ИСТИНА

An inscription on the statuette of the elder son of Nectanebo II (former collection of Tigran Kelekian, later in the possession of Arakel Pasha Nubar; present location unknown) contains the following phrase: “(When) I was among the foreigners she (the goddess Isis) put forward my place in the heart of their ruler; she brought me to Egypt” (left side of the rear support, col. 4: wn.i imytw xAst(y)w sxnt.s st.i m ib n HoA.zn in.s wi r BAkt ). Traditionally this phrase was understood as a part of the prince’s biography pertaining to his alleged stay at Persia during the Second Persian Domination (343-332 B.C.) and the favour of a Persian Great King to him (cf. the case of Somtutefnakht narrated in his Stela of Naples: Urk. II. 1-6). However, there are a number of details that would allow an alternative to this view. (1) The normal denotation of the Persian Empire in the early Hellenistic hieroglyphic texts is %tt (lit. “Asia”; cf. the Stela of Naples and the Satrap Stela). There was no controversy among scholars that the word transliterated xAswt should in this case be understood “foreigners”, not “foreign countries”; it cannot be denied categorically that this denotation could be applied to the Persians but in the majority of its early Hellenistic attestations it seems to apply to the troops of the Macedonian rulers of Egypt (cf. the inscriptions in the tomb of Petosiris, on the naophorous statue of Djed-Hor the Saviour, on the sarcophagus of the “general” Nectanebo). (2) The “ruler” mentioned in the present phrase seems to be identical with the one appearing in the titles of the prince, in his epithet “sweet of love in the heart of the ruler (surface of the rear support, col. 1: bnr mrt m ib n HoA); however in the latter case the word HoA “ruler” is written with the determinative A44 showing a ruler in the white (“Upper Egyptian”) crown, i.e. a legitimate Egyptian king. There is a reason to doubt that this writing would apply to one of the last Achaemenids who were probably denied a status of legitimate Pharaohs); however, the same word is written in a similar way in the Long Biographical Inscription of Petosiris where it seems to be applied to Alexander the Great (in the epithet “the ruler of the foreign countries as a protector of Egypt”; col. 28: HoA nw xAswt m nDty Hr Kmt). Hence there is a possibility that the inscription of the statuette of the Egyptian prince tells about his stay not at the Persian court but at the court of Alexander at Asia. A parallel to this evidence can with some grounds be looked for in the biographical inscription of Wennefer from his tomb at Saqqara. According to its earlier and still undisputed interpretation by Fr. von Kaenel (BSFE 87-88, 1980), it describes the adventures of an Egyptian nobleman contemporary to Dynasty XXX; having come to disfavor under Tachos (ca. 361/0-359/8 B.C.), he later went to this king to his army fighting the Persians, appeared somehow at the court of the Great King (Artaxerxes II or III), and, after a kind reception there, returned to Egypt. This interpretation has in it a number of inconsistencies: the most drastic of them is that the highlight on the positive effect of Wennefer’s visit to the Great King, which is found in the autobiography, is implausible under such circumstances as the recent war with Persia under Tachos, the flight of Tachos deposed by Nectanebo II to the Persian court, the eventual menace of Persian assault throughout the reign of Nectanebo II and the hatred for Persians after this assault was realized in 343 B.C. that lasted as long as the early Hellenistic time. Besides the interpretation by von Kaenel leaves unexplained quite a number of minor details. All this allows proposing a re-dating of these events in Wennefer’s life to an epoch of the 4th century B.C., evidently following the reign of Nectanebo II, when Egypt was under the dominion of a foreign ruler staying outside it but recognized its legitimate king (in the autobiography he must have been the host of Wennefer outside Egypt). Historically this must be with greatest probability the time of Alexander the Great.