This little lady is the Princess Nefertiabet. The stela depicts some of the items placed in her tomb to ensure her comfort in the afterlife. On the far right is an inventory of the clothes and fabrics buried with her. You can see the glyphs for her name right over her head. These particular glyphs are read from right to left, which you can tell because of the direction the princess is looking.

The glyphs are transliterated as sA.t-nsw nfr.t-iAb.t, or "daughter of the king, Nefertiabet". Note that the sign for "king", sw, is actually written before the word for "daughter", sA.t, but is pronounced after it. This is called "honorific transposition": the signs for words referring to eminent persons (kings and gods) are placed at the beginning of compounds as a sign of respect, although grammatically they come at the end of the compound. The sign for t is the marker of the feminine gender and, for example, turns the masculine sA, "son", into the feminine sA.t, "daughter".

© 1999, Terrence Donnelly