The true overseer of upper Egypt

In lines 33-35 of the tomb autobiography of the ancient Egyptian official Weni, he boasts of his promotion by the pharaoh Merenra to the office of the «overseer of Upper Egypt, from Yebu in the south to Medenit in the north», and then stresses that «never had this office been given to any servant (bAk) before». Meanwhile, the Egyptologists know more than a dozen of overseers of Upper Egypt previous to Weni. The article is intended to explain this seeming discrepancy between Weni’s assertion and evidence at hand. The wide spread assumption is that the word bAk alludes here to Weni’s initially low social status, and thus the passage in question means only that prior to Weni never had the office of the «overseer of Upper Egypt» been held by such a «commoner» (M. Lichtheim, et al.). But this is certainly wrong. When applied to the owner of a tomb biography, the word bAk never had it basic meaning «slave» or meant something like a man of low social status; and moreover, now we know that Weni was a vizier’s son. The probable explanation of the passage in question is that in the title «overseers of Upper Egypt (imy-rA Smaw)» the term Smaw did not imply the authority of each «overseer» over whole Upper Egypt in its entirety. It pointed out, first and foremost, to the overseer’s involvement into the special Upper Egyptian system of levies for the royal residence. That is why sometimes two or three «overseers of Upper Egypt» seem to have been coexistent, and it seems probable that each of them had control of far less than the entire southern half of the country. The occurrences of the titles «overseers of Upper Egypt in the middle nomes» and «overseer of Upper Egypt in the northern nomes» support this hypothesis. Royal decrees from the end of the Dynasty VIII show that the number of the nomes given under the authority of an overseer of Upper Egypt could vary considerably, and this even caused the emergence of the expression «this Upper Egypt (Smaw pw, Smaw pn)», referring to the specific part of Upper Egypt given under the overseer’s control. Thus, even while not being the earliest overseer of Upper Egypt, Weny may well have become the very first holder of this title invested with the authority over entire Upper Egypt within the its traditional limits «from Yebu in the south to Medenit in the north». The grandeur of this unprecedented career achievement entailed some peculiarities of the relevant part of Weni’s inscription: (a) visually this section is the focal point of the stela; (b) it is separated from the other text by means of two broken descending lines; (c) within the section so created, Merenre’s name is twice set into rectangular fields, thus suggesting that these passages might have been actual excerpts from royal documents, and that the king himself or an archivist acting on his behalf shared in the composition of the biography (J. Richards). In the last line of the inscription, Weni proudly calls himself «true overseer of Upper Egypt», being the first holder of this title with the epithet mAa. By doing so, he seems to have also stressed that the geographical scope of his authority of overseer of Upper Egypt for the first time really comprised whole Upper Egypt - as opposed to all previous «servants».