The Court of King Neb-Ḥepet-Rē Mentu-Hotpe at the Shaṭṭ er Rigāl

Abstract

The Shatt er Rig'll is one of several unimpressive little gaps in the edge of the western sandstone plateau, where it borders the Nile about 35 kilometers above Edfu and about 4 kilometers below Gebel Silsileh. It is inconspicuous from the river, although its entrance is only some fifty paces from the bank (Figs. 1-2). At its mouth it is perhaps thirty paces wide, and from there it follows a serpentine course for about a kilometer back into the low, sandstone hills to a point where it is crossed by sand dunes which can easily be ascended to the rolling desert plateau. Nowadays none of the regular passenger steamers stop in the neighborhood, and the nearest railway station, Kagilg across the river, is a stopping-place for an occasional local train only. It is not surprising, therefore, that in modern times its visitors have been few and far between, and those who have carried notebooks and pencils have broken its solitude scarcely more than half-a-dozen times in the last century. The earliest record of any of these modern visitors is a neatly carved A. C. Harris 18502 under the large relief, which he discovered and of which he made a copy. He communicated his discovery to Sir James Gardner Wilkinson, who seems to have visited the site when he was in Egypt in 1855, for there are copies of some of the inscriptions among the Wilkinson manuscripts now on deposit in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.3 A brief description of the site appears in Wilkinson's Handbook for Travellers in Egypt (1858), page 397, and later editions published by John Murray carried the same note. Seeing the 1867 edition, August Eisenlohr visited the site in 1869, eventually