Of Aspelta, king of Kush (6th century B. C. E.)
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Varia MittSAG 23 110
same time was alloted to a «God’s Wife» of Amun in Thebes. 44 Blackman, in 1921, went still further and also compared the ration of the Sanam temple sistrum player with that of a prisoner as described in the Egyptian tale, «the Eloquent Peasant». As he stated: «One must certainly agree with Schäfer in regarding this stipend as very modest. The bread would have supplied the needs of only a very small household, while the beer would seem to have been barely enough for the princess alone <…>». 45 These observations made by the earliest students of the Dedication Stele seem to have been missed, or merely ignored, by most later scholars. 46 They do, however, deserve much more attention as they may lead us to another paradoxical question: whether the named royal ladies’ position in the Amun temple at Sanam was as honorable as scholars usually think. To understand this we should try to ascertain the category of Sanam temple personnel entitled to the allowance referred to in the stele. All we know in this regard is that the «king’s sister (and) king’s wife» Madiqen was «given/placed
father Amun, Bull of the Land of the Three-Curved Bow to be sistrum-player, as he (11) gave a (libation) bucket of silver in her right hand, as he gave a sistrum of silver in her left hand, to appease the heart of this been comparable with 2,100 deben (191.10 kg, according to Ricardo Caminos’ calculation) of bread alloted to Nei- tiqert at her accession as «God’s Wife» of Amun at Karnak (Caminos, ‘The Nitocris Adoption Stela’, p. 96, note to line 30). This difference in the endowments of Neitiqert and Madiqen can hardly be ascribed to the difference in «living standard» in Egypt and in Ancient Sudan only, for the Kushite kings’ donations to temples (not to mention their lists of war spoils) look quite impressive. For lists of donations see: Kawa III, cols. 1-21; Kawa VI, cols. 1-14; Dream Stele, line 9; Kawa IX, cols. 59, 66-69, 124; Kawa X, cols. 6-7; Kawa XII, col. 5; Harsiotef Stele, lines 30, 33-55, 66-69, 139; war spoils: Harsiotef Stele, lines 86-88; Nastasen Stele, lines 47-48, 51, 53-54, 56, 58-59. 44 B.A. Turayev, Istoriya Drevnyago Vostoka: Lektsii, tchi- tanniya v 1906-1909, T. II (litograph; [St. Petersburg], s.a.), p. 318; id., Istoriya Drevnyago Vostoka, [Part] II: Kurs, tchitannyi v S[ankt]P[eter]B.[urgskom] Univer- sitete v 1910-1911 g.[odu] (St. Petersburg, 1912), p. 232-33; id., Istoriya Drevnyago Vostoka, Vol. 2 (ed. by V.V. Struve and I.L. Snegiryov; Leningrad, 1935), p. 179. 45 Blackman, ‘On the Position of Women’, pp. 29-30. 46 It seems that only Török noticed this oddity, stating that: «The presence of the highest economic officials of the land <…> may also suggest that Kheb’s revenues were not exhausted by the modest amounts of bread, beer, and oxen
have been secured from domains that were outside the domain in which the Sanam temple was situated» (FHN I, p. 126). This of course is a pure guess. god, as he gave (12) her allowances in(side of) this temple <…> (list of provisions following)». The descriptive
r jHjj.t «to (be) sistrum-player» 47 is not very informative. Long ago Blackman observed: «The word iHyt, <…> is deter- mined with a woman rattling a sistrum, thus indica- ting what was considered to be a characteristic duty of this officiant.» 48 Pointing out that in Egypt there were various categories of sistrum-players (xnjt, dxn, etc. with the determinative ) 49
tus in the priestly hierarchy, 50 he somehow assumed that the term used in the Dedication Stele was «the title of the high-priestess of Amun of Napata (more correctly would be ‘of Sanam’ - A.V.).» 51 No proofs were produced apart from a rather confusing 52
allusion to the relief in the lunette of the stele where three royal ladies «are depicted not merely rattling sistra before the god but also pouring out libations - a very important priestly function». 53 Blackman seems to have assumed that the royal persons could only be at the head of the priestly corporation, just as «in theory <…> the Pharaoh was ex officio high- priest of every Egyptian divinity, the acting high- priest being his delegate». 54 The question of how it could happen that three high priestesses were func- tioning in the same temple at the same time (which we seem to see in the relief of the Dedication Stele if we render it «literally»), was never raised in Blackman’s study. Much more recently Török, without going into details of the temple musicians’ ranks, seems also to have taken for granted that the office of jHjj.t men- tioned in the stele was the highest in the priestesses’ hierarchy. He stated that the text refers to «three queens» who, in accordance with the «‘adoptive’ suc- 47 In both published facsimiles the second determinative looks more like (C10 «goddess with feather on head») than (B7C) presented in the «standard» copy (Urk. III, 105). 48 Blackman, ‘On the Position of Women’, p. 20. 49 Blackman, ‘On the Position of Women’, pp. 9-10. This enumeration could be continued by some other terms like cxm(j).t (Wb. IV. 252. 9), Sma(j.)t (Wb. IV. 479. 9, 14), etc. 50 Cf. Blackman, ‘On the Position of Women’, p. 22: «In the New Kingdom women of all classes, from the highest to the lowest, were attached as musician-priestesses to some temple or other.» 51 Blackman, ‘On the Position of Women’, pp. 25, 28, 29-30. 52 The word jHjj.t in the Dedication Stele refers neither to the queen-mother Nnsrws nor to the princess #b (i.e. Nasalsa and Henuttakhebit) but, strictly speaking, only to Madiqen, whom Blackman (‘On the Position of Women’, p. 25), strangely enough, does not mention at all. 53 Blackman, ‘On the Position of Women’, p. 25. 54 Blackman, ‘On the Position of Women’, pp. 10-11.
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