This series is published with the authorization of Professor Jin Shoufu. This is an AI-assisted contemporary editorial adaptation by Clio Walker based on Jin Shoufu’s Ancient Egyptian Civilization. It is neither a newly written eyewitness travel account by the professor nor a chapter-by-chapter reproduction of his book.

In the Egyptian Museum in Berlin there is a limestone stela small enough to lift with two hands, less than thirty centimeters high.

On it, a man sits back in a chair, entirely at ease. He has a thick full beard, his hair is bound with a band, and he wears a colorful kilt with tassels. A dagger is tucked in his belt and a spear stands upright behind his chair. In front of him a large jar rests in a tall stand, and from the jar a bent tube rises; he is drinking through it. The scene also shows his wife, who is dressed like an Egyptian lady, in a long flowing linen gown and an Egyptian hairstyle.

Their names are carved beside them: the man is Terura, the woman Arbura, and neither is an Egyptian name. The museum’s conclusion is that he was a Syrian soldier, and that the stela probably comes from Amarna, set up in the years of Akhenaten, about 1351 to 1334 BCE, in a house rather than a tomb.

The museum’s own description also notes that the stela is often called “the beer drinker,” which is not accurate: the jar is a wine amphora, and he is drinking wine.

When Jin Shoufu discusses slavery in ancient Egypt he mentions a similar picture. In the reliefs and paintings of officials’ tombs, he writes, one can see men who look West Asian; on one relief a West Asian man drinks beer through a straw while his Egyptian wife and their children attend him. He clearly held a high social position in life.

A man from Syria, with a wife and a stone carved with his own name, sitting at home and drinking. To ask whether ancient Egypt had slaves, one has first to work out what to make of such a man.

I. A List Pieced Together

A papyrus in the Brooklyn Museum in New York was originally about two meters long and thirty-two centimeters high. The American collector Charles Edwin Wilbour bought it on a trip to Egypt in one of the winters between 1881 and 1896. By then the roll had broken into more than five hundred pieces, most of them crumbs. They were pieced back together one by one, and William Hayes published the result in 1955.

Both sides of the sheet carry several documents, written over a span of ninety-one years, from year 10 of Amenemhat III to year 2 of Sobekhotep III. The museum dates the papyrus to about 1809 to 1743 BCE, the late Middle Kingdom.

The most striking of them is a list on the back: ninety-five people, one to a line, in four columns, giving title and name, nickname, occupation, and finally whether the person is a man, a woman or a child. Children follow their mothers and each takes a line of his or her own.

Many of the names are not Egyptian. Of the seventy-seven lines that are fully preserved, forty-eight are Asiatic names and twenty-nine Egyptian; the Brooklyn Museum’s label says that about forty-five of the ninety-five have Asiatic names. The two counts use different bases, and the numbers differ slightly.

The occupations, on the other hand, do not divide along those lines. Among the men are specialists in orchards and vineyards; among the women are weavers, and women who dress, comb and make up other people.

II. One List, Two Readings

Hayes read the roll as a document meant to prove that a woman of Thebes named Senebtisi held legal ownership of the ninety-five people on the back. The Brooklyn Museum’s label follows this reading, saying that she sought to establish ownership of ninety-five household servants; Hayes himself took the people to be slaves. The front, he thought, was a register of detention: the families of fugitives were held as hostages in the “Great Prison” of Thebes, and once the fugitives were caught they became slaves, assigned for life to state workshops and estates. On Hayes’s reconstruction, the people with Egyptian names on the back were the descendants of such men.

The French Egyptologist Bernadette Menu disagrees. In an article published in 2012 she argues that the people named on the front, among them men in charge of fields, the keeper of a state granary, a representative of the treasury steward, a priest and a commander of soldiers, look less like runaway serfs than like officials who had failed in their duties. The front excerpts three years’ worth of cases: twenty-four for year 10, twenty-six for around year 20 or 21, and twenty-six for year 31. If these were peasants fleeing forced labor, that would be only two or three a year, almost ideally few; she concludes that those brought to court were officials who had erred. As for the ninety-five on the back, she takes them not to be slaves but immigrants from Syria and Palestine, registered on entry by the state and settled to work.

Her grounds are several. The children of Asiatics all have Egyptian names. All ninety-five, whether their original name is Egyptian or Asiatic, carry an additional Egyptian nickname. Most interesting of all are two little girls: two Asiatic women on the list each have a daughter with them, and both daughters are named Senebtisy, which means “may she be healthy.”

