The reader’s attention has already been drawn to the fact that the
monarch was invested at his coronation with a Royal Signet, upon which
his name and titles were engraved. In the earlier periods of Egyptian
history this Royal Signet was, doubtless, either worn by the monarch
himself or carried in some secure way about his person. We do not read
in the inscriptions of the earliest dynasties of any “Keeper of the
Royal Seal,” as we find so frequently alluded to in the hieroglyphic
texts from the Middle Kingdom onwards, and it would consequently appear
as if the king himself in those early times attended to the business
connected with his Treasury Department.
Two important officials of the oldest period, however, were closely
concerned with the use of the seal, and their titles were derived from
its name. One of these was the “Sealer of the Honey [jars]”; the other
was the “Divine Sealer,” “Sealer of the God.” The first title[37]
[Egyptian **] “the Sealer of the Honey [jars],” was, perhaps, the oldest
of the many hundreds of titles that we find at all periods of Egyptian
history, and from the Third Dynasty onwards there was probably not a man
of less than royal rank who would not have been proud to bear it. It
originally meant, as we have said, “the Sealer of the Honey [jars]”
honey being the greatest of all primitive luxuries, and its use reserved
for the king’s table. This title must therefore be regarded as a relic
of the most extreme antiquity, and it certainly goes back to the time
before the use of wine in the Nile Valley. At the beginning of the
Fourth Dynasty (_circa_ 3000 B.C.), however, its meaning had probably
become already obsolete, and from that period onwards it meant nothing
more than a “Royal Sealer,”[38] or one entitled to use a seal with the
monarch’s name engraven upon it. Doubtless there were several of these
officers employed in the royal palaces to look after the security of the
king’s private property, and it was the duty of some of them to
accompany the sovereign on his various military expeditions.[39]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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