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Rahotep and Nofret
These statues of Rahotep and his wife Nofret date from the Old Kingdom and contain some of the oldest texts on this
website. They were discovered in 1871 at Meidum near the pyramid of the 4th Dynasty King
Sneferu (ca. 2625 - 2585 BCE). It is possible that Rahotep was Sneferu's son.
The statues are made of painted limestone, about 122 cm high, which makes the
images of Rahotep and Nofret basically life-sized. The paint is amazingly fresh and bright. The eyes of the
statues are made of inlaid crystal, which frightened the first workers to open the tomb. Rahotep's neat
moustache and close-cropped hair give him a very modern look. This style of adornment apparently did not survive into
later ages. Nofret wears a wig, and if you look closely at her hairline, you can see her natural hair peeking
out from under it.
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There are six lines of text around Rahotep's
statue, arranged in three columns on each side. The text is read from top to
bottom, right to left. The last column in each group is the same, so I
have written it only once. Beginning with the text on the left side of the
statue (over Rahotep's right shoulder), the hieroglyphs read
 Great One
 of Buto,
Overseer of
Transporters,
Overseer of
the Army,
Controller
of Archers,
King's Son
of his own body,
Rahotep.
The text on the right reads
Great One of the Seers
of Heliopolis
Unique One of the Great Ones of the Hall
Hewer of the Ames mace
Eldest2 of the Palace1
Unique One of the Great Ones at the
Place of the Beer Measurers.
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The text beside his wife is also read top to bottom. There is only a single
line of text on her statue, repeated on both sides:
King's Acquaintance,
Nofret.
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Place your mouse over the glyphs for
their transliterations.
This text is rather difficult to interpret: the language is a thousand years older
than the Classical Middle Egyptian that is covered in most of this site, and given the nature of the text (a list of
titles), there isn't a lot of context to aid interpretation. In addition, the text contains unusual spellings and
abbreviations. I wasn't able to find two sources that agreed in
every particular, so the above is my own reading of the titles, relying heavily on the work of Wolfgang Helck.
- The word
sT.tiw
transport workers has a couple of
unusual features: the determinative comes at an odd place, not at the end but
in the middle of the word (I've regularized it in my rendering), and the
nisbe suffix .tiw,
meaning those concerned with transporting is represented by the single
glyph for t.
- The title imy-r (m)Sa
Overseer of the Army is also sometimes translated General.
Note that the word mSa
is missing a glyph for m.
- The word tmA
Archers needs some study. The Beinlich wordlist of Egyptian terms
gives the definition Rotte Soldaten for
tmA, and my
German dictionary tells me that Rotte means
group, gang, crew. The phonetic glyphs for t-mA are followed by what
appears to be a quiver with arrows, so I think we are justified in
expressing the whole idea of
gang of soldiers with arrows as the one term Archers.
- The phrase sA nsw{t}
shows honorific transposition (with the sedge glyph for the king coming first
although used second), and besides meaning King's son, can of course
also be translated Prince. The glyph for
t is not really
needed except maybe to balance the composition.
- The word Spn(t).tiw
is given by Helck simply as jugs. However, Faulkner gives the meaning of measure of beer for the
word
Spnt, moreover, this writing shows the determiniative for
place and a glyph spelling out the nisbe suffix .tiw, and it is on these
features that I base my translation.
- Nofret's title of rx.t nsw(t) King's (Female) Companion also shows
honorific transposition, with royal sedge symbol first in the grouping. It's also possible that the single sign
for n is part of this grouping, and not part of Nofret's name.
Reference
Helck, Wolfgang, Researches on the Thinite Era, 1987
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