Speaking Beyond the Destruction of Their Names

The blog post for this week has been written by Carlein Boers, a political scientist and ancient history enthusiast from the Netherlands. After watching numerous reruns of the animated classic ‘Asterix and Cleopatra’ from the age of five, she developed a lifelong interest in the Amarna Period and the fall of the Roman Republic. In the Netherlands, she has taken courses with Egyptologist Huub Pragt and the ‘Huis van Horus’ Association. She first participated in online courses by the Egypt Centre during the 2021 (second or third) COVID lockdown. Carlein has written blogs for the Egypt Centre in the past, focusing on A Look at the Political Legacy of Amarna.

The ancient Egyptians gave great importance to not only preserving the bodies of the deceased, but also to speaking the names of the ones who passed away. They believed that each morning the Ka-soul of the deceased would find its way back to the body; if the body would be disturbed and/or did not recognise their name, the soul would wander the earth aimlessly to haunt the living ‘till eternity. At least, this is what horror movies tell us.

The practice of Damnatio memoriae

During the course Causing Their Names to Live, Dr. Griffin introduced us to fifty individuals whose names and biographies survived to the present day. Rather, it was the mentioning of Damnatio memoriae during the first part of the course that caught my attention. The phrase Damnatio memoriae originates from modern Latin and translates as “condemnation of memory”; in short it is the complete eradication of any written or depiction of a person with the aim of removing them from history until perpetuity (fig. 1). In a society where speaking one’s name or honouring an effigy is essential to the individual’s wellbeing in the afterlife, it must have been the most severe punishment imaginable. The practice of damnatio memoriae can be found in several societies from Agamemnon wanting to destroy any evidence of Priam’s Troy, King Henry VIII replacing any trace of Anne Boleyn by covering it with Jane Seymour’s initials, and most recently Vladimir Putin’s notorious refusal to utter the name of his strongest opposition (the now departed) Alexei Navalny.

Fig. 1: Erased figure of Hatshepsut at Karnak

The ancient Egyptians had a long tradition of damnatio memoriae, which resulted in destroying graves, mummies, statues, depictions, and erasing names from within cartouches in order to simply not mention someone’s existence ever again. The most prominent example that comes to my mind to prove this practice is the Abydos King List (fig. 2), or rather: what is missing on the King List. The list names 76 pharaohs in chronological order and can be found on the temple of Seti I (c. 1300 BC) in Abydos. And here comes the fun part; take an educated guess at whose names are missing from the list, but when you ask a stranger on the street to name an Egyptian pharaoh, they’ll probably name one of these rulers. I’ll give you a minute…

Fig. 2: Abydos King List

Calling into evidence, case no. 1: the case of the famous female pharaoh

The Abydos King List is missing the name of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut (c. 1479–1458 BC), who initially reigned in her stepson Thutmose III’s name only to emerge as an independent ruler. She sought to solidify her succession through her daughter and with the help of a presumed shady advisor/lover Senenmut. Despite being a woman, Hatshepsut donned herself with the traditional king regalia such as the headdress with an uraeus snake and false beard. She even went as far as to marry her daughter, Neferure, as the ceremonial God’s Wife of Amun (fig. 3). Modern feminist love to use her example to show that anything a man can do a woman can do just as well.

Fig. 3: Relief of Neferure (Egypt Centre W1376)

In all fairness, Hatshepsut did accomplish some remarkable things besides managing to stay in power for over twenty years: she pioneered land and trade routes to the Land of Punt (today’s Somalia and Eritrea) and Byblos (Lebanon). She commissioned several great building projects throughout Upper and Lower Egypt, the most famous being her mortuary temple in Deir el-Bahari. For reasons we might never fully know, her stepson Thutmose III went above and beyond to erase her name and depictions after her death (fig. 4). Talk about really not liking the person whose job you took over! By erasing her history, we can only speculate what kind of ruler she really was and what prompted her damnatio memoriae. People today might suggest it is because she was a strong and successful woman overshadowing the old male elite at court. Yet, they failed in their attempt to have her forgotten; Hatshepsut’s name is remembered and spoken today.

