A new hypothesis on dating Ramesses IV’s Great Abydos Stela to Osiris and the Gods

Ramesses IV’s Great Abydos Stela to Osiris and the Gods (KRI VI 20–25) is a round-topped limestone monument, which was found by Auguste Mariette in the Middle Cemetery of Abydos and is now kept in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (JdE no. 48831). Since the political consequences of the Harem Conspiracy for Ramesses III’s successor are well reflected on the stela, its central theme being royal legitimacy, the text was often discussed by scholars and is relatively well known. Accordingly, it is sometimes labelled as “a treatise on royalty” after Philippe Derchain, while Antonio Loprieno called it “a royal counterpart to the ‘Duties of the Vizier’ of the early New Kingdom.” The Great Abydos Stela to Osiris and the Gods is often cited together with a somewhat smaller limestone monument of the same king, with Ramesses IV’s Great Abydos Stela to Osiris for Length of Reign (JdE no. 48876; KRI VI 17–20). The main text of this smaller stela is a major royal address to Osiris and is best known for the passage in which Ramesses IV pleads to the god for a length of reign twice that of Ramesses II, arguing that he had done more for the god in his first four years than his predecessor in 67 years (lines 21–23 in KRI VI 19, 12–15). Since the two stelae constitute the two most important royal inscriptions from Abydos from the reign of Ramesses IV and the date is preserved only on one of them—on the Great Abydos Stela to Osiris for Length of Reign—the shorter Abydene text acquired central significance in dating the Great Abydos Stela to Osiris and the Gods. While Alexander Peden, Kenneth Kitchen, and Jean Revez stress the similarities of the two monuments and argue for their identical dating, according to Francesco Tiradritti and Benoît Claus, the larger stela predates the smaller one. The present paper revisits the main arguments of the debate and presents a new hypothesis on dating Ramesses IV’s Great Abydos Stela to Osiris and the Gods with the help of compositional, epigraphic, and intertextual evidence. As a result, four specific dates are considered within the range of a few months between the end of the third and the beginning of the fourth regnal year of Ramesses IV as a possible erection date of the stela