. The basic problem, of course, is that the archives are dated by the civil calendar and the festivals were celebrated according to the lunar calendar. It is therefore necessary to relate the lunar dates and festivals to the cycles of the moon rather than the civil calendar in which they are recorded. Luft uses a schematized but reasonable formula on which he bases his conclusions.

The initial step was to arrange the references to lunar dates into a relative chronological order. These references come from temple day-books, letters, and lists of festivals. The most certain dates relative to regnal years of reigning kings are, of course, those which include the year and name of a king. References to officials are also useful, especially if the official is the local nomarch, since there was only one at a time. Relative dating of letters is sometimes rendered possible using the names of the sender and recipient. By these means, enough material can be put in a relative chronological order to show a sequence of scribal hands, though this only determines whether a given reference comes early or late in the series. But the scribal hands do allow a few more references to be placed in the sequence. From all this, it emerges that the lunar dates contained in the Lahun archive cover a period of fifty years, from year 5 of Sesostris Ill to year 36 of Amenemhat Ill.

A catalogue of the lunar dates in the...