Ohh I’m going to refer you to @thatlittleegyptologist because she will welcome any opportunity to talk about the tomb robber papyri her beloved. It’s her trap card, you know.
I was summoned by the mention of Tomb Robbery Papyri! This bitch wrote her PhD thesis on these papyri! Prepare for info dump!
Ok! So! I’m going to tell you straight off that getting hold of these names, outside of a papyrus called P.Leopold II Amherst, is going to be very difficult. That’s because the main books on the TRP are…very very out of print. I’ve never seen a physical copy of the books. In fact, my lecturer, at the time when I first studied them during UG, put both books as PDFs on our blackboard/moodle/vital/whatever it’s called at your university. No really, you don’t want to try to get hold of it:
Anyway!
These texts are fascinating because they’re a set of ‘courtroom’** records of everyone*** brought forward and accused of the crime of Tomb Robbery. This is what was known as the Great Kenbet. A regular Kenbet was a local court where petty to moderately serious crimes (by Egyptian standards not ours) were tried. They’d be made up of local officials and were easily bribed I’m ngl. P.Salt 124 is an example of a Kenbet in action, with the accusations made against Paneb.**** That one you can find on wikipedia, but other Kenbet texts would be hard to come by since they’re not in places you’d be able to access. The Great Kenbet is only documented to have been convened twice in Ancient Egyptian history: once for the murder of Ramesses III, and once for the investigation into the robberies in the Valley of the Kings and Queens. Yes, kids, the Egyptians robbed their own tombs in antiquity! These are deadly serious cases, and it was the king’s retinue that came down from Pi Ramesses to interrogate the accused.
Anyway, all that aside, the TRP contain many names and since the resource is largely unavailable and tbh the translation of the names in there is wildly out of date I’ll reproduce a list of them under the cut.
**use of courtroom here is merely to orient modern readers into the situation, they did not use the word courtroom…nor was it a room…or a court. Literally, a wooden structure on the riverbank for yelling at people that was dismantled after use.
***records are incomplete
****a note of caution on that text. Do not read it cold (i.e. do not take it at face value). There’s a lot of internal politics contained within the text, and several personal grudges. So any charges made are ultimately suspect due to the guy being a general nuisance anyway.