That name made Menu think of the Senebtisy who held the ninety-five. Another document on the back records a husband who, in a quarrel over inheritance with his daughter by an earlier marriage, leaves his property to his wife Senebtisy. Menu conjectures that this wife may be the very Asiatic girl on the list, who had entered Egypt with her mother, and that the husband produced the entry list to prove her origin and her authority over these people from her own country. It is a conjecture; nothing on the papyrus says so in as many words.

One Asiatic woman on the list has a name written Šp-ra, which some link to the midwife in the Bible who saved Hebrew baby boys. Scholars suppose it to be the Egyptian writing of the Hebrew name “Shiphra”; the Brooklyn Museum itself says it cannot be certain that the Biblical woman is meant.

III. People a Single Word Cannot Hold

Jin Shoufu’s summary is that ancient Egypt did have slaves, and slaves were bought and sold, mostly prisoners of war. Most of them, however, served as domestic servants in individual households. When a war ended, large numbers of prisoners were brought to Egypt and settled together in one place as labor for building sites or workshops. This slave status was mostly temporary; after a time their position was no different from that of native Egyptians, and marriage with locals was common. In general, a slave in ancient Egypt was economically dependent on the person who bought or hired him, not legally subordinate to him; once he became economically independent he became free, with no legal procedure needed.

Menu arrives at a similar caution from the other side. The Egyptians on the list, she says, mostly bear the title “ḥm-nsw,” and the word “ḥm” in it is traditionally translated “slave,” which she holds to be a mistranslation.

One reads the people as prisoners of war and their descendants, the other as immigrants who came of their own accord, and the two accounts are not the same. What they share is that these people’s place in Egyptian society was fluid and changed over time, and one word does not cover it.

IV. A Hundred Thousand Men, Three Months

The Greek writer Herodotus, in the second book of his Histories, tells of Khufu. He says Khufu closed all the temples and forced all the Egyptians to work for him: some dragged stones from the quarries in the Arabian mountains to the Nile, and others took them over and dragged them, once they had been ferried across, to the Libyan hills. They worked in gangs of a hundred thousand men, each gang for three months; ten years went to building the road for the stones, and twenty to the pyramid itself.

Herodotus writes “all the Egyptians,” working in shifts (in the standard English translation the passage does not contain the word “slave”). The passage has often been retold as the toil of countless slaves. Jin Shoufu adds that, with Wittfogel and others naming ancient Egypt the type of “oriental despotism,” many people have taken the Egyptian peasant to be a slave.

How heavily peasants were exploited and oppressed is in fact hard to measure. Jin Shoufu’s method is to make a comparison. The German papyrologist Ulrich Wilcken worked through the tax archives of the Ptolemaic period and concluded that the Ptolemaic rulers extracted from Egyptian peasants ten times the taxes of the pharaohs. Of course the Ptolemies brought in better irrigation tools, farmland grew, and Greek and Macedonian settlers swelled the population; but neither farmland nor population could have grown tenfold. So the tax burden on peasants was heavier in the Ptolemaic period than under the pharaohs; that much is certain.

V. A Word That Sounds Right

The idea of a “redistributive economy” comes from the Hungarian political economist Karl Polanyi. The late Dutch Egyptologist Jac Janssen and others borrowed it to explain ancient Egypt: in a centralized state many people do not produce directly, officials and priests among them; what they consume comes from taxes in kind collected by the center, which first collects and then redistributes. Most scholars used to hold that Egypt was the most typical redistributive economy.

Jin Shoufu points to two difficulties. First, temples did not depend on the state for support; a temple was itself a large and complex economic entity, and it took on farming, tax collection and mining, tasks no modern religious institution has anything to do with. Second, collecting goods scattered across the country and then handing them out as needed sounds simple but is enormously costly in time and effort; for a pharaoh it was neither necessary nor, probably, within his power. So most scholars hold that it is best not to use the word “redistribution” at all, because it leads people to imagine that ancient Egypt had a nationwide mechanism for collecting and dispensing.

VI. The Jar with a King’s Name

How, then, did things travel between the center and the provinces?

There is a phenomenon that has long drawn attention without ever getting a satisfactory explanation: officials’ tombs often contain vessels inscribed with the king’s name. These were not bought or sold; they were royal gifts, marks of the owner’s honor and privilege. They turn up not only in the cemeteries of senior officials near the capital but in tombs of officials in provincial capitals and even in quite ordinary village cemeteries: at Elkab, Naga ed-Deir, Reqaqnah, Qau, Maiyana and Lahun. The vessels are finely made and were probably produced in palace workshops, and it is hard to imagine that all these tomb owners received them from the king’s own hand.

