The marvel in the desert: some observations on the inscription m 191 of the pharaoh Nebtauira Mentuhotep III's expedition to Wadi Hammamat

The Wadi Hammat inscriptions M 110 and M 191 are the earliest ancient Egyptian narratives focused upon marvels- biAywt «given» by gods to expeditions to the desert. Containing a new translation of M 110, the article reveals the reasons for the creation of the story about the revelation of a well previously invincible to the expedition of the Year 2 of Nebtauira Mentuhotep III, the last known Eleventh dynasty king. The propagandist purpose of this expedition’s inscriptions was to proclaim this king the dearest son of the god Min exercising oversight of those desert lands. However, after the arrival of the expedition in the Wady Hammamat, it turned out, that some three centuries earlier subjects of Merira Pepi I of the Sixth dynasty had found there a natural reservoir in a rock crevice («couloir»), then named in the honour of that king «Festive Hall of Merira» (in 1948- 1949 it was rediscovered by G. Goyon in Wadi el-Chagg). Therefore, the «propagandists» of Mentuhotep III had to declare that it was also to his expedition that some well was revealed by the god - so that no one could ever doubt that Min loved Mentuhotep III more than Pepi I. It is shown in the article that some details of the text of M 110 - the unusual determinative of the noun Xnmt «well» in line 3 or the phrase Hr rA=s nb in line 4, etc. - are connected with certain specific features of the reservoir in the «Festive Hall of Merira». Nevertheless, its equation with the well in M 110, once suggested by R. Vergnieux, seems to be improbable; rather, the author of M 110 was just influenced by the appearance of that real reservoir. The just revealed reason for the creation of M 191 is pretty much in parallel with that for the insertion of the subscript «The First Occurrence of the Jubilee- sd » into the scene depicting Mentuhotep III in front of the god Min in M 110. Actually, this ruler never celebrated the sd, the highly honorable jubilee of a king’s continuous thirty-year reign. But, since in the Wadi Hammamat there had already been such a subscript in the similar scene depicting Pepi I in front of Min (M 63), Mentuhotep III’s «propagandists» had to add the same words in M 110, even despite their fictitiousness.