Page 63 - THE SLOUGHI REVIEW - ISSUE 13

T H E S L O U G H I R E V I E W 6 3

The upper left net shows a hound, more precisely a Tesem, old type, biting a Dorcas gazelle

in the throat. Another one on the lower left bites an Oryx antelope in the neck.”

Ludwig Borchardt, who excavated the Sahure pyramid with the entire complex, stated
that this must be considered the earliest and most perfect representation of a hunt in
Egypt. It set standards in the type of depiction and the extent of what was depicted,
which was later copied again and again.
“I know of no older, similarly extensive composition of a hunt, but later hunting pictures

give extracts from ours. The details, of course, go back to very old types. Already on the
hunting palette and in the tomb of Hierakonpolis, the hunt is depicted with the bow, the
lasso and with hounds ...” [45].

Since Ludwig Borchardt, as a very carefully working archaeologist, served as a model for
the following generations, he is a guarantor for the quality of this statement. Only the
statement about the dogs on the hunting palette of Hierakonpolis is occasionally taken a
little further and described as “canids”, which can also be described as jackals and thus
also as hunting game [46].

Remarkable is the mention of carrying lassos, which were used to catch live game. So

we see in this a comparable situation to the hunting (or keeping?) of reindeer in northern
Eurasia.

As an example of the later adoption of hunting scenes in later tombs, he shows the two
scenes with the Tesems, the Oryx antelope and the Dorcas gazelle:

Sahure Hunting Scene 5th Dynasty Old Kingdom, from Borchardt Plate 17 Leipzig 1913
detail 1 and 2, p.35 [46]