Fig. 4: Block with the erased cartouches of Hatshepsut on the left

Calling into evidence, case no. 2: the Amarna pharaohs

At the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, we have another number of names missing from the Abydos King List: Akhenaten, Smenkhkare (possibly Nefertiti), Tutankhamun, and Aye. Long did Egyptologists doubt the existence of these pharaohs as the names were not to be found either on the king lists nor in the famous temple complex of Karnak/Thebes, or in the Valley of the Kings. From what Egyptologists can reconstruct about the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, it was Horemheb who was responsible for making the names of his predecessors disappear. Again, without knowing exactly what happened in Egypt during the Amarna reign that made people hate Akhenaten and his immediate family. Just as quickly as their royal city of Amarna emerged as a new power centre, although it disappeared in the desert sands after which seemed to be an overnight destruction. The names of Akhenaten and Nefertiti were hacked out of their cartouches (fig. 5) while his mother’s name (Tiye) remained revered. This indicates to me that the hatred against Akhenaten was truly focussed on him and his immediate descendants.

Fig. 5: Defased images of Akhenaten and Nefertiti

 

We might never have known about the Amarna royals if some traces of their existence hadn’t survived, such as the Amarna talatat blocks. Talatat (limestone) blocks that had been used in Amarna were repurposed to fill the inner Second Pylon at Karnak. The decorated talatat blocks remained untouched by time until their discovery in the twentieth century when they emerged to tell us their story and provide a face for long forgotten kings and queens. From the sands of Amarna appeared beautiful art, such as the bust of Nefertiti in sculptor Thutmose’s workshop (fig. 6). To this day, millions of tourists flock to Berlin’s Neues Museum to gaze on Nefertiti’s face. The search for her tomb still causes controversy as became apparent when a couple of years ago Nicholas Reeves presented his theory on where she might be found.

Fig. 6: Plaster cast of Nefertiti's bust (Egypt Centre 1991)

Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun marked the beginning of an Egypt-craze all over the Western world and mass tourism to Egypt’s ancient sites. Horemheb’s attempt to erase Tutankhamun’s name from prosperity might have contributed to his tomb’s location being forgotten and thus hidden from tomb robbers. When Carter opened the tomb, he found a nearly undisturbed grave filled with golden “wonderous things”. Today, Tutankhamun’s image is commercialized as immortalised in Steve Martin’s SNL sketch (https://youtu.be/FYbavuReVF4?si=HOPqyQMLgsnbEvaw). Mention ancient Egypt and most people will have his golden death mask come to mind (fig. 7).

Fig. 7: Golden mask of Tutankhamun

Though Horemheb and the Thebes elite attempted to have the names erased from history, the names of Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and Tutankhamun are still spoken today.

 

Calling into evidence, case no.3: Queen Cleopatra

Cleopatra VII Philopator was ancient Egypt’s last reigning pharaoh; her death brought an end to an independent Egyptian kingdom that would henceforth be a province in the Roman empire. Cleopatra was last in the line of the Ptolemaic dynasty that claimed ancestry to both the ancient Egyptian pharaohs as well as Alexander the Great (fig. 8). Sources speak of her intelligence, knowledge of literature, languages and mathematics, wit, scheming, and beauty. Asterix and Obelix speak of her nose. The story of Cleopatra and Roman consul and general Marc Antony was immortalised by subsequently Cicero, Plutarch, Shakespeare, and to the moment when Elizabeth Taylor met Richard Burton’s Marc Antony on the film set of the 1960s classic Cleopatra.

Fig. 8: Cleopatra and Caesarion at Dendera

It is now believed that Cleopatra did not die of suicide using a serpent’s venomous bite, but rather was secretly executed by Emperor Augustus. After her death it wasn’t enough to erase her name from temple sites, Augustus made sure her memory was trashed. Cue to stories of Cleopatra seducing Rome’s great but helpless generals and using her charms and poison to rule the eastern part of the Roman Empire. She was portrayed as a scheming harlot with an unsatisfiable hunger for power, yet showed cowardice when she sailed away from the battle scene of Actium before the fight was over. Even her death was used to vilify her; it was said that she had abandoned her people by choosing suicide over remaining on Egypt’s throne as a Roman protectorate.

 

Today, Cleopatra catches our imagination in fiction and as a feminist icon. Her life and legacy still stir controversy as recent as a 2023 Netflix documentary series. All of this despite Rome’s attempt to slander her memory. Speaking beyond her (still to be discovered) tomb, Cleopatra’s name is still spoken today.

