Egyptian antiquities, scarabs : an introduction to the study of Egyptian seals and signet rings.

  • Newberry, Percy E. (Percy Edward), 1869-1949.
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Egyptian antiquities, scarabs : an introduction to the study of Egyptian seals and signet rings. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    perhaps, the oldest of the many hundreds of titles that we find at all periods of Egyptian history, and from the Third Dynasty onwards there was probably not a man of less than royal rank who would not have been proud to bear it. It originally meant, as we have said, “ the Sealer of the Honey [jars],’ honey being the greatest of all primitive luxuries, and its use reserved for the king’s table. This title must therefore be regarded as a relic of the most extreme antiquity, and it certainly goes back to the time before the use of wine in the Nile Valley. At the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty (circa 3000 b.c.), however, its meaning had probably become already obsolete, and from that period onwards it meant nothing more than a “ Royal Sealer,” * 1 2 or one entitled to use a seal with the monarch’s name engraven upon it. Doubtless there were several of these officers employed in the royal palaces to look after the security of the king’s private property, and it was the duty of some of them to accompany the sovereign on his various military expeditions.3 In contradistinction to this secular title we find the ^ ^ “ Divine Sealer,” the priest who had ought probably to be considered as a survival from a prehistoric state of society in which wine was unknown (cf Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. XV, p. 21). If this meant “Treasurer of the King of Lower Egypt,” we should expect to find a corresponding ^ “ 1 reasurer of the King of Upper Egypt,” but this title, so far as^I know, never occurs. 1 In the Twelfth Dynasty and later is found the frequently recurring variant ^ g. See A.Z., 1890, p. 91. 2 Stele of Kuban, 1. u.