Oldal 82 [82]
background in which capacity he served in these missions. Two other officials appear
on a rock-stele (No. 12) which commemorates an expedition to the stone quarry at Wadi
Hammamat from the reign of Ramesses IV. The leader of the expedition was the ‘high
priest of Amun’ and ‘overseer of work’ Ramessesnakht, in whose company — among
some other high ranking officials — there were two wb3 nswt ‘royal wb3s’, Nakhtamun
and his colleague, Usermaatresekheper.*“* The usage of the title wb3 nswt here is not the
one that one would expect in a report of an expedition, rather wdpw nswt usually appears
in these sort of special missions. A possible explanation could be the position of the
two officials in the assignment, the intensity of their active participation in it, namely
they did not function as active leaders but — as the phrasing of the text implies — they
‘only’ accompanied the leader in the mission, possibly as agents of the ruler in the role
of observers.
IL5.2.2.2. Preparation of a royal tomb
Several documents render an account of the preparation and the inspection of the pro¬
cedure of royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings by certain delegations of high ranking
officials among whom ‘royal wdpws’ appear in great number, in some cases more than
one of them acted together. From the present corpus, fourteen officials are presented in
these delegations from the reign of Merneptah until the time of Ramesses XI.
The necropolis journal CG 25504~° shows Ramessesemperre as a member of a visiting
commission at the tomb of Merneptah in the Valley of the Kings, together with the
‘vizier’ Panehsy and the ‘scribe’ Penpamer, in order to inspect the procedure of placing
the coffins into their places, it is supposed, into the tomb. In the next five days, the same
delegation visited the tomb, probably to inspect the placing of additional pieces of funer¬
ary equipment. The ostracon DeM 45” describes the arrival of a delegation of high
ranking officials to the Valley of the Kings in the 2” regnal year of Ramesses IV to select
a site for constructing the tomb of the ruler. Besides the ‘vizier’ Neferrenpet two ‘royal
wdpws’, Hori and Amenkhau were also a members of the delegation. Amenkhau par¬
ticipated in another commission regarding the tomb of Ramesses IV reported in
> For a discussion on Nakhtamun and Usermaatresekheper, see p. 234. and p. 235, respectively, for
the inscription of the stele, see [79] Stele, Wadi Hammamat No. 12 on p. 560.
45 For further discussion on the usage of the two titles, see p. 91.
#6 For the text of the ostracon, see [53] Ostracon, Cairo, 25504 on p. 496.
47 For the text of the ostracon, see [73] Ostracon, Deir el-Medina No. 45 + Ostracon, Berlin, P.12651 +
Ostracon, Vienna, H.4. on p. 535.