Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 102-103. (Budapest, 2005)
ZOLTÁN HORVÁTH: A unique servant statue in the Egyptian Collection
small tablets are covered with the original white plaster; hence, it essentially marks the width of the large board, too. If it is assumed that the third scribe statuette from the "pasha's" collection (FM No. 3282) was also furnished with his own writing tablet, an extra 7.0 cm should be added to the minimum height that would amount then to ca. 21 cm. This upright format of 21 x 11 cm may have been an extant one, as it can be compared to MMA 28.9.5, another upright tablet dated to the 11th Dynasty or slightly earlier, that measures 22 cm in height and ca. 8.5 cm in width." Needless to say, this procedure to reconstruct the dimensions of a long-lost board is highly assumptive, yet it serves well to demonstrate that the inscription comprised no more than six columns, perhaps of considerable length, a part of which has since then been completely lost. ON THE NATURE OF THE TEXT Due to the brevity of the inscription and its poor state of preservation, it is rather difficult to comment on the function of the text. Even if the proposed dimensions of the large writing board are indeed indicative, it does not necessarily coincide with the full length of the inscription. 1 The preserved portion, however, is sufficient to suggest that the densely written board once bore a running text, the structure of which was determined by recurring funerary wishes and the naming of the recipient for whom these were requested. These characteristics alienate the text from the group of short, tabulated accounts normally found on model writing boards that are evidently concerned with the activity actualised by the scene. Since scribe figurines holding the stiff tablet on their laps consistently co-occur with a well-defined class of model scenes (mainly granaries, slaughterhouses and any major acts of inspection), the accounts record various goods, predominantly grains and fruit, side by side with their (often excessive) quantities, but never make mention of the beneficiary. 72 With respect to the dating of the text, it was implicitly stated to have belonged to the wider class of offering formulae. However, the preserved part of the inscription gives evidence of only two essential parts of the standard invocation-offering formula: requests and recipient, while the king's formula (i.e., htp-dj-nsw.i) and the associated "god's formula" are missing. While the goods enumerated are indeed those comprising the pr.t-hrw offerings, their sequence here is arbitrary, and the 1100 heqats in col. 1, probably giving the amount of some sort of cereal, would be absolutely unique to the offering formula.