 

In conclusion: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!

It is mesmerising to me that the names of Egyptian monarchs who had their names eradicated by their successors are known in the twenty-first century. We don’t know much about either their character nor their style of ruling their kingdom; maybe they were horrible human beings and deserved their punishment of damnatio memoriae. Yet, somehow theirs are the names that survived into our times, which are often spoken today. Their names and images have been iconised and commercialised. We in the twenty-first century allowed their names to speak beyond their graves and thus, inherently, securing the survival of their Ka-soul.

 

Bibliography

Cooney, Kara 2014. The woman who would be king. New York: Crown.

Cooney, Kara 2020. When women ruled the world. Six queens of Egypt. Washington, DC: National Geographic.

Goldsworthy, Adrian 2010. Antony and Cleopatra. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Hawass, Zahi (ed.) 2018. Tutankhamun: treasures of the golden pharaoh. The centennial celebration. New York: Melcher Media.

Reeves, Nicholas 2022. The complete Tutankhamun, revised and expanded ed. London: Thames & Hudson.

Reeves, Nicholas 2001. Akhenaten: Egypt’s false prophet. London: Thames & Hudson.

Schiff, Stacy 2010. Cleopatra: a life. New York: Little, Brown and Co.

The Rest is History Podcast by Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook (they have an excellent mini-series on both Cleopatra and Tutankhamun)

Tetisheri: The Much-loved Queen

The blog post for this week is written by Linda Kimmel, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the United States. When she retired from full-time work as a data research manager in late 2020, she began studying the ancient world and serving as a docent at the University of Michigan’s Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. Linda had never heard of the Egypt Centre before the pandemic but has taken every course offered since she first noticed a tweet about the Centre in the fall of 2020 and has been taking online courses there ever since. She hopes to visit the Egypt Centre in the fall of 2024, provided the trains are running!

In the fourth session of the latest Egypt Centre class, Causing Their Names to Live, Ken Griffin introduced us to many interesting individuals. From the fascinating Iwesenhesetmut (whose gorgeous coffin is housed at the Egypt Centre) to Udjahorresnet (“the collaborator”) who worked with the Persians during their reign in Egypt, to the notorious Paneb (accused of so many crimes it is hard to remember them all). However, from the minute Ken mentioned Queen Tetisheri, I thought she sounded familiar, and knew I wanted to write about her. Once the class was over, I went back and reviewed the notes I had taken from a 2021 class Ken offered on Egyptian History. Yes, Queen Tetisheri appeared in my notes, but there was nothing there that fit with the odd feeling of familiarity I had with her name.

Finally, it came to me. Queen Tetisheri features prominently in The Hippopotamus Pool by Elizabeth Peters (fig. 1)! Decades before I took my first course from the Egypt Centre, I became interested in ancient Egypt from Peters’ Amelia Peabody mystery series. The books feature Amelia Peabody and her husband, the fictional Egyptologist Radcliffe Emerson. Elizabeth Peters is the pseudonym of Barbara Mertz, who received her Ph.D. from the then Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. Given her background, it is not surprising that the series is filled with real-life Egyptologists and archaeologists.

Fig. 1: Book cover of The Hippopotamus Pool 

In The Hippopotamus Pool, the eighth entry in the series, the Emersons search for, and eventually find, the tomb of Queen Tetisheri. Along with the mystery, we get many tidbits about ancient Egypt in general, and Queen Tetisheri in particular. At one point, Amelia Peabody notes: 

“In my opinion historians have never given enough attention to the ladies, and what a remarkable woman this Tetisheri must have been – the first of that line of great queens who wielded so much power.” (Peters, p. 72).

How could I resist writing about Queen Tetisheri!

Tetisheri was the daughter of Tjenna and his wife Neferu. Tjenna is unknown except for the appearance of his name on the mummy bandages of his daughter (Dodson and Hilton 2004). Tetisheri was the Great Royal Wife of King Senakhtenre Ahmose I, a ruler of the late Seventeenth Dynasty. It appears that when her husband died, Tetisheri became regent for her son, Seqenenre Tao, one of several women at the end of the Seventeenth Dynasty who became regent or co-regent with their young sons. Tao is said to have been responsible for instigating the war with the Hyksos, which eventually led to the reunification of Egypt. Tetisheri’s daughter Ahhotep I was Tao’s sister and wife. 

