The hymn to Ptah as a demiurgic and fertility god on O. Turin CG 57002: Contextualising an autograph by Amennakhte son of Ipuy

During a research stay at the Museo Egizio in September 2014* – which was targeting documents potentially written by the scribe of the necropolis Amennakhte1 (v) son of Ipuy (ii), such as P. Turin Cat. 1879+ TPOP Doc ID 9 (Turin Papyrus Map) and O. Turin CGT 57001 (Hymn to Ramesses IV) – we observed that the state of preservation of O. Turin CGT 57002 is much better2 than could be inferred from the facsimile, hieroglyphic transcription and picture published by López.3 This prompted us to build upon Bickel and Mathieu’s analysis4 and to study this piece anew.In this paper, we first provide a revised hieroglyphic transcription, an annotated translation and comments on the content and motivations for composing this hymn to Ptah. In a second step, we situate the text within the growing corpus of Amennakhte’s literary compositions. We then contextualize the hymn among the scribe’s expressions of religious piety and discuss the Sitz im Leben of this particular hymn. Finally, we argue that this text is likely to be an autograph. As such, the date of copy can be used as a chronologically fixed point for the analysis of Amennakhte’s handwriting.