Stela of Pentcheny Worshipping Osiris

Pentcheny, the man with raised hands on this stela, was a priest of Onuris, a god of war and the hunt whose name means he who brings back the distant one. In the myth he went to the far south to fetch home a goddess who had fled in the shape of a lioness, and married her. His cult centre was Thinis, the old town whose cemetery was Abydos, and it was at Abydos, the burial place of Osiris, that Pentcheny set up this stone early in the 18th Dynasty.

He stands in a kilt and sandals, his head shaved, before Osiris enthroned in a shrine, with a table heaped with loaves, a duck and lotus flowers between them. In the curved top two eyes of Horus flank a ring of eternity above the sign for water. Below, the offering formula lists what he hoped for. He asks to be blessed in the sky beside the sun god Re, powerful on earth, justified in the cemetery beside Osiris, to smell myrrh and incense, to have wine and milk poured for him, a good burial after old age, and to go out as a living soul in any form he wished.

The text calls him a great wab priest, one of the pure priests, and names Daday, also a wab priest, and two women, Tuyu and Ipu. The Louvre bought the stela in 1857, at the Paris sale of the collector Giovanni Anastasi.