Comparisons in writing and translation

Opportunities for a Sydney resident to visit the British Museum are few. On most visits I seem to buy introductory books on hieroglyphs in the Museum souvenir shop. On one such visit I came away with Wallace Budge’s little book with sample sentences, Egyptian Language:

Budge, Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis. 1963 1983 [printing]. Egyptian language: easy lessons in Egyptian hieroglyphics with sign list. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

It looked heavy going, with full pages of hieroglyphs, with their translations below. And it was years before I looked at it in any way seriously. And several more years passed before it was returned to, to re-examine the sentences. By then I was beginning to notice more detail, but it was only in July 2013 that I realised that certain passages were more or less repeated. It all arose from the word mer for ‘pool’, which I had thought to mean ‘canal’ among other totally different things.

 But ‘canal is incidental to the story that follows, other than to say that the near-duplicated sections enable comparisons to be made.

One of the ‘duplicated’ sections begins on page 202. Here is is, rendered a little differently, having as it does my own analysis of it:

ILLUSTRATION 1

The corresponding duplicated section begins on page 236, for which the similarly treated presentation occurs below:

ILLUSTRATION 2

There are minor differences all the way through, but I have picked out a few with coloured patches. The yellowish patches above simply show quite different ways or rendering mAyat(i).

Anyone who looks at this entry might also wish to note that the passage marked out with square brackets in the last three lines of Illustration 2 are missing in Illustration 1 — hence the bracketing, presumably.

Now to look at the other parts of the duplication.

ILLUSTRATION 3

ILLUSTRATION 4

Comments

Comment 1

The first of the green patches shows ireten-ek in Illustration 3, but iren-ek in Illustration 4. This is a subtle difference. The inclusion of the <bun> sign (after <eye>) denotes a relative, hence the translation do what is did thou

Figure 1a: EAWB [202:7.2]

Figure 1b

Figure 2b

Comment 2

Even more minor is the form of the determinative in the second pair of green patches: <U-cross> in the first and <U-tub> in the second.

Figure 3a and 3b

These two determinatives appear to be slightly different renderings of basically the same element.

Comment 3

The third green patch shows the word heten-i or perhaps hAtun-i

Figure 4a and 4b

The last three signs in each case are:

— <SQUATTERMOUTH>: determinative indicating something to do with the mouth, in this case speaking / yelling

— <water> en: past tense marker

— <SQUATTER> i: 1sgNOM personal pronoun ‘I’

So the word is /ht/ het or hAtu. het is ‘call’ (yell, shout). hA could be an interjection ‘hey!’, leaving a mystery tu. tu has various roles, including as a pronoun as a verbal element. Possibly in the present instance hAtu is just a scribe’s alternative way of rendering /ht/.

sheden-i

ILLUSTRATION 5a

The following repeats the bottom of Illustration 3:

This is to be compared with the top of page 237, below. We are looking at the pink patches.

ILLUSTRATION 5b

The word concerned is sheden-i, which for some reason Wallace Budge indicates should be sesheden-i (which he has rendered: ‘se´seṭ - nå’). But ignoring that detail, we notice that on page 203 he has translated the word as ‘I dug’, while on page 237 it is translated as ‘I adjured (it)’.

ILLUSTRATION 5c

You probably did not notice, but the word was used earlier, in Illustration 2. The sentence concerned is repeated below, now with further pink patches applied:

And look: the translation offered by Wallace Budge is different again. Now it is ‘maketh to prevail’. Well, the ‘maketh’ part would be acceptable had the word had a se- causative prefix to make se-shed-en-ek su, but there is no sign of one. It is simply sheden-ek again. So what does shed mean? dig? adjure? prevail?

The ideas being expressed in these sentences are from a culture remote from the present and it is not easy to come to a conclusion as to the real underlying idea. While it is nice to use fancy words such as ‘prevail’ and ‘adjure’, they are not helpful in a quest to arrive at the fundamental meaning intended.

Perhaps the database can help. What follows are all the instances of the root shed in the database as it stands in July 2013:

Figure 5a, 5b and 5c

The grey column is the original translation, and the yellow the simplified ‘guess’ of your amateur researcher (JMS). JMS suspects that in the yellow column ‘extract’ and ‘dig’ convey the same basic idea. And also that ‘read’ is ‘extracting’ in the sense of extracting meaning from a text. That leaves half a dozen other ideas in the grey column including ‘foster’, ‘mortar’, ‘poultice’, ‘waterfowl’, ‘artificial lake', and ‘vulva’. Are these correct, or fanciful? As the database expands, perhaps more solid ideas of interpretation will present themselves.

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Two final pages of duplication follow.

seden-i

ILLUSTRATION 6

The word of interest in Illustration 6 is seden-i. Wallace Budge translates this as ‘broke I’, as picked out by the pale blue patches.

ILLUSTRATION 7

In Illustration 7 Wallace Budge translates seden-i (note the pale blue patches) as ‘I made use of’.

I do not know what is really being described but it does seem as though a tablet of stone might have been broken and used to dig a ‘canal’, more or less in the manner a shovel. But of course some other idea altogether might have been intended. While your amateur researcher is an amateur indeed, this blog entry has attempted to show that great authorities such as Wallace Budge were equally unsure as to what they were claiming as authentic translations.

To recapitulate, Wallace Budge translated:

sheden-i I dug I adjured prevail (sheden)

seden-i broke (I) made use of

Your amateur research opts for 'extract' and 'break' respectively.

Jeremy Steele

Wednesday 31 July 2013