Hor son of Punesh [1] (or Pwenesh) [2] is a magician from ancient Egyptian literature.
Hor son of Punesh [1] (or Pwenesh) [2] is a magician from ancient Egyptian literature.
Hor is named in the fragmentary Blacas papyrus from the third quarter of 5th century BC, discovered at Saqqara and now in London. [3] This text is in Imperial Aramaic. [4] The name of Hor has been read as ḥr-pa-pꜣ-wnš, [3] but there is some uncertainty regarding ḥr. The patronymic 'Bar Punesh' is clear. [1] It can also be translated "son of the wolf". [3] Hor is mentioned on only one side of the papyrus and it is unclear if the text on the other side belongs to the same story. [1] [2]
Hor (or Horus) is also named in fifteen Demotic Egyptian papyrus fragments by at least three different scribes, all now kept in Berlin. [3] They have not been published, but described by Karl-Theodor Zauzich. [5] He may be the same figure as Horus son of Paneshe named in the Demotic tale Setne Khamwas and Si-Osire , preserved on a papyrus from the 1st century BC, probably of Crocodilopolis, now in London. [3]
The fragmentary Aramaic story of Bar Punesh has been transcribed and translated into English by Arthur Ernest Cowley. [6] In the Aramaic version, Bar Punesh is a magician who announces a coming disaster. This seems to be a response to the murder of his sons by a king, who, given the fragmentary nature of the text, could be either the king of Egypt or another. [1] The adventures of magicians are a common topic in ancient Egyptian literature. [2]
In Cowley's summation, Bar Punesh "had done some meritorious service for which he was suitably rewarded by the king". [6] Terence Mitchell, too, sees him as having "a meeting with the Pharaoh". [4] The edition of Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni agrees, having Bar Punesh put "over the host of kings, and set him among the officers". That the adversary of Bar Punesh was a foreign king is made clear by the Demotic texts. [1]
The Demotic fragments show Hor son of Punesh as one of the priests of Ra at Heliopolis. His stories belong to a cycle separate from those of the High Priests of Ptah at Memphis. His chief adversary is the king of Meroë. His methods of spellcasting involve the Book of Thoth and waxen figures. [3] In Setne Khamwas and Si-Osire, he protects the Pharaoh Ramesses II from some Meroite sorcerers. [1]
Although his oldest attestation is in an Aramaic document, Hor son of Punesh must be an Egyptian literary creation. [2] The translation and adaptation of his story into Aramaic, a lingua franca used as far east as India, demonstrate that Demotic literature was not limited in readership to a tiny elite. [3]
The Elephantine Papyri and Ostraca consist of thousands of documents from the Egyptian border fortresses of Elephantine and Aswan, which yielded hundreds of papyri and ostraca in hieratic and demotic Egyptian, Aramaic, Koine Greek, Latin and Coptic, spanning a period of 100 years in the 5th to 4th centuries BCE. The documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives and are thus an invaluable source of knowledge for scholars of varied disciplines such as epistolography, law, society, religion, language, and onomastics. The Elephantine documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives: divorce documents, the manumission of enslaved people, and other business. The dry soil of Upper Egypt preserved the documents.
Book of Thoth is a name given to many ancient Egyptian texts supposed to have been written by Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing and knowledge. They include many texts that were claimed to exist by ancient authors and a magical book that appears in an Egyptian work of fiction.
Bethel, meaning 'House of El' or 'House of God' in Hebrew, Phoenician and Aramaic, was the name of a god or an aspect of a god in some ancient Middle Eastern texts dating to the Assyrian, Achaemenid, and Hellenistic periods. The term appears in the Torah and the Christian Bible, but opinions differ as to whether those references are to a god or to a place.
Prince Khaemweset was the fourth son of Ramesses II and the second son by his queen Isetnofret. His contributions to Egyptian society were remembered for centuries after his death. Khaemweset has been described as "the first Egyptologist" due to his efforts in identifying and restoring historic buildings, tombs and temples.
Demotic is the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Nile Delta. The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts. By convention, the word "Demotic" is capitalized in order to distinguish it from demotic Greek.
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John Laurence Gee is an American Latter-day Saint scholar, apologist and an Egyptologist. He currently teaches at Brigham Young University (BYU) and serves in the Department of Near Eastern Languages. He is known for his writings in support of the Book of Abraham.
"The Contendings of Horus and Seth" is a mythological story from the Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt found in the first sixteen pages of the Chester Beatty Papyri and deals with the battles between Horus and Seth to determine who will succeed Osiris as king.
The Story of Aḥiqar, also known as the Words of Aḥiqar, is a story first attested to in Imperial Aramaic from the fifth century BCE on papyri from Elephantine, Egypt, that circulated widely in the Middle and the Near East. It has been characterised as "one of the earliest 'international books' of world literature".
This page list topics related to ancient Egypt.
Insinger Papyrus is a papyrus find from ancient Egypt and contains one of the oldest extant writings about Egyptian wisdom teachings (Sebayt). The manuscript is dated to around the 1st century BC according to the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden where the main part is kept. Other sources suggest it dates to the 1st century AD, and to the 3rd century BC. Fragments have also been found in other collections.
Hebrew and Aramaic papyri have increasingly been discovered from the 1960s onwards, although these papyri remain rare compared to papyri written in Koine Greek and Demotic Egyptian. The most valuable and religious texts were written on leather scrolls, parchment - such as the literary texts from Masada and Qumran, while papyrus was employed for cheaper, domestic use.
The Tale of Setne Khamwas and Si-Osire is a Demotic Egyptian story attested on papyrus in Roman Egypt. Some argue that it is an answer to the biblical account about the Queen of Sheba testing Solomon with hard "questions" in 1 Kings 10:1.
"The Quarrel of Apophis and Seqenenre" is an ancient Egyptian story. It is fragmentarily attested only in a papyrus copy made by a scribe named Pentawer during the reign of pharaoh Merenptah of the 19th Dynasty. The story is set in an earlier date, towards the end of the Second Intermediate Period: the main characters are the two pharaohs Apophis and Seqenenre Tao, though the text is not historically accurate. In it, 'the Hyksos king Apophis challenges Seqenre, the local ruler of Thebes, with an adynaton [puzzle]. The end of the tale has been lost, but Seqenenre presumably found a solution, perhaps with the help of a wise counsellor.' It is part of a wider corpus of ancient Egyptian tales of wisdom-contests: it has some similarities, for example, to the much later "Tale of Setne Khamwas and Si-Osire", attested on papyrus in the Roman period.
The Philinna Papyrus is part of a collection of ancient Greek spells written in hexameter verse. Three spells are partially preserved on the papyrus. One is a cure for headache, one probably for a skin condition, and the purpose of the third spell is uncertain. Two fragments of the papyrus survive, in the collections of the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, and the Berlin State Museums.
Julius Euting was a German Orientalist.
Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt, often referred to as TAD or TADAE, is a four volume corpus of Aramaic inscriptions written in Egypt during the Ancient Egyptian period, written by Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni.
Papyrus Amherst 63 is an ancient Egyptian papyrus from the third century BC containing Aramaic texts in demotic Egyptian script. The 35 texts date to the eighth and seventh centuries BC. One of these, a version of Psalm 20, provides an "unprecedented" extrabiblical parallel to a text from the Hebrew Bible. It syncretizes abundantly, including the names Anat Yaho and Bethel, and mentions a khnh, a word meaning priestess of Yaho.
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