The article is devoted to the analysis of the text of the so - called Neapolitan Stele-the autobiography of an Egyptian nobleman, a native of Heracleopolis Sematauitefnakhta, who found himself on the territory of the Achaemenid empire on the eve of the Macedonian conquest. It is suggested that he was deported after the second Persian conquest of Egypt in 343 BC as part of a corporation of priests of the goddess Sokhmet, who were also professional doctors.
Keywords: Sematauitefnakht, Neapolitan stele, autobiography, priest, doctor, Sokhmet, deportation, Achaemenids, Alexander the Great, Egypt, Heracleopolis, Iran.
The source to which this article is devoted - the so-called Neapolitan Stele, named after its place of storage in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples (No. 1035) - is well known to Egyptologists working with texts from the beginning of the Hellenistic period [Tresson, 1930; Kanel, 1984, p. 120-125; Perdu, 1985; RoBler-Kohler, 1991, S. 282-284 (nr. 86a); Burkard, 1994, S. 39-40; Menu, 1995, p. 84-86; Gorre, 2009, p. 210-215]. However, it is much less frequently used by researchers who study this era mainly based on ancient evidence: symptomatically, nothing is said about it in the most detailed essay on the history of Hellenistic Egypt written by the ancient scholar V. Khuss: [NiV, 2001, pp. 52-54].
This monument was discovered in the Temple of Isis in Pompeii during their classical excavations in 1765: it is a rectangular slab with a height of 105 cm and a width of 44 cm [La collezione..., 1989, p. 142 ff. (Nr. 15); Pirelli, 1998; Verhoeven, 2005]. It is possible that initially this slab was part of a monumental stelophor statue (its early descriptions indicate the presence of hieroglyphs on its side faces as well [Tresson, 1930, p.369-371]). It is surmounted by a frieze of 14 figures, which is actually an enigmatic inscription that "ciphers" the name and epithets of the god Herishef [Sethe, 1904-1916, S. 1 (Z. 13); Perdu, 1985, p. 96-97]. Under thi ...
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