The messy scribe from Deir el-Medina : a palaeographical journey through the texts of a draughtsman, scribe, and poet from the 19th dynasty : Pay (i)

Abstract

This paper gathers a number of texts that it argues were written by a single scribe from Deir el-Medina who lived during the first half of the 19th Dynasty and who was active mostly during the reign of Ramesses II. The identification of these texts takes as its point of departure the archeological context of ‘Maison G/J’, situated north of the Ptolemaic temple and to the east of the Grand Puits. Based on palaeographic, orthographic, and thematic evidence, the paper shows that this scribe wrote a series of hymns to Amun that are expressive of a vivid personal piety. By correlating certain features of this scribe’s handwriting, it further argues that the same scribe was also responsible for hymns addressed to the deities Mut, Taweret, and Iaret, as well as for a hymn to Thebes. Outside of the literary realm, the same hand is attested in administrative documents, including letters that allow us to situate the scribe in question within a family of draughtsmen. The paper identifies this polygraph as Pay (i) – the first of this line of draughtsmen from Deir el-Medina – to whom dozens of hieratic texts can be attributed.