by
Damien F. Mackey
“It should be noted … that the king is absent from Ankhtifi’s autobiography …”.
Dr. Doaa M. Elkashef
Just who was this incredible character like no other, the mysterious Ankhtifi?
I asked this question right at the end of my recent article:
Egypt’s high official, Ankhtifi, outboasts even great Senenmut
(4) Egypt’s high official, Ankhtifi, outboasts even great Senenmut | Damien Mackey – Academia.edu
Who, indeed, was Ankhtifi, a high official of Egypt, seemingly a quasi-Pharaoh (see “ruled like a pharaoh” below), who, in his Autobiography, did not even bother to observe standard Egyptian protocol by mentioning the current Pharaoh?
Which means that Egyptologists cannot be exactly sure when Ankhtifi lived.
Bearing a host of impressive titles, Anhktifi – or whoever wrote his Autobiography – boasted of his having been like no other man ever born:
“I am a man without equal …. I am the front of people and the
back of people because (my) like will not exist; he will not exist.
(My) like could not have been born; he was not born”.
Could Ankhtifi have been the renowned Joseph, who likewise was front and centre involved in a terrible Famine? Certainly Ankhtifi’s claim to have been the greatest ever to have been born seems to be echoed in Sirach’s short praise of Joseph (Sirach 49:15):
“Nor was anyone ever born like Joseph …”.
Ankhtifi’s Famine
This was no ordinary famine. It was of long duration, driving Egyptians to resort to cannibalism.
Here I am following Dr. Doaa M. Elkashef’s account of it in “Self-Presentation in the Autobiography of Ankhtifi of Moalla between Tradition and Innovation” (2023):
“I gave bread to the hungry and clothes to the naked. I anointed the unanointed.
I shod the one who had no shoes.
I gave a wife to the one who had no wife. ….
Ankhtifi used the traditional cliché theme of local patronage to introduce the Famine Inscription on Pillar IV. He employed this common theme in a new context in relation to a real event (i.e. the famine):
iw ^maw r-Dr.f m(w)t n Hqr s nb Hr wnm Xrdw.f n sp di(.i) xpr m(w)t n Hq<r> m spAt tn iw di.n(.i) TAbt n Sma [Sma] di.n(.i) mHt
“All of Upper Egypt died because of hunger, every man eating his (own) children; but I never let death happen because of hunger in this nome.
I gave a loan of Upper Egyptian barley
….
Ankhtifi stresses that he fed Elephantine and Iat-Negen in the first and second Upper Egyptian nomes respectively,[1] after satisfying Moalla and Hormer in the [2]third Upper Egyptian nome. The formula sanx.n.i “I made … live” (in the sense of “fed”) is recurrent in the First Intermediate Period texts referring to famine. ….
The theme of famine also figures in the documents of Heqanakht,[3] a kA-priest
(Hm-kA) and farmer during the Middle Kingdom.[4] Heqanakht refers to famine in 4 Letter II as follows:
mk Tn tA r-Dr.f m(w)t n Hqr.[Tn]
“Look, the whole land is dead and [you] have not hungered.”7 5 mk Tn Dd.tw Hqr r Hqr mk Tn SAaw wnm rmT aA
“Look, one should say hunger (only) about (real) hunger. Look, they’ve started to eat people here.”7
Heqanakht boasts of his ability to feed his family while the rest of the country suffers from famine. One might argue that the theme of human cannibalism appearing in the texts of Ankhtifi and Heqanakht is evidence of such terrible famine in their times, so terrible that people were forced to eat their own children. Nevertheless, both Ankhtifi and Heqanakht might be expressing in a rhetorical way how serious the famine events were in their times. The rhetorical device would be hyperbole, an overstatement to impress the audience (contemporaries and posterity) or the addressee.[5]
Reference to famine appears again in the Autobiography of Ankhtifi on Pillar V:
iw grt sanx.n(.i) Nxn WTs-@r Abw Nbyt Hsi w(i) @r Nxn anx n(.i) @mn iw pH.n it-^ma(.i) Iwnt ^Abt m-xt sanx spAt tn m ……s
“Now, I made Hierakonpolis, Edfu, Elephantine and Kom Ombo live so that Horus of Hierakonpolis would favour me and Hemen would live for me.
