Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 102-103. (Budapest, 2005)

ZOLTÁN HORVÁTH: A unique servant statue in the Egyptian Collection

According to the general captions, documents containing pr.t-hrw lists can also be identified in a particular scene referred to in the scholarly literature as "presenting the scroll .

11 It frequently appears in Old and Middle Kingdom private chapels and depicts the large-scale figure of the tomb-owner, to whom a written document is handed over or read aloud. Since the scene is typically associated with representations of various types of work generally involving the figure of a scribe who carefully records the flow of goods, there can be little doubt that the document being presented is actually a summary account composed of what these scribes had previously jotted down. Unfortunately, just a few representations go into details as to the content of these documents, but if they do, the inscription proves to be the same type of tabulated lists of commodities that can be encountered on the surface of inscribed model boards.

74 Lists of commodities and detailed accounts do occur on contemporaneous largescale writing tablets,'' and two writing boards have survived from the early Middle Kingdom containing full invocation offering formulae of the age: MMA 28.9.5, cited above on account of its dimensions as compared with those of the reconstructed board,

76 and BM EA 56870, written on both sides with an elaborated version of the offering formula" (unfortunately, to date none of them have received full publication); an inscription directly comparable to that of the Budapest tablet, however, has not yet been traced. Nevertheless, being easy to wipe, real writing boards were employed extensively for recording a relatively wide range of texts of interim importance, most of them evincing an explicit didactic character in their utilisation. 8 The two wooden tablets mentioned above support that owing to their frequent occurrence on various media, like stelae, coffins, wall decoration, etc., drafts of funerary formulae were definitely one of these texts as early as in the Middle Kingdom. In fact, all the extant writing tablets from the period under consideration show traces that allow us to conclude that their texts were invariably used as training aids at an advanced level of scribal education.

79 It was noted above that despite the limited access to the text, the inscription on the Budapest board also exhibits minor grammatical as well as orthographical mistakes, which go together with an evincible vagueness in contexture and in the shaping of more complex signs. Keeping this in mind, and admittedly for want of a more satisfactory explanation, I would tentatively propose that the inscription at full length may have been a scribal exercise focusing on the crucial elements of the offering formula.