National Museums Scotland. New Kingdom Hieratic Texts in Edinburgh

Potter, Daniel

National Museums Scotland. New Kingdom Hieratic Texts in Edinburgh

Resource type

Book chapter

Creator (person)

Potter, Daniel

ORCID

Date published

2024

Abstract

This contribution catalogues the 19 New Kingdom Hieratic inscriptions in the collections of National Museums Scotland (NMS). The collection is made up of 14 wooden labels, 1 pottery sherd, 1 travertine fragment, 1 fragment of papyrus letter, and 2 limestone ostraca. It provides an overview of the history of NMS and its formation from The Royal Scottish Museum, The University of Edinburgh’s Natural History Museum, and the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland, detailing each collection’s origin and development. The provenance and find spots of the hieratic material is also discussed focussing on the key donors: the pioneering Scottish archaeologist and antiquarian Alexander Henry Rhind (1833–1863), the Scottish surgeon Dr John Ivor Murray (1824–1903) and the British School of Archaeology in Egypt; describing the full histories of several objects for the first time. A full publication history for the texts follows, with their contents described. The inscriptions include a unique tomb warning from a Theban tomb and one of two attestations of the poem/hymn of the ‘King upon his chariot’. A case study of 14 late 18th Dynasty wooden labels naming princesses is also presented. The labels were collected in Sheikh Abd el-Qurna during Rhind’s excavations. The case study examines their archaeological context and compares them with examples of wooden name labels from other 18th Dynasty royal tombs, as well as several in historic private collections as a means of assessing their dating, usage, and previous identification as relics of post-robbery re-burials