a period of nearly 35 years, from the end of the 26th Dynasty down to year 30 of Dareios I (492 BCE; Posener 1936: pp. 88–116).
Numerous stelae attest the burials of three Apis bulls during the reign of Dareios I; for the first of them the official epitaph from year 4 (518 BCE) is preserved (Posener 1936: pp. 36–41). For the Apis bulls that continued being installed and buried under the later Achaemenids any direct inscriptional evidence is lacking; there is, however, a damaged mention of Artaxerxes I in the context of events regarding the “Mothers of Apis” (Smith et al. 2011: pp. 15–25).
A small stela in Berlin shows Dareios in the form of divine falcon adored by a private individual, a unique example of presumably posthumous divinization of this ruler (Burchardt 1911: pp. 71–72; Vittmann 2003: fig. 60). Particular esteem of Dareios, though on a more mundane level, is demonstrated by a text on the verso of the so‐called Demotic Chronicle: there, Dareios I is presented as a king who had the earlier laws of the Egyptians until year 44 of Amasis (527 BCE) systematically collected (Kuhrt 2010: p. 125 [b]).
Many Demotic administrative documents are dated to the reign of Dareios I, among them an archive from Thebes that concerns the private affairs of funerary priests in the period from Amasis to Dareios (Pestman and Vleeming 1994). A famous papyrus, the copy of the lengthy draft of a petition which was to be submitted to a high official of Dareios, vividly describes the vexations suffered by an Egyptian temple scribe at the hands of the local clergy when trying to recover the prebends that had been snatched away by the priests from his ancestors in the past (Vittmann 1998; Hoffmann and Quack 2007: pp. 22–54). An important group of papyri is formed by the so‐called correspondence of the satrap Pherendates from Elephantine, which illustrates the concern of the Achaemenid authorities for the administrative and economic aspects of an Egyptian temple (Kuhrt 2010: pp. 852–854; Martin 2011: pp. 288–292). Another letter of identical provenance sheds some light on the unrests in this area which may have been connected with the rebellions that took place at the end of Dareios' rule (Martin 2011: pp. 295–296).
As for the successors of Dareios I, Egyptian sources from the Nile valley are extremely rare. Xerxes and Artaxerxes I are mentioned in some hieroglyphic graffiti in the Wadi Hammamat left by two high Persian officials of the local administration (Posener 1936: pp. 120–128; here Figure 12.3). Whereas there are some Demotic papyri that can be assigned to the rule of Artaxerxes I (Devauchelle 1995: pp. 38–40; Smith and Martin 2009: pp. 31–39, with interesting prosopographic connections with Aramaic documents), there is no papyrological evidence at all for Xerxes. An inscription from the early years of Greek rule, the so‐called “satrap stela,” depicts him as an impious ruler of the past who seized property of the Egyptian gods but was finally expelled by them from his palace, together with his son (Schäfer 2011: pp. 146–151). Dareios II is the king into whose reign two fragmentary Demotic papyri from Saqqara with official reports can be dated (Smith and Martin 2009: pp. 24–31). Over the last two decades, however, several hundreds of Demotic ostraca were discovered in Ain el‐Manawir (Kharga Oasis), many of them dating to the latter half of the First Persian Domination (Artaxerxes II, Dareios II). These documents from the area of the temple of Osiris‐Iu, a local form of Osiris, testify to the continuity of cultic and religious activities in this period, and concern various aspects of public life such as water rights and agriculture. One ostracon is particularly interesting because of its date, “year 2” of a prince Inaros. Whatever the correct reading of his title (Chauveau 2004 “great one of the rebels”; Winnicki 2006 “great one of the Bakales,” a Libyan tribe), he is most probably to be identified with one of the two(?) fifth‐century rebels named Inaros that are known from Aramaic and Greek sources.
Figure 12.3 Graffito of the Persian official Athiavahya from year 28 of Xerxes in the Wadi Hammamat.
Source: Reproduced by permission of Kurt Tausend.
A first edition of these ostraca by Chauveau and Agut‐Labordère is now available on the Achemenet site (www.achemenet.com; for a preliminary report see Chauveau 2011).
For the Second Persian Period (340/39–32 BCE; for the former date see Depuydt 2010), the only Egyptian sources that can be attributed to this period are some coins with the name of Artaxerxes (III) in Demotic (Kuhrt 2010: p. 413, Fig. 9.8) and a contract concerning a house division from the reign of Dareios III (Cenival 1966). There are, however, some hieroglyphic inscriptions that might possibly refer to events of that period: Petosiris, a high official in the administration of the temple of Thoth at Hermopolis, alludes to the troubles that befell Egypt (Kuhrt 2010: pp. 460–461). An inscription from the time of Philippus Arrhidaeus reports the rescue of the corpses of the sacred falcons that had been profanated by the “foreigners,” presumably the Persians toward the end of their rule (Sherman 1981: p. 90). Like Udjahorresnet some two centuries earlier, Somtutefnakhte, a priest of Harsaphes in Herakleopolis, spent a certain time of his life outside Egypt: the inscriptions of the so‐called “Naples stela” probably allude to the battle of Issos (333 BCE, Kuhrt 2010: pp. 458–459). It should not be forgotten, however, that all these documents that have been brought in connection with the Second Persian Period never mention the king by name, which leaves some doubt concerning the reliability of the current ascriptions.
The exact date of Chababash, an ephemerous Egyptian “anti‐king” in the last years of the Second Persian Domination, is unknown (Depuydt 2010: pp. 192–193; Vittmann 2011: p. 410; Schäfer 2011, passim).
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13 Lippert,