The German Egyptologist Stephan Seidlmayer offered a new explanation. He argued that there was a channel running from the capital to all parts of the country that carried vessels with this political and religious “added value”: a higher official gave them to his subordinates, and only the particularly fortunate received them directly from the king. They were a part, or a form, of the payment officials earned by their loyalty to the king; they marked rank and status, and they were also the grave goods the afterlife required. What a local official received was not the same kind of thing as the taxes he sent upward, but something symbolic and far more valuable.

At Elephantine on the southern edge of Egypt, in the temple of the goddess Satet, a vessel of this kind was found: a limestone jar in the shape of an ape with its young, bearing the cartouche of Pepi I of the Sixth Dynasty. Richard Bussmann of the Free University of Berlin says that stone vessels of this sort were distributed by the royal residence to high officials. So the jar was most likely a gift from the king to some provincial high official, who later dedicated it to the temple.

The same temple also yielded several faience plaques bearing the names of Pepi I and Pepi II. Bussmann sees these differently: plaques of this kind are known only from this temple, the temple at Abydos and Pepi I’s own mortuary temple, and they look less like gifts to officials than like offerings made by the king himself to the temple. Both carry a royal name, but they arrived by different roads: the jar was a gift to an official, the plaques the king’s own offering.

VII. Things Moved Both Ways

The case of gold is clearer. Even in places quite remote in Egypt, tombs have yielded gold grave goods, mainly gilded, gold-plated or gold-inlaid amulets and beads. Gold mining in ancient Egypt was a royal monopoly, and gold scattered across the country shows that the flow of material went in both directions: part of what the provinces produced went to the capital as taxes, while objects of exotic style and special political and religious meaning went out from the center to the provinces.

This was something like exchange, but not an exchange of equal values. What the provinces gave the center was useful; what the center gave the provinces was symbolic, and for Egyptians who believed so strongly in the afterlife those symbolic things were vital grave goods. The taxes the provinces paid went mainly to feed workmen sent to the mines of Nubia and Sinai for gold and stones, to supply soldiers on campaign, or to trade for luxuries from inner Africa and the Mediterranean coast. Jin Shoufu says that what bound center and province was not the principle of “redistribution” but mutual need; he sees no trace of a redistributive economy there.

VIII. May She Be Healthy

Back to the list in Brooklyn. The two little girls named Senebtisy had mothers whose names came from abroad, but the daughters carry a name that was fairly common in the Middle Kingdom. What Menu reads in it is hope of belonging; what Hayes read in the list was an inventory of servants. The roll itself does not take a side.

Jin Shoufu’s proposal is a plain one: rather than apply modern theories, go into ancient Egypt’s own concrete setting and see how things moved and how people made a place for themselves.

On the stela in Berlin, Terura has stood his spear upright behind his chair. Arbura is there with him. Their names are carved on the stone.