Perhaps more significantly, it is through her grandchildren that we learn of the lasting impact of Tetisheri. Tetisheri’s daughter Ahhotep I was the mother of Nebpehtyre Ahmose II, and served as his regent after King Seqenenre Tao was killed during the battle for liberation. Consequently, Ahhotep I played a significant role in Seventeenth Dynasty politics (one of those powerful women alluded to in The Hippopotamus Pool). Ahmose II is credited with being the founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty (Popko, 2013). 

But what remains of Tetisheri? Her mummy has been identified as coming from the Deir el-Bahari Cache, but the location of her original burial site remains a mystery. Ken said it likely was at Dra Abu el-Naga, as that was the royal burial site for the Seventeenth Dynasty.

Fig. 2: Statue of Tetisheri (British Museum EA 22558)

Sadly, the most well-known object related to Tetisheri, a small statue with inscriptions, located in the British Museum (fig. 2), was determined to be a modern copy of an original statue that is only partially preserved (Davies 1984). Mertz (1964), in a non-fiction work, Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs laments the loss of the statue as a true artifact, no doubt leading to the frequent mention of Tetisheri statues in the fictional The Hippopotamus Pool. However, more spectacular monuments to Tetisheri do exist. Her grandson, Ahmose II, built a memorial structure or cenotaph for her at Abydos, just several hundred meters from his own pyramid. Tetisheri’s structure includes a pyramid, making her one of the last Egyptians to have a pyramid constructed in their honor (fig. 3). The pyramid has been under excavation for several decades. Ken joined the excavation in 2010 and told us they found a lot of mummified dogs on site dating to Roman times. The pyramid can be explored in more detail virtually at the Mused website (https://tetisheri.mused.org/en/topics/510/pyramids).

Fig. 3: Restored pyramid of Tetisheri (Ahram Online)

A large dedication stela was found inside the pyramid by Charles Trick Currelly for the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1902 and is now located in the Cairo Egyptian Museum (fig. 4). The stela has mirror images of Ahmose II presenting great offerings to his grandmother, Queen Tetisheri (The Egyptian Museum, 2022). An inscription on the stela notes that Tetisheri’s grave was currently in Thebes, and her cenotaph was in Tawer. So why did Ahmose II build this new structure for his grandmother? This portion of the inscription gives us some clues: 

“Dug out was its lake, planted were its trees, confirmed was its sacrificial bread, it was staffed with people, it was provided with fields, it was endowed with cattle, mortuary priests and lector priests are at their duty, every man knows his regulations. That is, His Majesty spoke these words when the construction of this was being done. His Majesty did this because he loved her more than anything.” 

Fig. 4: Stela of Tetisheri (Cairo Museum)

It was designed to be grand, carefully landscaped, and fully staffed with priests to ensure Tetisheri’s memory would endure. But touchingly, Ahmose II had it built because “he loved her more than anything.” And since this past week included Valentine’s Day, it seems a fitting reason to write about Tetisheri, and to repeat her name. 

 

References

Daymarany, Ayman. The life of Queen Tetisheri. Mused. https://tetisheri.mused.org/en/stories/209/the-life-of-queen-tetisheri [Accessed February 13, 2024]

Dodson, Aidan and Dyan Hilton. 2004. The complete royal families of ancient Egypt. London; New York: Thames & Hudson.

Davies, W. V. 1984. The statuette of queen Tetisheri: a reconsideration. British Museum Occasional Paper 36. London: British Museum.

Mertz, Barbara. 2007. Temples, tombs & hieroglyphs: a popular history of ancient Egypt. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.

Peters, Elizabeth. 1996. The hippopotamus pool. New York: Grand Central Publishing.

