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

specific monument, but conformably to the general principles of dating. First, even the most conclusive epigraphic, iconographie, stylistic, archaeological etc. feature taken per se matters very little for reliable dating of an Old Kingdom monument (the sole exclusion is the presence of a biographical inscription mentioning a ruling king); only a complex of these qualitatively different criteria can substantiate the date. Their exactness is inevitably diverse and they may even measurably disagree, but they form a kind of a strong framework with its elements supporting one another. Second, our datings are not dots on a temporal axis, but segments of various length, sometimes rather extended ones. They are of probabilistic nature, and when we say that a tomb is dated, for instance, to the reign of Niuserra, this means only that these 24 years are statistically most probable and our dating may well include the reigns of Neferefra and Menkauhor, the vagueness of chronological borders depending on the degree of inexactness of our knowledge. Andrey O. Bolshakov Hermitage Museum, St. Peterburg