Notes

1. The Berlin stela: Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection, Berlin, ÄM 14122, limestone, 29.7 × 23.5 × 3 cm, dated to Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten, find-place Amarna. The museum’s description (in German): “Der kleine Gedenkstein eines Soldaten namens Terura und seiner Frau Arbura stammt vermutlich aus Amarna”; “die gänzlich profane Darstellung einer häuslichen Szene schließen eine Verwendung als Grabstele aus und verweisen auf eine Aufstellung im häuslichen Bereich”; “die häufig zu lesende Bezeichnung ‘Bier trinkend’ [ist] irreführend, da es sich ... eindeutig um eine Weinamphore handelt”; “Terura ist aufgrund seiner Tracht eindeutig als Syrer gekennzeichnet”; “Teruras Frau trägt zwar ebenfalls einen ausländischen Namen, ist aber vollkommen wie eine ägyptische Dame ... dargestellt”; “Syrische Söldner waren im Neuen Reich in beträchtlicher Zahl in die ägyptischen Truppen integriert.” The museum-digital entry gives the date as 1351–1334 BC. The Chinese rendering of the names is a transliteration of Terura and Arbura. 2. The source text’s description: Jin Shoufu, Ancient Egyptian Civilization, lecture 5, section 5.3: “In reliefs or paintings in several officials’ tombs one can see people who look West Asian. On one relief a West Asian man drinks beer through a straw, while his Egyptian wife and their children attend him.” The Berlin stela is a household stela, not a relief in a tomb; the museum says the wife has a non-Egyptian name though she is dressed as an Egyptian lady, and mentions no children. Whether the Berlin stela is the piece Jin Shoufu means could not be checked, so the text says only “a similar picture.” 3. The Brooklyn papyrus: Brooklyn Museum 35.1446, “Gift of Theodora Wilbour,” dated by the museum “ca. 1809–1743 B.C.E.”; its label: “The most important text recounts the efforts of a Thirteenth Dynasty Theban noblewoman named Senebtisi to establish legal ownership of ninety-five household servants, whose names indicate that forty-five were of Asiatic origin.” Size, purchase and reconstruction: Bernadette Menu, “Le papyrus du Brooklyn Museum n° 35.1446 et l’immigration syro-palestinienne sous le Moyen Empire,” ENiM 5 (2012), pp. 19–30: “Le papyrus mesurait initialement 2,09 m de long sur une hauteur de 32 cm. Il a été reconstitué patiemment à partir de plus de 500 fragments (des miettes, pour la plupart)”; bought by Charles Edwin Wilbour on one of his journeys “durant les hivers de 1881 à 1896”; the documents are dated “entre l’an 10 d’Amenemhat III et l’an 2 de Sobekhotep III, couvrant une période de 91 ans au total.” Edition: W. C. Hayes, A Papyrus of the Late Middle Kingdom in the Brooklyn Museum (Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446), Wilbour Monographs 5 (New York, 1955); the list on the back is on pp. 87–125. 4. Format and counts of the list: Menu 2012: ninety-five workers, “chacun faisant l’objet d’une ligne” in four columns: a) title and name; b) nickname; c) occupation; d) “homme,” “femme” or “enfant” (children simply follow their mother “mais ils occupent néanmoins une ligne”); “sur les soixante-dix-sept lignes entièrement conservées, quarante huit noms asiatiques et vingt-neuf noms égyptiens.” The museum’s “forty-five” uses a different basis. Occupations: after Hayes’s table (p. 108) as cited by Menu, “les occupations sont identiques, que les personnes portent un nom égyptien ou asiatique”; men include specialists in orchards and vineyards, women include weavers, dressers, hairdressers and makeup women. 5. Hayes’s reading, as summarized in Menu 2012: the roll’s ultimate purpose is “d’établir les droits d’une femme nommée Sénebtisy sur les 95 personnes dont la liste figure au verso”; the front is a register of the “Great Prison” of Thebes (Hayes: “Great Prison”) in which the families of fugitives are held as hostages until they are caught and “réduits en esclavage en les affectant à vie aux ateliers et aux domaines d’État”; “ces gens de très basse condition seraient les ancêtres des esclaves égyptiens qui figurent sur la liste du verso.” Menu notes that Théodoridès (RIDA 7, 1960, pp. 55–145) had already rejected Hayes’s reconstruction of how the parts relate; she herself sees the common thread as the registration and transfer of labor, and translates the “Great Prison” as “Grand Dépôt,” which she takes to be a reservoir of manpower rather than a labor camp. 6. Menu’s reading: same article. The people named on the front “sont tous « cultivateurs » ... ou « chefs d’équipe »,” with also a “gardien du Grenier des terres d’État,” a “représentant de l’intendant du Trésor,” a “prêtre de This” and a “commandant des soldats de This,” so they “ne sont ni des serfs ni des esclaves”; the ninety-five on the back are “constituée exclusivement d’immigrés volontaires syro-palestiniens”; “les enfants d’Asiatiques portent tous des noms égyptiens”; all “reçoivent toutes des surnoms égyptiens.” The two girls named Senebtisy appear in lines 23–24 (mother Âsher) and 35–36 (mother Baâl-tûya), spellings as in Menu’s French transcription; Menu glosses the name as “Elle sera en bonne santé,” calls it “relativement commun” in the Middle Kingdom, and takes it to show among foreigners “un grand espoir dans l’intégration.” Her suggestion is in her conclusion (“mon hypothèse est que ...”) and rests on the document on the back (“Insertion B′”) in which a husband settles his estate; that document is damaged and its outcome is not preserved. Her 2012 article is the summary of a lecture; the fuller argument is promised in another article (Droit et Cultures no. 67, forthcoming), which was not seen. She says Hayes “et tous les commentateurs du papyrus de Brooklyn” read the people on the back as slaves; that is her own generalization and was not checked against the other scholars. 