Stele of Usersatet, Viceroy of Kush

One of the titles Usersatet gives himself here is child of the kap, the royal nursery where sons of the elite were brought up in the palace beside the princes. He rose to be King's Son of Kush under Amenhotep II, the king's viceroy over the conquered lands of Nubia, south of Egypt. In the rounded top of this sandstone stele, beneath a winged sun disc, the king offers two jars of wine to Khnum, Satis and Anukis, the gods of the First Cataract at Aswan, Egypt's old southern border. Below, in sunk hieroglyphs, Usersatet lists his titles and asks for offerings.

How close the two men were is known from another stele of his, found at the fortress of Semna and now in Boston. It copies a letter the king wrote to him himself in year 23 of his reign, on the anniversary of his accession, while, the text says, he sat drinking on a day of holiday. The king remembers their old campaigns in Syria, teases his viceroy about the foreign women in his household, and tells him to be on guard against the Nubians and their magicians. Some of Usersatet's monuments elsewhere had his name deliberately cut away, perhaps because he fell from favour, for reasons that are not known.

This stele was found in December 1938 in the first court of the temple at Amara West, in what is now northern Sudan, during excavations by the Egypt Exploration Society, and it came to the Louvre in 1940 when the finds were divided.