The Shabaka Stone, sometimes referred to as Shabaqo, is an ancient Egyptian artifact engraved with a religious text dating to the Twenty-fifth Dynasty. In later centuries, the stone was likely repurposed as a millstone, a use that severely damaged its hieroglyphic inscriptions. This wear was compounded by deliberate acts of defacement, leaving much of the text in poor condition.
Provenance and Historical Background
Originally erected in the late eighth century BCE as a permanent monument at the Great Temple of Ptah in Memphis, the stone was later removed for unknown reasons and transported to Alexandria. From there, it was shipped to England aboard a naval vessel, where it was used as ballast along with other Egyptian antiquities, including a column capital, fragments of a Greco-Roman black basalt capital, quartzite lintel pieces from the reign of Senusret III, and a black granite kneeling statue of Ramesses II.
In 1805, the artifact was donated to the British Museum by George Spencer, 2nd Earl Spencer, who served as First Lord of the Admiralty and had been a museum trustee since 1794. The stone was first deciphered, translated, and systematically studied in 1901 by American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted. It has remained part of the British Museum’s collection ever since.
Dating and Scholarly Debate
The dedicatory introduction on the stone states that it reproduces the contents of a deteriorated, worm-eaten papyrus discovered by Pharaoh Shabaka in the Great Temple of Ptah. Homer W. Smith argued that the original text dated to the First Dynasty, describing it as the earliest written record of human thought.
Early Egyptologists such as James Henry Breasted, Adolf Erman, Kurt Sethe, and Hermann Junker attributed the composition to the Old Kingdom. This view was supported by the archaic linguistic style—closely resembling the Pyramid Texts—and by political references emphasizing Memphis as Egypt’s first royal capital. Scholars including Henri Frankfort, John Wilson, Miriam Lichtheim, and Erik Iversen likewise endorsed an Old Kingdom origin.
More recent scholarship, however, has shifted toward dating the monument itself to the Twenty-fifth Dynasty. Friedrich Junge and many later researchers argue that while the text may preserve older traditions, the physical artifact was produced much later. Current academic consensus holds that the stone cannot predate the Nineteenth Dynasty.
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