7. Shiphra: Brooklyn Museum collection page, in its public Q&A: “The name ‘Šp-ra’ does appear on the list in reference to a Canaanite woman. Scholars assume that this is a hieroglyphic transliteration of the Hebrew name ‘Shiphra.’ We cannot be certain that it refers to the same person described in the Biblical text.” 8. Summary on slavery: Jin Shoufu, Ancient Egyptian Civilization, lecture 5, section 5.3, paraphrased in the text: slaves and slave trading existed, mostly prisoners of war; most served as domestic servants in individual households; large groups of prisoners were settled together as labor; “the slave status of these prisoners was temporary”; “slaves in ancient Egypt were economically dependent on the person who bought or hired them, not legally subordinate to them; once they reached economic independence they became free men without any legal procedure.” 9. “ḥm”: Menu 2012: “les Égyptiens portant pour la plupart le titre de ḥm nsw, ḥm.t au féminin, le mot ḥm étant traditionnellement traduit, à tort, par « esclave » dans les écrits égyptologiques”; her footnote lists her own work, including “La question de l’esclavage dans l’Égypte pharaonique” (Droit et Cultures 39, 2000, pp. 59–79), which was not seen. “Slave” is the traditional rendering; the text reports Menu’s view without deciding how the word should be translated. 10. Herodotus, Histories 2.124, in A. D. Godley’s English translation (Harvard University Press, 1920; Perseus Digital Library): “he compelled all the Egyptians to work for him”; “They worked in gangs of a hundred thousand men, each gang for three months. For ten years the people wore themselves out building the road over which the stones were dragged”; “The pyramid itself was twenty years in the making.” The word “slave” does not appear in this English passage. Jin Shoufu’s lecture 5, section 5.3, counts Herodotus among the classical authors who say the pyramids were built by countless slaves over decades. The difference between the two can only be settled against the Greek original, which was not checked here and is still to be verified. 11. Wittfogel and the peasants: source text, 5.3: “Classical authors, Herodotus among them, said that the pyramids were built by countless slaves over decades, and, with Wittfogel and others listing ancient Egypt as the typical case of oriental despotism, many people think the Egyptian peasants were slaves.” Karl August Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism was not read for this article. 12. Wilcken: source text, 5.3, paraphrased: the German papyrologist Ulrich Wilcken, after working through the tax archives of the Ptolemaic period, “thought that the taxes the Ptolemaic rulers extracted from Egyptian peasants were ten times those of the pharaonic period”; the source text then notes that farmland and population cannot have grown tenfold and concludes that “the pressure of taxation on Egyptian peasants under the Ptolemies grew heavier, to a degree beyond that of the pharaonic period; that much is certain.” Wilcken’s own work was not seen. 13. Redistributive economy: source text, 5.3: “Some scholars, represented by the late Dutch Egyptologist Jac J. Janssen, borrowed the redistributive-economy theory of the Hungarian political economist Karl Polanyi”; “most scholars therefore hold that it is best not to use the concept of ‘redistribution,’ because it gives the false impression that ancient Egypt had a nationwide mechanism of collecting and dispensing.” The original works of Janssen and Polanyi were not seen; the text follows the source text. 14. Vessels bearing the king’s name: source text, 5.3: “in the tombs of officials archaeologists have found many vessels inscribed with the king’s name”; “for example at Elkab, Naga ed-Deir, Reqaqnah, Qau, Maiyana and Lahun”; Stephan Seidlmayer’s explanation, “there was a channel by which these vessels, carrying important political and religious ‘added value,’ were sent from the capital to all parts of the country”; “these vessels were a form or part of the payment of the officials for their loyalty to the king.” Seidlmayer’s original article was not seen; the text follows the source text. 15. The ape vessel at Elephantine: Richard Bussmann, “Pepi I and the Temple of Satet at Elephantine,” in Rachel Mairs and Alice Stevenson (eds.), Current Research in Egyptology 2005 (Oxford: Oxbow, 2007), pp. 16–21: “a limestone vessel in the shape of an ape with its offspring bears the cartouche of Pepi I (Dreyer 1986, no. 455). Stone vessels of this and other types were distributed by the residence to high ranking officials ... Therefore, the ape vessel from the Satet temple was probably a present to a high provincial official who offered it secondarily as a votive offering.” Faience plaques, same article: “It seems reasonable to conclude that the faience tablets were not presents to high officials but votives directly offered by the kings in the temples”; he says they are known only from the Satet temple, the temple at Abydos (Petrie 1903) and the mortuary temple of Pepi I (Leclant 1978). Dreyer 1986 (Günter Dreyer, Elephantine 8: Der Tempel der Satet) and the studies by Fischer, Minault-Gout and Ziegler are cited here through Bussmann and were not seen. 16. Gold and two-way flow: source text, 5.3: “in tombs in quite remote parts of Egypt archaeologists have found gold grave goods, mainly gilded, gold-plated or gold-inlaid amulets and beads”; “what the provinces gave the center was practical, what the center gave the provinces was symbolic”; “in this channel the tie between center and province is not the principle of redistribution but the fact of mutual need”; “we see no trace of a redistributive economy there.” 17. The source text’s conclusion: “Rather than apply modern economic theory, it is better to place oneself in ancient Egypt’s concrete setting and analyze how its economy ran.” (5.3)