Popko, Lutz, 2013, Late Second Intermediate Period to early New Kingdom. In Wolfram Grajetzki, Willeke Wendrich (eds.), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, Los Angeles. http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz002hgq2

The Egyptian Museum. 2022. https://egyptianmuseumcairo.eg/artefacts/stela-of-the-king-ahmose/#:~:text=Artefact%20Details&text=This%20commemorative%20stela%2C%20bears%20a,a%20symbol%20of%20royal%20protection [Accessed February 13, 2024] 

Metjen: Causing His Name to Live

The blog post for this week is written by Judit Blair, who has a Masters in Ancient Near Eastern religions and a PhD in Hebrew and the Old Testament, both from the University of Edinburgh. Judit is a Teaching Fellow at the Centre for Open Learning (COL) at Edinburgh University and a Tutor at Glasgow University where she teaches such courses as Ancient Egypt and the Bible, Aspects of Ancient Near Eastern Demonology, and Ancient Monsters. Judit is also a member of Egyptology Scotland and the EES.

 

The Egypt Centre’s new course Causing Their Names to Live looks at the lives of many ancient Egyptian men and women from the Old Kingdom through to the end of pharaonic history. Some of these individuals are well known (e.g. Imhotep, Amenhotep son of Hapu, etc.), while others are quite obscure with scant evidence. Their autobiographies inscribed in their tombs, although often exaggerated, allow us a glimpse into the lives and achievements of these individuals.

 

Arguably the first known (auto)biography comes from the decorated tomb-chapel of a man called Metjen, who lived most of his life during the reign of the Third Dynasty king Netjerikhet Djoser. According to his inscriptions, he also served under Huni, the last king of the Third Dynasty and in the court of Sneferu, the first king of the Fourth Dynasty (Logan 2000, 51 n. 22). He died sometime during the reign of the latter, in the twenty-sixth century BCE (Manley 2023, 68).

 

Metjen was buried in a mastaba close to the Step Pyramid of Djoser, some 400m north of the pyramid enclosure. The mastaba, built of solid stone and largely undecorated, was quite well preserved due to it having been buried under sand. It was discovered by Karl Richard Lepsius in 1843. The T-shaped tomb-chapel was decorated with high-quality limestone and inscribed with detailed hieroglyphs containing “a remarkable amount of inscription, as well as pictorial elements”. It is “the oldest decorated chapel that is almost completely preserved.” (Baines 1999, 29). Lepsius removed the reliefs of the tomb chapel and took them to Berlin (fig. 1) where they are now reconstructed in the Ägyptisches Museum (Manley 2023, 67).  

Fig.1: Offering chapel of Metjen (Limestone Giza Inv.-No. ÄM 1105)

 

The entrance to the tomb chapel leads to a narrow and high passageway (0.67m x 2.52m), which was decorated on both sides with Metjen’s biography (written in columns). The roof of the passageway consisted of limestone blocks, which were shaped to look like cedar logs and placed lengthways. The passageway opened into an offering chamber. On the north side, a window looked into a serdab, a stone box for Metjen’s statue (Manley 2023, 68; Romer 2013, 329). The statue, made of granite, measures 47cm in height, and shows Metjen seated, dressed in fine linen, wearing a curly wig, with his right hand in a fist, resting on his chest and his left hand on his left knee (fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Statue of Metjen (Berlin, ÄM 1106)

 

Three sides of the chair are inscribed with Metjen’s name and titles. As one is facing the statue, on the left side he is referred to as “mouth-opening priest who is before Min, priest of Horus, Metjen”, on the right side he is “servant of the estate of the serdab of the king’s mother, Metjen”, and in the middle, he is “greatest of the ten of Upper Egypt, king’s acquaintance, Metjen” (translation here and all others in italics are my own done in Bill Manley’s Reading Class, The University of Glasgow, 2021).

 

On the west wall of the offering chamber, there is a false door; this is the focus of the chapel and offerings. Its central area is quite wide, and it depicts a striding figure of Metjen with a smaller, seated representation of him above the door (Baines 1999, 30). The false door is decorated with “a prodigious statement of Metjen’s achievements and extensive endowments of land” (Manley 2023, 68). It is also here that his involvement in the upkeeping of the funerary cult of queen Nimaathap, wife of Khasekhemwy and mother of Djoser, is mentioned (Dodson & Hilton 2004, 48; Manley 2023, 68).