My Upper Egyptian barley reached Dendera and ^Abt after making this nome live with ……”[6]
Ankhtifi stresses that he fed the third and second Upper Egyptian nomes of Hierakonpolis and Edfu and the towns of Elephantine and Kom Ombo in the first
Upper Egyptian nome for the sake of his local gods, Horus and Hemen.7 He also
stresses that he fed the towns of Dendera and ^Abt in the sixth Upper Egyptian
nome after supplying his own nome.8
[End of quotes]
We read along similar lines at:
Ankhtifi and Khety the nomarchs
Fortunately during these trying times, some nomarchs were competent administrators. They boasted of their achievements on their tomb walls ….
Ankhtifi of Hierakonpolis and Edfu, two of the southernmost nomes of Upper Egypt, had such a high opinion of his military abilities and of himself that he called himself the “great chieftain.” He became nomarch just as low floods became commonplace. “All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger,” his tomb inscriptions tell us. There were reports of cannibalism, of people eating their children; his province becoming like “a starved grasshopper.” As so often happened in famines everywhere, hungry villagers wandered aimlessly in search of food and people fought over water. People were so hungry that they were said to be eating their children. “I managed that no one died of hunger in this nome,” he claimed, as tomb-robbers plundered the dead. Ankhtifi’s grandiloquent inscriptions boasted of loaning precious grain to people upstream, of forbidding the nome’s inhabitants to leave. The nomarch ruled like a pharaoh. “I am the beginning and the end of humankind, for my equal has not and will not come into being.” Fortunately, he controlled food supplies, imposed rationing, and erected temporary dams to impound water. These short-term measures worked and saved many lives, for his leadership was decisive and based on hard-earned local knowledge. ….
[End of quote]
If Ankhtifi were Joseph, though, the last statement above would need modification: “Fortunately, he controlled food supplies, imposed rationing, and erected temporary dams to impound water. These short-term measures worked and saved many lives, for his leadership was decisive and based on hard-earned local knowledge”.
These “measures” were “short-term” in the sense that the dams would have to have been built hastily and may later have fallen into disuse. As I intend to show in later articles, there is abundant evidence for the erection of unadorned, briefly used, infrastructure, such as dams and massive grain storage facilities, in Third Dynasty Egypt, in which I would place Joseph – for one, this accord with the Sehel Famine Stela of king Netjerikhet, a very late document harkening back to Egypt’s Third Dynasty.
But I would also definitely expect a (so-called) ‘Middle’ Kingdom correlation with the Old Kingdom’s Third Dynasty, based on articles of mine (Dr. Courville inspired) such as e.g.:
Egypt’s Old and Middle Kingdoms far closer in time than conventionally thought
And this could bring Ankhtifi’s cannibalising famine right into synch with Heqanakht’s Middle Kingdom cannibalising Famine, as I think must necessarily have been the case.
But leadership at the time was not so much “based on hard-earned local knowledge” as upon Divine inspiration, on Joseph’s ability to interpret dreams, which the Pharaoh trusted to the extent of giving Joseph virtually free rein in the land (Genesis 41:41-44):
So Pharaoh said to Joseph, ‘I hereby put you in charge of the whole land of Egypt’. Then Pharaoh took his signet ring from his finger and put it on Joseph’s finger. He dressed him in robes of fine linen and put a gold chain around his neck. He had him ride in a chariot as his second-in-command, and people shouted before him, ‘Make way!’ Thus he put him in charge of the whole land of Egypt. Then Pharaoh said to Joseph, ‘I am Pharaoh, but without your word no one will lift hand or foot in all Egypt’.
Genesis 42:6:
“Now Joseph was the governor of the land, the person who sold grain to all its people”.
Ankhtifi:
I never let death happen because of hunger in this nome.
I gave a loan of Upper Egyptian barley ….
Joseph’s new name
Genesis 44:45:
“Pharaoh gave Joseph the name Zaphenath-Paneah and gave him Asenath daughter of Potiphera, priest of On, to be his wife. And Joseph went throughout the land of Egypt”.
