42 



DISCOVERY 



wife were broken into ! " A member of " the deputa- 



tion " began to remonstrate with the mayor. 



All 



the kings," he asserts, " together with the royal wives, 

 royal mothers, and royal children, who rest in the 

 necropolis, together with those who rest in ' The- 

 Place-of-Beauty,' they are miinjured, they are pro- 

 tected and defended for ever." To this Peser said: 

 " Pooh ! Are your deeds as great as your speech, 

 pray ? " 



Pewer'o's account of the' sayings and doings of his 

 rival and " the deputation " is here interrupted by a 

 comment of his own on the accusation brought against 

 himself and his subordinates in this outpouring of the 

 vials of Peser 's wrath upon the demonstrators. " This 

 is indeed no little word that this mayor of the city 

 spake." Pewer'6 then gives a version of what Peser 

 was reported to have said in the matter of " the five 

 serious accusations," accusations which, as we have 

 already learnt, had been made to Peser by the two 

 scribes of the necropolis Herishere and Pebes, and 

 which, Pewer'o teUs us in his letter, Peser also claimed to 

 have had put down for himself in writing by his private 

 secretary and the scribe of the two districts of the city. 

 " I heard the words which the mayor of the city spake 

 to the people of the great and august necropolis of 

 millions of years," Pewer'o goes on to saj', " and I 

 report them to my lord (the vizier), for it were a crime 

 for one in my position to hear such words and conceal 

 them. I was not able myself to apprehend the very 

 serious words which the mayor of the city spake ; the 

 scribes of the necropolis who stood among the people 

 told me, but my feet were not present with them. I 

 report them to my lord, that my lord may bring in one 

 who actually apprehended the words which the mayor 

 of the city spake, and the scribes of the necropolis 

 told me. " Pewer'o waxes indignant over the conduct of 

 Herishere and Pebes. " It is a crime," he says, 

 " of these two scribes that they should have applied 

 to this mayor of the city, to report to him." Their 

 business was to have "reported to the vizier. " Pewer'o 

 concludes his letter by saying that he has had the 

 whole matter laid before the vizier in writing so that 

 those who actually heard Peser's speech " may be 

 summoned for to-morrow." 



Pewer'o Vindicated by a Judicial Inquiry 



Accordingly the next day, Hathor 21st, the vizier 

 instituted a judicial inquiry as to the truth of Peser's 

 allegations. The presiding judge was, of course, the 

 vizier himself, with whom were associated as assessors, 

 besides several others, the king's butler Nesiamun — 

 one has considerable doubts about that gentleman's 

 loyalty to his apparent friend Peser — and the luckless 

 Peser himself. According to the statements of the 

 vizier in his address to the court, the persons accused 



by Herishere and Pebes to Peser were three copper- 

 smiths in the employ of the High Priest of Amun, 

 the accusation being that they had rifled " the great 

 seats " (the royal tombs) in " The-Place-of-Beauty " — 

 the very part of the necropolis that the vizier and his 

 associates had inspected onh' the day before. " Now 

 I, the vizier of the land," said Khamwese, " have been 

 there with the king's butler Nesiamtin, the scribe of 

 Pharaoh. We inspected the tombs where the mayor 

 of the city said the coppersmiths . . . had been. We 

 found them uninjured, and all that he (Peser) had 

 said was found to be untrue. Now, behold, the 

 coppersmiths stand before you ; let them tell all that 

 has occurred." The document tells us that the copper- 

 smiths were examined, and that " it was found that 

 thej' did not know any place in the seat of Pharaoh 

 (the necropolis) of which the mayor had spoken the 

 words." Accordingly Peser "was found wrong 

 therein," and the coppersmiths were " granted life " and 

 handed back to their master, the High Priest of Amun. 

 Thus ended the attempt of Peser to get Pewer'o 

 deposed. \Miether he paid the penalty for losing his 

 Ccise by being deprived of his official position, we do 

 not know. 



But despite Khamwesc's vindication of Pewer'o's 

 administrative abilities, and his refutation of Peser's 

 charges against the coppersmiths, all was by no means 

 well in the necropolis. In the first place, as we have 

 seen, all Peser's statements with regard to the tombs 

 of certain nobles and others, situated in a particular 

 part of the cemetery, were verified, and one royal 

 tomb had been completely looted. Moreover, a frag- 

 mentary document in the Turin Museum, dated the 

 22nd day of Phamenoth in the seventeenth year of 

 the reign of Ramesses IX — the year after that in which 

 the inquiry was held as to the truth of Peser's charges 

 — affords us good grounds for supposing that, though 

 the coppersmith Pekharu was rightly acquitted of the 

 charge of ha\"ing robbed the tomb of Queen Ise, yet the 

 tomb had actually been plundered before the vizier and 

 Nesiamun inspected it ! These two must have made 

 a very careless inspection, or else, for some reason or 

 other, they closed their eyes to the truth of the situa- 

 tion. One wonders whether they had both had their 

 palms well greased by Pewer'5. . . . 



The above mentioned Turin papyrus informs us that 

 the vizier Khamwese, and the workmen of the necro- 

 polis and their overseers, went to inspect the tomb of 

 the king's wife Ise. They found that the tomb had 

 been plundered and that even the royal mummy had 

 been damaged, the authors of the mischief, be it noted, 

 being designated "the eight thieves." As Breasted 

 maintains, " these can hardly have been other than the 

 eight thieves of Sebekemsaf's tomb, who must have 

 robbed the tomb of Ise before their arrest in the year 



