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.