Can the name Ankhtifi be found in Joseph’s given Egyptian name, Zaphenath-Paneah?
This is a difficult matter since no two commentators seem to be able to reach a consensus on the meaning of Joseph’s new name.
Here I turn to professor A. S. Yahuda who has proven in the past to be a trustworthy guide in matters pertaining to Egyptian linguistics.
Abraham Yahuda suggested for Zapheath-paneah, ḏfꜣ n tꜣ pꜣ ꜥnḫ, “the living one is the sustenance of (the) land”, or ḏfꜣ n tꜣ pw ꜥnḫ “the sustenance of the land is he, the living one.” (Yahuda, A. S. (1930). Eine Erwiderung auf Wilhelm Spiegelbergs “Ägyptologische Bemerkungen” zu meinem Buche “Die Sprache des Pentateuch”. Leipzig. p. 7., cited by Vergote, p. 144).
In professor Yahuda’s explanation of this Egyptian name I think that we can basically find, in hypocoristicon form, the three elements that constitute the name, Ankhtifi: viz., Ankh (ꜥnḫ); ti (tꜣ); fi (fꜣ).
I should mention that Eulalío Eguía Jr. has also made the identification of Joseph as Ankhtifi, whom he, however, connects with Egypt’s Ninth Dynasty.
This video raises some interesting points not to be found in my present article.
Ankhtifi a polytheist?
Whilst Ankhtifi fails to refer to a king, and also makes little reference to the Egyptian gods, he does tell of his guidance by the god Horus, and also mentions Hemen.
Horus-Hemen can be reduced to the one compound deity.
Since Egypt would likely have had no name for – nor interest in – the God of the Hebrews, the best that the writer of Ankhtifi’s Autobiography might have been able to come up with may have been simply Horus, the god of kings.
The monotheistic pharaoh, Akhnaton, much later on, would have to grapple with the problem of how to represent the one true God to the polytheistic Egyptian people.
[1] J. Vandier, “La stèle 20.001 du 7 Musée du Caire,” Mélanges Maspero I (1935): 138 (lines 3–4).
[2] Vandier, “La stèle 20.001 du 8Musée du Caire,” 138 (line 7); translation: Lichtheim, Literature I, 89.
[3] The papyri of Heqanakht do not name any king. However, two regnal years are mentioned only 4 in Account V, “Year 5” (line 1) and “Year 8” (lines 34, 37), J. P. Allen, The Heqanakht Papyri (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002), 18, 19, pl. 40. Winlock, followed by James, assigned the documents to the reign of Seankhkare Montuhotep III, H. E. Winlock, Excavations at Deir el-Bahri, 1911-1931 (New York: Macmillan Company, 1942), 58–61; James, Hekanakhte Papers, 2–3. Subsequent studies, however, have argued for a date twenty to forty years later, during the Twelfth Dynasty, in the reign of Amenemhat I or that of Senusret I, H. Goedicke, Studies in the Hekanakhte Papers (Baltimore: Halgo, 1984), 8–10; D. Arnold, “Amenemhat I and the Early Twelfth Dynasty at Thebes,” MMJ 26 (1991): 35–38; A. J. Spalinger, “Calendrical Evidence and Hekanakhte,” ZÄS 123, no. 1 (1996): 85–96; Allen, Heqanakht Papyri, 128. 7 Allen, Heqanakht Papyri, 16, pl. 30 (line 3).5
[4] Allen, Heqanakht Papyri, 17, pl. 30 (lines 276 –28).
[5] Baldick, Oxford Dictionary, 119. 7 Cannibalism was not an acceptable cultural practice in ancient Egypt, C. J. Eyre, The Cannibal Hymn: A Cultural and Literary Study (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), 158–59.
[6] For Hemen, the local god of Hefat (Moalla)9 , see V. Vikentiev, La haute crue du Nil et l’averse de l’an 6 du roi Taharqa: Le dieu “Hemen” et son chef-lieu “Hefat” (Le Caire, Imp. de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1930); Vandier, Mocalla, 7–13. 8 On these localities, cf. Vandier, 0 Mocalla, 25–33.
Joseph and Moses impacted Egypt 