Rudamun

Who was Rudamun?

Rudamun was the final pharaoh of the Twenty-third dynasty of Ancient Egypt. His titulary simply reads as Usermaatre Setepenamun, Rudamun Meryamun, and excludes the Si-Ese or Netjer-Heqawaset epithets employed by his father and brother.

He was the younger son of Osorkon III, and the brother of Takelot III. He is a poorly attested pharaoh of this dynasty according to Kenneth Kitchen's seminal book on The Third Intermediate Period of Egypt. Kitchen credits him with a brief reign of about two to three years due to the few contemporary documents known for him. These include a small amount of decorative work done on the Temple of Osiris Heqadjet, several stone blocks from Medinet Habu, and a vase. In recent years, two fragments of a faience statuette bearing Rudamun's name from Hermopolis have been discovered. This recent discovery suggests that Radamun managed to preserve the unity of his father's large kingdom in Upper Egypt ranging from at least Herakleopolis Magna to Thebes during his brief reign.

Some Egyptologists such as David Aston have argued that Rudamun was the anonymous Year 19 king attested at Wadi Gasus. However, new evidence on the Wadi Gasus graffito published by Claus Jurman in 2006 has now redated the graffito to the 25th dynastic Nubian period entirely and demonstrates that they pertain to Amenirdis I and Shepenupet II based on paleographic and other evidence at Karnak rather than the Libyan Shepenupet I and the Nubian Amenirdis I. Jurman notes that no monumental evidence from the Temple of Osiris Heqadjet or Karnak depict Shepenupet I associated with Piye's daughter, Amenirdis I. Another alternative that the Year 19 Wadi Gasus ruler was a certain Shoshenq VII, a new unknown ruler, was proposed by G. Broekman in a paper based on Nile Level Text No. 3 which is dated to Year 5 of a Theban king who ruled after Osorkon III. However, there are serious doubts among scholars as to whether Nile Level Text No. 3 contained the nomen Shoshenq rather than Takelot. Jean Legrain, who had the first opportunity to survey the Karnak Quay Texts did not read any royal nomen in this inscription—from his 1898 publication of the Quay Texts—since the stone had already been badly eroded. The stone would have been in even worse condition when Von Beckerath inspected the document in 1953 and assumed the surviving traces on the Text No. 3 referred to a king Shoshenq, rather than a Takelot.