A hieroglyphic inscription on the statue of the "Anonym from Baqlia" (National Museum of Carthage, Tunis, No. 883.1) and the status of the satrap of Egypt Ptolemy in 300s b.c

The article considers an autobiographical inscription on the dorsal pillar of statue, which, from stylistic and paleographic criteria, dates to the last decades of the 4th century B.C. The statue belonged to a nobleman, whose name was not preserved; his home region was the 15th Lower Egyptian nome (with the center at Bahu, present-day Baqlia, in the central part of the Nile Delta). According to the inscription, he was receiving a foreign ruler who visited Baqlia in its temple (probably, that of the god Thoth): the ruler contemplated there the images of gods, undertook their restoration and offered a precious sistrum to the nobleman as a sign of his priestly rank and an instrument for performing ritual. The article considers the question of this foreign ruler’s identity. A favorable attitude towards him expressed in the inscription, as well as vesting him with certain sacral qualities appropriate to a legitimate king (among them the ability to fill humans confronting him with the terror-rtḥ), do not allow to see in him Artaxerxes III who invaded Egypt in 343 B.C. but was inacceptable in Egyptian view as Pharaoh due to his sacrileges in Egyptian temples (though this identification has once been postulated by É. Drioton). A possibility overviewed by scholars is this ruler’s identity to Alexander the Great who entered Egypt in 332-331 B.C.: however, Alexander’s route inside the country is known perfectly well from the Classical tradition and there is no evidence of his visit to Central Delta (such visit is also unlikely due to a very limited time of his stay in Egypt). The identity of this ruler to the Satrap Ptolemy, who ruled Egypt from 323 B.C. and became its king in 305/4, once suggested by P. Montet and A. Zivie, is still the most likely. It is supported with the denotation of this ruler as wr ʿȝ (“the great chieftain”) attested for Ptolemy in the Satrap Stela; besides, there is a dubious writing in column 3 of the inscription which might be tran scribed and interpreted “the king (and) the great chieftain” (nsw wr ʿȝ). If this interpretation is correct, this denotation might consist of the two titles of Ptolemy: as a satrap of Egypt in the time of his visit to Baqlia and as a king by the time when the statue was commissioned (quite expectedly, a more important title would be put on the first place). In this case the episode of Ptolemy’s visit to Baqlia might fall in the time between the compilation of the Satrap Stela (311 B.C.) and his royal accession: in the Satrap Stela Ptolemy was shown as a sole ruler of Egypt, without any limitations of his power; but he was not considered a legitimate Pharaoh and certain royal qualities were recognized for him quite implicitly. The inscription on the statue from Baqlia is much more explicit in stating Ptolemy’s ability to fill humans with fear and especially his right to interfere with the temple ritual, as appropriate to a legitimate king; at the same time he is still not denoted with royal title. That cancellation of certain features of the royal sacrality and their attribution to a non-royal ruler is an interesting and still unvalued phenomenon of the Late Egyptian ideological trends.