“Jubilation for the court official”. Scenes of the official’s return after being awarded in the decoration system of private tombs dated back to the new kingdom of Ancient Egypt

. The phenomenon of the court officials’ being awarded by the king for the loyal service had reached the highest peak of its development by the New Kingdom period as confirmed by a considerable number of sources, as well as by scenes illustrating the pharaoh’s rewarding of the nobility, which appeared in private tombs first during the reign of Thutmose IV. However, the focus of the article will not be on reliefs that illustrate the process of awarding an official, but rather on less common scenes that attest to the awarding of an official. The present article is about the features of the composition of the scenes of an official’s return after being awarded their evolution, and the place of such scenes in the system of painting private tombs of the XVIII–XIX dynasties. In the XVIII dynasty, especially in the Amarna era, when reward scenes are at their greatest, such subjects are part of a scene illustrating the awarding of an official, such as the scene in the tomb of Aye at Akhetaton (TA 25). But already during the reign of the last kings of the XVIII dynasty they become a separate scene, which first appears on stelae, such as the stela of Ani, and then on the walls of tombs, (for instance, the Tomb of Maya, LS 27). That kind of scenes continued its existence during the early period of the XIX dynasty: images in the Tomb of Amenemope (TT 41) and the Tomb of Userhat (TT 51) reflect the impact which the Amarna style had on the XIX Dynasty art because they are stylistically close to it. Probably there’s no rewarding scene exactly because those officials were not awarded by a king himself, the rewards were handed over to them by the high-ranking officials in the royal treasury of the palace. During the reign of the XX dynasty such scenes completely disappear from private tombs, indirectly marking the changing the officials’ role at the royal court, generally downgrading the role of the private individual in state affairs and bringing the deeds of the ruler back to the forefront, as was the case in the early XVIII dynasty.

1. Ershova, E.S. (2019), “Types and symbolic meaning of ancient Egyptian rewards in the New Kingdom”, Articult, 34 (2), pp. 32–40.

2. Ivanov, S.V. (2014), “The tomb of Tjay in Luxor, Thebes”, Science in Russia, no. 1, pp. 97–106.