Hedvig Győry: Mélanges offerts a Edith Varga „Le lotus qui sort de terre” (Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts Supplément 1. Budapest, 2001)
ANDREY O. BOLSHAKOV: Osiris in the Forth Dynasty Again? The false door of 'Intj, MFA 31.781
Supplement The dating of the tomb ofprincess Hm.t-r c (w) in the light of Baud's criticism It may be appropriate now to discuss Baud's criticism of my dating of the tomb of princess Hm.t-r r (w), following his arguments one after another. 1. I do not use dating criteria developed by Nadine Cherpion. The book by Cherpion 91 is perhaps the most cited during the last decade work on the Old Kingdom, great interest towards it being not unfounded. Cherpion has a very good eye for minor iconographie features and her criteria as such are really excellent and most detailed in the history of Old Kingdom studies. Nonetheless, they by no means form a consistent system of dating. Monuments are attributed to the reigns on the basis of a single characteristic - the presence of royal cartouches. However, the fact that cartouches are of little importance for dating Old Kingdom monuments and give only termini ante quern non is an axiom for more than a half of a century. Cherpion no doubt knows this rule, but in reality she unconditionally uses cartouches as giving reliable dates. Strange as it may be, her readers also forget that cartouches are only of very limited importance and accept her criteria without restrictions - probably because dating is such a crucial problem for Old Kingdom Egyptology that we subconsciously want to believe that a work has appeared that can give us firm footing at last. Cherpion neglects other, first of all archaeological and epigraphic criteria, which makes her "amend" more or less evident data for the sake of her theory (the most striking example is her tendency to redate late Old Kingdom Giza monuments to the Fourth Dynasty, which runs counter to the "horizontal stratigraphy" of the necropolis and everything we know about the logic of its development). Cherpion's criteria may and should essentially complement other methods of dating, but when taken uncritically, they are very dangerous (which is a reproach not at her, but mainly at careless admirers of her book). 92 2. My assumption that a certain $pss-kl.fr nh(.w) represented in the chapel of Hm.t-r c (w) as her associate is the owner of a neighbouring tomb that is not earlier than Jzzj is too weak to be used for dating . If taken alone, this is certainly not a decisive reason, but similar situations are common when we deal " Cherpion, op. cit. (note 61) n Cf. also S. J. Seidlmayer, Stil und Statistik, Die Datierung dekorierter Gräber des Alten Reiches - Ein Problem der Methode, in: J. Müller - A. Zimmermann (Hrsg.), Archäologie und Korrespondenzanalyse: Beispiele, Fragen, Perspektiven, Espelkamp 1997, pp. 20-22.
