The late Old Kingdom and the First Intermediate Period are obscure ages due to the paucity and disparateness of their material. The compositions and relationships of the dynasties that ruled during these periods are still debated. Regarding the last three Memphite dynasties, this article argues that Dynasty 7 was contemporary with late Dynasty 6, and that Dynasty 8 began when this shared government ended. Near the end of Dynasty 8, Intef the Elder revolted at Thebes; he was defeated, and Memphis regained its control of the South. Dynasty 8 was replaced shortly after by the power of Heracleopolis. The third Heracleopolitan king, Neferkara, faced a new Theban insurrection and deposed Intef I, a great overlord who had recently proclaimed himself king. The fourth and last king of Dynasty 9, Merikara, encountered the Thebans as well and had to recognise the kingship of Intef II. The Heracleopolitan Dynasty 10 commenced on that occasion. It reigned in parallel with the Theban Dynasty 11 until Mentuhotep II reunited the country.
Throughout the Bronze Age, Anatolia and Syria had been deeply connected by an intense cultural and political exchange channeled by the Taurus mountains. However, after the collapse of the Hittite empire and the beginning of the Iron Age, regions on the two sides of the Taurus developed independent socio-cultural networks with limited interaction. This broad separation is generally overlooked in past research because obscured by the common cultural background that Iron Age Syro-Anatolian polities mostly inherited from the Hittite period. Warning against conceptualizations of Iron Age Syro-Anatolia as a coherent cultural complex, this paper intends to show that a "Taurus divide" affected various spheres of interaction, ranging from the cultural and linguistic landscapes to the worldviews shaping political practices of Syro-Anatolian polities. I will also argue that this divide found expression in the Assyrian "mental maps" of the area.
The article analyses the Sabaic Fragmentary Inscription BM 125130=C 432 and offers an interpretation from both a philological and historical perspective. A new translation of the document is also proposed.
Despite the notability of the beer goddess Tenemit in ancient Egyptian literature, especially in the ritual texts of Ptolemaic and Roman temples, she has not yet received closer attention from scholars; some specialized dictionaries such as Wb, LGG, and WPL present disparate transliterations of her name and attribute to her some orthographic forms that, in the light of textual analysis, have been shown to belong to the goddess Khenemit. This paper aims to verify the orthographies of the goddess Tenemit's name and its transliteration, investigate her origin and her role in Egyptian religion and its development up to the end of the Greco-Roman period; the paper will also deal with the goddess Khenemit, adding to her some orthographic forms and some roles that were erroneously attributed to the goddess Tenemit.
