Qahedjet

Name of Qahedjet
Stele of Qahedjet in the Louvre, Paris
Horus name	Qa-hedjet / Qai-hedjet Q3j-ḥḏ.t The one with a high white crown The white crown of Horus is raised

Qahedjet (actually Hor-Qahedjet ) is the Horus name of an ancient Egyptian king ( pharaoh ), who possibly ruled either towards the end of the 3rd dynasty ( Old Kingdom ), in the first interim period or even only in the 18th dynasty .

Qahedjet, like King Huni , is viewed by Egyptology as a ruler that is particularly difficult to classify, as the previous knowledge about him can only be based on a single artifact . The name "Qahedjet" is not preserved on any other monument or artifact. The classification of the ruler in the 3rd dynasty is also associated with uncertainties, the actual time of reign is unknown.

Name and identity

Qahedjet's identity is controversial due to the unique naming. Thomas Schneider , Jürgen von Beckerath , Rainer Stadelmann and Dietrich Wildung see him as a ruler of the late 3rd dynasty. This assignment is based mainly on stylistic similarities between the facial profiles of Qahedjet and King Djoser ( 3rd Dynasty ) on relief images. Toby Wilkinson, Ian Shaw and Nabil Swelim also suggest equating Qahedjet with Huni , as only the name at birth is known of the latter and no Horus name has yet been assigned. However, this suggestion is not generally accepted. According to Peter Kaplony , Qahedjet may have ruled during the First Intermediate Period. Jean-Pierre Pätznik and Jacques Vandier think it is possible that Qahedjet with Thutmose III. (18th Dynasty) could be identical.

supporting documents

The stele

Upper part of the stele (detail).

So far the only artifact that points to the existence of this king is an about 50.5 centimeters high, 31.0 centimeters wide and about 3.0 centimeters thick stele made of polished fine-grained limestone , which since 1967 is owned by the Louvre in Paris is located. It comes from a private art trade. Their location is unknown.

A rectangular window is engraved in the stele (see figure above right). The main motif of the relief inside is an upright king figure with the white crown (left), embraced by a human figure with a falcon head (right). Both figures are the same size and look each other in the eye. The ruler's face looks distinctive with its short nose and powerful lips, plus a very large royal beard. The apron has a belt with a dagger on the side, and a band of fabric runs over the torso . Qahedjet holds in one hand a magnificent club with a pear-shaped pommel, in the other hand he holds a staff with a distinctive notch halfway up. The figure with the bird's head, however, can be identified as the falcon god Horus . According to Jean-Pierre Pätznik and Jacques Vandier, the inscription to the right of the king's serech refers to a possible visit by the ruler to a temple of the god Re in Heliopolis or to the Upper Egyptian shrine Per-wer .

Dating

According to Pätznik and Vandier, the pictorial program of the stele is contradictory in terms of style and subject matter. The face profile of the ruler and the design of the royal Serech are similar to those of the reliefs of King Djoser in the underground tomb galleries of the Djoser pyramid in Saqqara , thus correspond to the art of the 3rd dynasty, even if the technical execution of the relief engraving is finer and more sophisticated and suggests a later date of origin. But the subject of the image display gives rise to speculation and discussion. Although the ruler was considered a representative of Horus in his royal office, the portrayal of a god hugging a ruler would be rather unusual for a royal monument of the Old Kingdom because of the provocative iconography and the earliest evidence of this kind to date.

The mention of a building called hwt-ˁ3.t ("hut-aat" = " Great Palace ") in the orthography as presented on the stele has only been documented since Sesostris I ( 12th Dynasty ). Horus names with one of the two crowns as a name element have only been around since King Thutmose III. (18th Dynasty) common. In addition, there is the design of the barn owl hieroglyph ( Gardiner symbol G17 ; sound value "m"), which did not appear before the 18th dynasty, and the arrangement of the symbols Horus + owl + toponym is not documented on any monument from earlier epochs. And depictions of an anthropomorphic Horus, as he received an Egyptian ruler in a familiar pose, are attested for the first time under King Sahure ( 5th dynasty ) in his solar sanctuary. In addition, there are the noticeably shifted to the right inscriptions above the figure representations, which contradict the striving for artistic harmony and the pictorial canonical rules visible in the reliefs of the Old Kingdom. The word Qa-hedjet is also in a rarely documented variant of the name of Horus by Thutmose III. occupied as a name syllable. The name on the stele would therefore be a unique short form.

