Elena Luise Hertel

In ancient Egyptian beliefs, life did not end with death. Instead, those who had led a just life transitioned to the afterlife through an elaborate ritual and continued to exist for eternity in the realm of the dead, for which they had carefully arranged a burial in a tomb during their lifetime. However, this was an ideal scenario, and not all times were peaceful and prosperous, for the living or the dead. One of the greatest threats for the dead, especially in periods of social instability, was that their tomb might be reused by later generations. A small stela kept at the Musée du Louvre under the inventory number N 252 / C 101 (Fig. 1) provides valuable information on this threat in a period of change and insecurity. It offers a vivid glimpse into the life of Petamenope, son of Pakam, a washerman who lived in the area of ancient Memphis in the middle of the seventh century BCE and took a creative approach to protect his tomb and afterlife.

Our stela dates to the eighth regnal year of King Psamtik I (= 657 BCE), the first king of the Late Period (664–332 BCE). It is of considerable importance because it provides information on the major changes in the economy, law and writing culture that will have occurred during the preceding centuries of political fragmentation – a period for which textual sources are scarce. Following the typical layout of ancient Egyptian funerary stelae, it has a rounded top with an image field in the upper part and a text field below. In the image field, Petamenope, the commissioner of the stela and protagonist of the text, is depicted on the right, with his arms raised in a pose of adoration and prayer. In front of him stands the goddess Imenti, the personification of the West, the location of the realm of the dead according to ancient Egyptian beliefs. This places the stela in a funerary context and, as it is recorded that it was found in Saqqara, it is likely that it was originally placed in the city’s cemetery. The remains of the stela’s original bright colours can still be seen in the incised signs and figures (Fig. 2).

A first interesting feature of the stela is its script. Ancient Egyptians generally employed a hieroglyphic script for inscriptions carved into stone and an abbreviated cursive version, which allowed for quicker writing with reed brush and ink, on materials such as papyrus. Our stela shows both: hieroglyphic characters arranged in two vertical columns in the image field between the two figures, and eight lines of cursive script written horizontally from right to left in the main text field.

The fact that the creator of this stela chose to use the cursive variant of the script on a stela is interesting in itself. While the small, flowing shapes were easy to write with a brush and ink, they must have required some dedication to carve into the grainy limestone. The practice of incising cursive script – instead of hieroglyphs – on stelae became briefly popular in the early Third Intermediate Period, particularly during the 22nd Dynasty (c. 943–746 BCE). The exact reasons for this are unclear. It is possible that it was intended as a deliberate reference to the manuscript sphere and tied to the specific text content that usually occurs on papyrus manuscripts, as discussed further below.

The nature of the cursive script is also unusual. During the period of political fragmentation, in the northern part of the country the traditional hieratic script developed into an even more abbreviated form known as demotic. This later spread to the south and replaced hieratic as the primary cursive script for administrative writing. Our stela, which originates from the north, is written in a script that exhibits elements of both late hieratic and early demotic, illustrating the transition from one to the other.

Finally, another surprising aspect is the text genre. Funerary stelae most commonly contain texts illustrating their commissioner’s relationship with the gods, for example by memorialising a dedication to a divinity or temple. In doing so, those with the necessary means could be remembered as pious and generous, gaining the respect of the gods and their peers alike. The text on our stela, however, is a legal text. It is a contract for the purchase of a tomb between Petamenope and an overseer of the necropolis called Hekay-i-ir-a’a. ‘You have satisfied my heart with the payment for this tomb in the Desert of Anubis (= the name of a specific necropolis),’ states the overseer at the beginning of the contract. The text then elaborates on the tomb’s details: it was made by the stone mason Pa-mi, and the neighbouring tombs belong to funerary priests Ipy and Hor, the merchants Pa-iuiu-hor and Pa-tjener, and the goldsmith Ma’a-khonsu. Finally, the overseer pledges: ‘You may take it (= the tomb) from the second month of the Peret-season of year eight (of Psamtik I) onwards.’ A comparable tomb sale contract written on a stela now in the National Archaeological Museum in Florence (No.1659/2507, dated 586 BCE) describes a tomb in more detail: it features a small hall measuring approximately 3 × 2.5 metres and three adjacent rooms of a similar size. The tomb was likely part of a larger subterranean structure with multiple burials carved into the bedrock. This is probably how we should imagine the tomb that Petamenope bought.

The practice of securing business transactions with written contracts must have developed significantly during the Third Intermediate Period. People increasingly employed professional scribes to create legal records of loans, leases, inheritances, and sales that could be produced in court in the event of a dispute. Evidence from the Ptolemaic Period (332–30 BCE), for which more of these documents are preserved, shows that temples owned the land on which cemeteries were situated and that necropolis workers, such as overseers, acted as intermediaries. They sold tomb structures, organised the construction of tombs and set up funerary services such as regular offerings to the deceased. One reason why Petamenope’s stela is so important is that it demonstrates that the same system was already in place in the seventh century BCE. Together with the aforementioned stela in Florence, it is one of only four surviving contracts concerning tomb sales from this period, and the earliest among them. Furthermore, such contract texts were usually written on papyrus, not stelae. As a rare early attestation of a tomb sale contract on an unusual medium and in a cursive script that illustrates changing writing traditions, the stela Louvre N 252 / C 101 is an exceptional written artefact.

In fact, while a contract on papyrus was intended for archiving and use, if necessary, in any legal dispute, stelae were often placed in visible locations in the necropolis. As such, putting a contract on a stela grants it public visibility on top of its legal value. In our case, it reminded everyone visiting and working in the necropolis that Petamenope was the rightful owner of this tomb. After a generation or two, when he had faded from the memory of his closest relatives, nobody would have been there to defend his interests in court if the necropolis administration had decided to move his mummy in order to sell the tomb to someone else. Petamenope must have anticipated this, which is why he commissioned his stela and placed it in the vicinity of his tomb. With it, he appealed to the collective memory of the workers and visitors to the necropolis: ‘I bought this tomb. Hands off!’

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References

First edition: Malinine, Michel (1975), ‘Vente de tombes à l'époque saïte’, Revue d'égyptologie, 27: 164–174.

English translation: Vleeming, Sven P. (2024), Demotic Funerary Stelae and other Short Texts Gathered from Many Publications (Short Texts IV, 2351–2880) (Studia Demotica 14), Leuven: Peeters, 113–115 (no. 2497).

For more images, bibliography, and further information, see the website of the Louvre: https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010027551.

Description

Location: Musée du Louvre, Paris

Inventory number: N 252 / C 101

Date: 657 BCE

Material: limestone, painted

Size: 41.5 × 28.5 × 5.2 cm

Origin: Saqqara, Egypt

Copyright Notice

Photos by the author, with permission of the Egyptian Antiquities Department, Musée du Louvre.

Reference Note

Elena Luise Hertel (2026), An Ancient Egyptian Contract on Stone. In Marina Sartori, Thies Staack (eds): Artefact of the Month No. 38, CSMC, Hamburg.