Neferhotep

What was searched, and what came back

Four hits, all in Breasted, and none of them is a god.

A queen. Sahure, wanting to reward a favourite noble and finding no resources free, diverts to Persen's tomb an income of loaves and oil formerly paid to the queen Neferhotepes every day [breasted-1912]. She is a dead royal woman whose funerary endowment was repurposed — Breasted's example of how the Old Kingdom coped with an ever-growing bill for tomb offerings.

A priest. The other three are one man: the "divine father (priest) of Amon, Neferhotep," at Thebes, in whose tomb the second version of the Song of the Harper is written [breasted-1912].

Verdict — not a deity in this archive

Nefer-hotep means something like "beautiful in peace" or "perfect in contentment." It is a common personal name — kings, queens and commoners bore it — and this is the trap in a form the corpus had not yet recorded: not a title, an object or a place, but simply somebody's name.

As always, this rules out the hits, not the god (C396). A deified Neferhotep is known from elsewhere in Egyptology; the eighteen books read here contain a queen and a priest.

What the search found instead, which is better

The priest's tomb is one of the two places the Song of the Harper survives, and Breasted quotes it. This is the Egyptian text that doubts the whole funerary enterprise:

I have heard the words of Imhotep and Hardedef… [budge/breasted-1912]

— and then, of the tombs of the wise men, "Their place is no more."

Breasted's summary is blunt: the song "doubts all means, material or otherwise, for attaining felicity or even survival beyond the grave. To such doubts there is no answer; there is only a means of sweeping them temporarily aside… 'Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.'"

The Neferhotep version he calls "hardly as effective as the first, and unhappily very fragmentary," but it carries lines worth having:

How rests this just prince! The goodly destiny befalls, The bodies pass away since the time of the god, and generations come into their places.

Re shows himself at early morn, Atum goes to rest in Manu. Men beget and women conceive, every nostril… [breasted-1912]

The sun still rises and sets on schedule; only the people are replaced. That is the whole argument of the song in two lines, and it is in a priest of Amon's tomb.

Now written up on the Song of the Harper, with the complete text from Papyrus Harris 500. This belongs there and not on this page. imhotep and djedefhor are both named in it and both have entries; the song itself has none. Flagged as the most valuable thing this audit turned up.