In the case of Jean-Pierre Pätznik and Jacques Vandier, the clear contradictions in the artistic style and the inscriptions ultimately raised the question of whether the stele could possibly be a modern forgery or a reproduction from the New Kingdom or from the Saitian era . The latter assumption is based on the fact that there was, for example, a heavily destroyed, relief-decorated shrine in Heliopolis by King Djoser, whose artistic execution of the image motifs is a clear homage to the 3rd dynasty, but the shrine itself is not contemporary. In the New Kingdom and the Saitic Era, such homages were often found in royal decorations.

literature

• Jürgen von Beckerath : Handbook of the Egyptian king names . Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich / Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-422-00832-2 .
• Peter Kaplony : The cylinder seals of the Old Kingdom (= Monumenta Aegyptiaca , Bd. 3). Fondation égyptologique Reine Elisabeth, Bruxelles 1981.
• Jean-Pierre Pätznik, Jacques Vandier: L'Horus Qahedjet: Souverain de la IIIe dynastie? . In: Jean-Claude Goyon, Christine Cardin: Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Egyptologists . Peeters Publishers, Leuven 2007, ISBN 9042917172 , pp. 1455-1472.
• Stephan J. Seidlmayer: The Relative Chronology of Dynasty 3. In: Erik Hornung , Rolf Krauss , David A. Warburton (Eds.): Ancient Egyptian Chronology (= Handbook of Oriental studies. Section One. The Near and Middle East. Volume 83 ). Brill, Leiden / Boston 2006, ISBN 978-90-04-11385-5 , pp. 116-123 ( online ).
• Thomas Schneider : Lexicon of the Pharaohs. Albatros, Düsseldorf 2002, ISBN 3-491-96053-3 .
• Nabil Swelim: Some Problems on the History of the Third Dynastiy. In: Archaeological and Historical Studies . Vol. 7, The Archaeological Society of Alexandria, Alexandria 1983, p. 184.
• Jacques Vandier : Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles-Lettres. 1968, pp. 16-22.
• Toby AH Wilkinson : Early Dynastic Egypt. Routledge, London / New York 1999, ISBN 0415186331 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Qahedjet stele
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Thomas Schneider: Lexicon of the Pharaohs . P. 226.
3. ^ Jean-Pierre Pätznik, Jacques Vandier: L'Horus Qahedjet: Souverain de la IIIe dynastie? . P. 1456.
4. ↑ ^{a b} Jürgen von Beckerath: Handbook of the Egyptian king names . P. 52 and p. 177.
5. ↑ ^{a b} Peter Kaplony: The cylinder seals of the Old Kingdom . P. 155, note 271.
6. ↑ ^{a b} Thomas Schneider: Lexicon of the Pharaohs . P. 315.
7. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j} Jean-Pierre Pätznik, Jacques Vandier: L'Horus Qahedjet: Souverain de la IIIe dynastie? . Pp. 1455-1472.
8. ^ Erik Hornung, Rolf Krauss, David Warburton: Ancient Egyptian Chronology . P. 121.
9. ^ ^{A b c d} Toby Wilkinson: Early Dynastic Egypt . Pp. 103-105.
10. ^ Ian Shaw (Ed.): The Oxford history of ancient Egypt. Oxford University Press, Oxford et al. 2002, ISBN 0-19-280293-3 , p. 88.
11. ↑ Susanne Bickel: The connection of worldview and state image: Aspects of politics and religion in Egypt. In: Reinhard Gregor Kratz , Hermann Spieckermann (Ed.): Images of Gods, Images of God, Images of the World. Polytheism and Monotheism in the Ancient World. Volume 1: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine (= research on the Old Testament. 2nd row, Vol. 17). Mohr Siebeck, Ulmen 2006, ISBN 3-16-148673-0 , pp. 82-84 and pp. 87-88.

predecessor	Office	successor
Chaba ? Gently ?	King of Egypt 3rd Dynasty	Huni ? Snofru ?