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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 procedure 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 funerary 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 participated 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.