 

Metjen’s life is presented to us through his titles and a lengthy statement of 18 columns of text, which are carved on the far west wall of the tomb chapel. The biographical texts on the north and south walls of the entrance passageways give an explanation of his success (Manley 2023, 68). We can learn a significant amount of information about Metjen from these texts. He was not a member of the royal family but came presumably from Xois in the Delta. We know his father’s and mother’s names; his father was Inpu-em-ankh, who was a superintendent of writing, and his mother was Netnebes. Although he inherited his father’s property with royal approval (Romer 2013, 332), he tells us that it had come down to him “with neither wheat nor barley nor anything tangible for an estate but there were people and animals”, which presumably means that he only inherited “debts and responsibilities” from his father (Manley 2023, 70).   

 

However, as his father was an inspector of writing, it is likely that Metjen was taught to read and write, and so “he was put in charge of the writing of the office of provisioning as keeper of the belongings of the office of provisioning”. This is how his public career started, and then presumably he got himself noticed during one of the boat festivals, as in the following lines we read that “he was put as strong-oarsman and physician of the stroke-rowers so that the canal-cutter of Xois would be following the superintendent of the chiefs of stone-cutters of Xois”. This might mean that “Metjen’s prowess was such that even the local governor had to follow his lead” (Manley 2023, 70). 

 

From here, Metjen’s career took off. He was “put as keeper of all the king’s flax”, and became a “staff-bearer”, the governor of Buto, Xois, Dep, Sais, Mendes, and Letopolis (inscription on the North wall of the passageway). He had developed land at the western edge of the Delta, reclaimed desert for settlement, developed wetlands in the Fayum, etc. As Manley (2023, 69) puts it, “Metjen became the go-to man of his age for hydraulic engineering, especially adept at managing the marshes and lands along the fringes of the Nile Delta to ‘open it up’ for agriculture and safe settlement”.

 

At the end of the inscription of the north wall, we find out that a community called “Sheret-Metjen was founded in front of what his father, Inpu-em-ankh gave him.” From the text on the opposite (south) wall, we learn that more communities have been founded in his name, “there were founded for him 12 Sheret-Metjen in Sais, Xois and Letopolis”, and also that he was given “a serdab for his chapel”. He received large areas of land holdings as gifts; “200 arouras (c. 4.8 ha) of fields were brought to him for a reward from the numerous kings”. He was also given 50 arouras of fields for his mother (Manley 2023, 71).

 

Metjen founded a series of gardens; these were walled, with a lake and trees planted in them, e.g., date palms, and fig trees. Vines, salad, and other vegetables were also cultivated there; the grapes were pressed and wine was produced (Romer 2013, 333; Manley 2023, 71). Besides the already mentioned responsibilities, Metjen was also an “Administrator of the desert, Controller of hunters/hunting” as well as in charge of the royal linen production (Romer 2013, 332). There are scenes (the south thickness relief of the false door) showing small desert animals and others where the hunt is evoked through dogs attacking the hindquarters of other animals (Baines 1999, 31).

 

Apart from containing the first (lengthy) biographical texts, Metjen’s tomb-chapel has another significance: it is the earliest to have the ḥtp-dı͗-nsw (offering) formula inscribed (twice on the north side).

 

Metjen’s story is one of success; from humble origins, he rose to be a high official thanks to “the gift of literacy”. His biography is “the first, magnificent celebration of a transformative, new technology – writing.” (Manley 2022, Society of Authors). Interestingly, there are “no direct successors” to Metjen’s inscriptions until the beginning of the Fifth Dynasty (Baines 1999, 34).   

 

Bibliography

Baines, John 1999. Forerunners of narrative biographies. In Leahy, Anthony and John Tait (eds), Studies on ancient Egypt in honour of H. S. Smith, 23–37. London: Egypt Exploration Society.

Dodson, Aidan and Dyan Hilton 2004. The complete royal families of ancient Egypt. London; New York: Thames & Hudson.

Logan, Tom 2000. The jmyt-pr document: form, function and significance. Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 37, 49–73.

Manley, Bill 2022. Metjen, the earliest known writer, Society of Authors. Available at: https://www2.societyofauthors.org/2022/08/04/metjen-the-earliest-known-writer/

Manley, Bill 2023. The oldest book in the world: philosophy in the age of the pyramids. London: Thames & Hudson.

Romer, John 2012. A history of ancient Egypt: from the first farmers to the Great Pyramid. London: Allen Lane.