Night into Day

Many have waged the awesome battle of the footnote in which the explanatory data threaten to become greater than the text itself. In some cases the final product is impressive to view if only for the wealth of supporting Information and evidence of deep erudition^ On the other hand, such a tendency, deliberate or otherwise, can lead to obfuscation of the argument, a reef upon which many a Scholar has foundered. In a recent discussion of the priestly rota system in the Twelfth Dynasty, based on the Illahun material, I purposely avoided extending the study when considering the problem of the commencement of feasts in temples, as that would have entailed burdening the reader with an oversupply of Information ancillary to the main point of the article^. Fortunately, I could do so from a position independent of mere length, as Ulrich Luft's study of the beginning of the Egyptian day appeared almost simultaneously with the final redaction of my work^. The present analysis in many ways complements Luft's study while at the same time providing additional data and commentary on the still-interesting problem of time and its relation to the Performance of rites, festivals, and religious observances in Egyptian temples. In many ways the scholarly tradition relating to the occurrence of feasts in the morning goes back to Kurt Sethe, who in a series of studies presented the first detailed analysis of the common yet troublesome phrase hd His conclusion was to Interpret the term as the eve before the specific event subsequendy mentioned, wherein the word "eve" meant the day before. For Sethe, at least, M ß did not refer to the morning upon which a festival took place. (Let us remember that an Egyptian day began astronomically at the dawn and ran until, but not including, the next dawn.) Parker, in his Calendars, challenged this viewpoint, correctly I believe, by referring to the well known inscription of Kheruef concerning the erection of the dd pillar; however, the pure philological analysis of Gilula went against Parker's Interpretation^ This academic dispute presents a useful paradigm of how texts can be read by different people in different ways owing to the orientation of the researcher, and it is noteworthy that in his up-to-date publication of the tomb of Kheruef, Wente opts for Parker's Interpretation rather than Gilula's^. Luft's astronomical perspective has provided unalterable support for Parker's conclusion, with a wealth of additional Information. It is interesting that the passage regarding the erection of the dd pillar was often combined with other inscriptions, perhaps the most notable of which is a partially fragmented scene of Amunhotpe III from Soleb^. This depiction has a provocative history quite similar in historiography and misinterpretation to that of hd ß. The relief of Soleb was published by Lepsius, albeit imperfectly, in the last Century. To