The article shows that the traditional scenes of the deceased standing before the gods in the chapel of the tomb of the priest Petosiris in Tuna el-Gebel near Hermopolis (late IV century BC) are connected exclusively with the posthumous fate of Petosiris ' older relatives who died before him. The design of pronaos, dedicated to himself, with their deliberate Hellenization, reproduces the archaic model of the "Twin world", characteristic of private tombs of the 3rd millennium. Apparently, Petosiris ' desire to find a posthumous existence on this model independently of the gods is connected with his conviction that it is impossible to enter into effective contact with the deities through the illegitimate Macedonian rulers of Egypt.
Keywords: Egypt, Hellenism, tomb, priests, Hermopolis, afterlife, gods, Double, decoration.
The tomb of the Hermopolis temple priest Thoth Petosiris "Given by Osiris "(Ranke, 1935, p. 123) is undoubtedly the most famous monument of the Greco-Roman necropolis in Tuna el-Gebel (see: Kessler, 1981, p. 83-109; 1986; Aufrere and Golvin, 1997, p. 211-217). It was excavated in the 1910s by G. Lefebvre. He prepared its normative edition [Lefebvre, 1923 (1); Lefebvre, 1923 (2); Lefebvre, 1924]; the latest photographic edition supplemented it: [Cherpion, Corteggiani, Gout, 2007]. However, being immediately assessed as a very interesting monument, this tomb relatively rarely became the subject of special research. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, its murals were painted, in particular:
The article is published in the framework of the RGNF project No. 15-01-00431 " The Hellenistic era and its rulers in the mirror of traditional worldviews of the peoples of the Middle East (on the example of Egypt and Mesopotamia)".
page 48The scene of the bull sacrifice on its southern wall became the subject of controversy between P. Monte (Montet, 1926) and Sh. Picard (1931) on the degree of influence of Persian or Greek art here1. Later, at the turn of the 1970s and 198 ...
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