Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 104. (Budapest, 2006)

ÉVA LIPTAY: Between Heaven and Earth II: The Iconography of a Funerary Papyrus from the Twenty-First Dynasty (Part I.)

The papyri in question, apparently, did not attach great importance to which hand is raised, but much greater to the visibility of the hand: for obvious reasons, the direction of the scene serving as closing motif had to be turned 180 degrees compared to the precursor in the royal tomb; it is logical therefore that thus the other ("visible") hand is raised here. The mingling of Min with the Osiris-figure at the moment of the sunrise is accounted for not only by his close connection to fertility, but also to the East, to the eastern horizon.

43 The raised arm symbolises both the recent victory over the enemy (m$

c-hrw) and the joy felt because ofthat.

44 The ithyphallic character, as well as the raised arm and clenched fist, emphasise the role played by the masculine features of the androgynous god in (self-) creation.

41 The god penetrating into the sky with his hand is the lord of the sky, the power possessing the sky and fertilising the sky-goddess. He reaches the sky and breaks through its boundaries.

46 The clenched fist recalls the fist-symbols held in the four baboons' hands in the 12th hour (90th scene) of the Book of Gates, which call to mind the gesture of the welcoming and celebration of the god being reborn in the East.

47 THE SCARABS As it was mentioned above, the scarab holding the sun-disc in the Ramesses IX version is proceeding straight to the god's raised hand;

48 this, however, is not the case in the Twenty-first Dynasty versions of the same scene, where the motif can no longer be directly connected to the hand of the main figure. The scarab on the Heruben papyrus gets a different explanation due to its positioning: it seems that this new figure of the god, put on at dawn, comes out of the erect phallus of the ithyphallic god, which also makes the relationship of the two very close.

49 In the Henuttawi version, however, he cannot be directly connected to the great god: his doubled form with the sun-disc makes up a separate unit on the papyrus. We can witness an interesting phenomenon on the Budapest papyrus: the scarab is in the foreground of the scene, and similarly to the former, it is in a doubled form, but without a sun-disc. One of them is looking upwards, the other in the direction of the beginning of the papyrus. Two iconographical precursors can be found in late Ramesside royal tombs. 1. In the lower register oi the enigmatic wall of Ramesses IX, on the right, four androgynous figures bending backwards can be seen with a sun-disc on the body of each.-" The sun being reborn is coming out of their phallus in the form of a child/fire (sdty) (as the mswt-îorm of the sun),'

1 and from their mouth in the form of a scarab (as the hprw form of the sun). Above the former black scarab, another smaller, red