* The only monument of this prince as yet known gives him
merely the usual titles of the high priest, and the
inscriptions of his son Paînotmû I. style him “First Prophet
of Amon.” His name should probably be read Paîônûkhi or
Piônûkhi, rather than Pionkhi or Piânkhi. It is not unlikely
that some of the papyri published by Spiegelberg date from
his pontificate.
** Manakhpirrî often places his name in a square cartouche
which tends at times to become an oval, but this is the case
only on some pieces of stuff rolled round a mummy and on
some bricks concealed in the walls of el-Hibeh, Thebes, and
Gebeleîn. If the “Psiûkhânnît, High Priest of Amon,” who
once (to our knowledge) enclosed his name in a cartouche, is
really a high priest, and not a king, his case would be
analogous to that of Manakhpirrî.
Paînotmû II. contented himself with drawing attention to his connection with the reigning house, and styled himself “Royal Son of Psiûkhânnît-Mîamon,” on account of his ancestress Mâkerî having been the daughter of the Pharaoh Psiûkhânnît.*
* The example of the “royal sons of Ramses” explains the
variant which makes “Paînotmû, son of Manakhpirrî,” into
“Paînotmû, royal son of Psiûkhânnît-Mîamon.”
The relationship of which he boasted was a distant one, but many of his contemporaries who claimed to be of the line of Sesostris, and called themselves “royal sons of Ramses,” traced their descent from a far more remote ancestor.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-
Bey.
The death of one high priest, or the appointment of his successor, was often the occasion of disturbances; the jealousies between his children by the same or by different wives were as bitter as those which existed in the palace of the Pharaohs, and the suzerain himself was obliged at times to interfere in order to restore peace. It was owing to an intervention of this kind that Manakhpirrî was called on to replace his brother Masahirti. A section of the Theban population had revolted, but the rising had been put down by the Tanite Siamon, and its leaders banished to the Oasis; Manakhpirrî had thereupon been summoned to court and officially invested with the pontificate in the XXVth year of the king’s reign. But on his return to Karnak, the new high priest desired to heal old feuds, and at once recalled the exiles.* Troubles and disorders appeared to beset the Thebans, and, like the last of the Ramessides, they were engaged in a perpetual struggle against robbers.**
* This appears in the Maunier Stele preserved for some
time in the “Maison Française” at Luxor, and now removed to
the Louvre.
** The series of high priests side by side with the
sovereigns of the XXIst dynasty may be provisionally
arranged as follows:—