Sources and editorial boundaries

1. Authorized source text: Jin Shoufu, Ancient Egyptian Civilization, authorized electronic text, lecture 5, section 5.3, “‘Slavery’ and the ‘Redistributive Economy,’” read in full on 3 November 2026. Taken from the source text in paraphrase: the origin, status and prospects of slaves in ancient Egypt; that peasants are not slaves and that taxation was heavier under the Ptolemies; the Polanyi-Janssen redistribution theory and the reasons most scholars advise against the concept; Seidlmayer’s explanation of vessels bearing the king’s name; gold in remote cemeteries and the two-way flow between center and provinces. The source text mentions Herodotus and Wittfogel only briefly; this article reads Herodotus separately in English translation. 2. Material from outside the book (all read on 3 November 2026): (1) The stela ÄM 14122: the museum’s description in the Berlin State Museums collection database (search.smb.museum) and museum-digital (in German, by F. Seyfried). (2) Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446: Bernadette Menu, ENiM 5 (2012), in full; the Brooklyn Museum collection page (accession 35.1446a-e) and its public Q&A. Hayes’s 1955 book, Théodoridès’s 1960 article and Quirke’s 1990 book were not seen and are known here only through Menu. (3) Herodotus 2.124: A. D. Godley’s English translation (Perseus Digital Library). (4) Richard Bussmann’s 2007 article, in full (Heidelberg University, Propylaeum-DOK). Coordinates from Wikidata. 3. Places and dates: Amarna (27.6617, 30.9056, site), “about 1340 BCE,” the date of the Berlin stela (Akhenaten’s reign; the museum gives about 1351–1334 BCE); Thebes (25.7206, 32.6103, site), “about 1780 BCE,” the probable place of origin of the Brooklyn papyrus (the museum says “possible place made: Thebes”), dated to the midpoint of the museum’s range of about 1809–1743 BCE; Elephantine (24.0900, 32.8900, site), “about 2300 BCE,” the ape vessel of Pepi I. Absolute dates for Pepi I differ by several decades between chronologies (proposals seen range from about 2390 to 2228 BCE), so only “about” is given. 4. Limits and tensions: (1) Whether the people on the list were servants, descendants of prisoners of war, or immigrants who came of their own accord is read in opposite ways by Hayes and Menu; the text sets them side by side and does not decide. Menu’s suggestion that Senebtisy is one of the girls on the list is a conjecture; her lecture summary offers no further evidence, and the inheritance document on the back is damaged. (2) The number of Asiatic names on the list is given differently by the museum (about forty-five) and by Menu (forty-eight of the seventy-seven fully preserved lines); the bases differ. (3) Terura is a soldier of Syrian origin, as the museum judges from his dress and features; whether he himself was a prisoner of war or the descendant of one cannot be told from the stela, and the text does not say. The find-circumstances of the stela are unknown, and the museum itself says only that it “vermutlich” (probably) comes from Amarna. (4) The relief described in the source text and the Berlin stela may not be the same object; see note 2. (5) Herodotus is reported from an English translation and differs from the source text’s summary of him; see note 10. (6) Whether the Elephantine ape jar was in fact given by the king to an official who then gave it to the temple is Bussmann’s “probably”; the stone of the jar is given by Bussmann as limestone. (7) The original works of Seidlmayer, Janssen, Polanyi, Wilcken and Wittfogel were not seen; the text follows the source text. (8) No dialogue, inner thoughts or scene details have been invented; ancient documents are retold in modern Chinese and English from modern English and French translations and German museum descriptions, with the original wording in the notes.