Free Hieroglyphs by Penelope Wilson Page B

complete removal of the name of a person could also remove their existence. If the name of a tomb owner were scratched away, his ka would not recognize its images and could not be nourished and therefore the dead person would not live in the afterlife. Their name, the memory of them, and their cult would indeed be forgotten and their being would be inanimate. Clearly, this was an act of condemnation, sending a person to their second death, the most feared end for any human life. It was used in Egypt against both human beings and gods as a political and religious act of denial of existence.
    Hatshepsut ruled Egypt on behalf of her stepson, Thutmose III, and assumed the full regalia and titles of ‘King’. Yet, some time
    ‘I kno
    after her death her names and images were scratched out from w y
    many of the temples she had built and even in her mortuary ou, I kno
    temple, designed to continue her afterlife existence. The exact reasons for this can only be guessed at, but the effect is undeniable.
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    Someone was trying to erase her memory, so that she would not yo
    exist in the minds or eyes of people in this life or in the next.
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    Similarly, after the reign of Akhenaten, his name and images were es’
    systematically removed from his city at Akhetaten and also from his monuments at Karnak.
    12. Examples of the erasure of the name of Amun from the architraves of a colonnade in Luxor Temple.
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    The damnatio memoriae had been a favourite weapon of Akhenaten himself during his reign when he turned to the worship of the sun disk, the Aten, and apparently away from the previous state god, Amun. He had ordered the removal of the name of Amun from wherever it occurred, particularly in the heartland of the god at Thebes and among the supporters of the old religio-political order. Many of them had names compounded with the name of Amun, such as ‘Amun-em-het’, ‘Amun is to the front’, and even his father had been called ‘Amun-hotep’, ‘Amun is content’. Nothing was safe and Amun was scratched out in tombs and temples, on statues and objects in a truly literal gesture of ‘rubbing him out’.
    In the context of the tombs it almost casually removed the afterlife existence of the person too.
    The denial of existence was a strong political gesture in a culture where such beliefs permeated political and social situations and institutions. It seems to have been one of the worst things which phs
    could be done to a person and the fact that so many texts mention ogly
    the hope that names will continue to exist suggests that the fear of Hier
    losing the written name went deep. Even Akhenaten himself acknowledged it in his boundary stela at Akhetaten, saying of the inscription, ‘It shall not be scratched out, it shall not be washed off, it shall not be hacked out, it shall not be washed over with gypsum-plaster. It shall not be lost and if it is lost, if it disappears, or if the stela on which it is falls down, I shall renew it again as a new thing in this place where it is’. 2
    Power and the written word
    In magical rituals the gestures, dancing, incantation, smoke, and magical objects were not enough to make some spells work. They needed the extra power of written hieroglyphs. A lector priest’s toolkit from a Middle Kingdom tomb under the Ramesseum at Thebes consisted of a box containing all the paraphernalia for invoking power. There were fertility figures, ivory ‘wands’ covered in bizarre and fantastic creatures, a cowherd figure, a copper serpent, 60
    and a figure of a woman wearing a lioness mask and holding two serpent wands in her hands. Together with these objects were papyri covered in texts in hieratic, including literary works and magical texts. Whoever owned this box was a trained scribe with a sideline or maybe a job in providing magical services for people at Thebes. It is the association of the gear and the written material which is so fascinating. This person, most likely to be a man, possibly