Door posts in the Ani Papyrus

It appears that the sentences in Wallace Budge’s (EAWB) Egyptian Language, pp 238-9 come from the Papyrus of Ani, and form part of the Book of the Dead. On the surface this would seem to be a not especially cheerful topic to modern Western thinking, but the sentences are free of anything gruesome or dismal, although the translations of them are enigmatic indeed. There is a chasm between when the text was compiled and the present, and the sorts of things being talked about in those far-off times might well have been different. But this passage is mostly about going through doorways, which would appear to be straightforward.

Here is page 238. At this stage just give it a quick glance:

EAWB: 238

Now let us look at various lines in detail. 

EAWB:238:2

The first of these is the second line on the page above:

The three little boxes below show Wallace Budge's transcription, JMS's easy-to-read equivalent transcription, and JMS's word-for-word translation.

mer māåi årek āq ḥer

mer mayi ireq aq Her

canal // come / in relation to thee [?] / enter / at

The initial <water> en has been ignored, forming part of the previous line as a past tense marker. The portion of interest is ‘Come then pass in over ...’

Puzzles begin at once.

1. EAWB gives ‘then’ for :

in relation to thee

Gardiner, however, sees this as a preposition+pronoun (‘as to thee’), which JMS translates as ‘in relation to thee’.

2. Next, for <cormorant slope legs> EAWB gives ‘Come then pass in over ...’. But this same group he translates in different ways, including 'enter':

EAWB:238:2.5	EAWB:238:5.1, 239:1.3, 239:5.2

As shown in the analysis line above, your amateur researcher JMS has also opted for ‘enter’.

In each case being looked at, a JMS idiomatic translation is suggested in blue type:

... canal.

Come, you, before me enter at ...

EAWB:238:3

There is little to quibble over in the next line:

sba pen en useXt ten net Maāti

sebA pen en weseKHet ten net mAyati

door / this / of / wide what is (hall) / thee / of / Maāti

‘Hall’ in the middle of the line, transcribed useXt by EAWB, has been rendered weseKHet by JMS. As usual with Ancient Egyptian (AE) words, weseKH has several meanings (‘collar’, ‘cup’ among them) but most notably ‘wide’. The -et suffix is the relative marker, so   weseKH-et means ‘wide what is’, something that is wide. So weseKHet is used for ‘barge’, and also for ‘hall’, both wide things.

(wsḫt: weseKH-et)	"barge"	wide what is [boat]	Faulkner Concise	[69:8]	<quail cloth string bun tub boat>
(wsḫt: weseKH-et)	"hall"	wide what is [hall]	EAWB	[242:6.2]	<quail cloth string bun tub hairy: tub&bun>

The next word <bun water> ten is translated by EAWB as 'this', but JMS translates it as the 2sg pronoun ‘thy’ (thee-of), or ‘your’.

... this door of your hall of Maāti ...

EAWB:238:4

åu - k reX - œ´å - n enen (i.e., ån) ṭā - å

iwu-k reKH-tji en enen (i.e., an) da-yi

be / thou / know will us-all // not / permit I

There is little to quibble over or remark on in this line.

... it's like this: you will know us.

I (will) not let you ...

EAWB:238:5

āq - k ḥer - å ån ben¬´s en

aq-ek Hera an benesh en

enter thou / before / in relation to me / by / bolt / of

Line 5, however, has several points of interest. 

(a) It includes the ‘enter’ issue already dealt with in 238:2 above. In respect of this it is worth remarking that for verbs + pronouns written in hieroglyphs it is not possible to tell whether the case is nominative or accusative. That is to say, is this 238:5 instance ‘enter thee’ (accusative) or ‘thou enter’ (nominative). JMS opts for the latter, nominative, rather than EAWB’s accusative.

(b) The sentence also includes one of AE’s prepositions with multiple meanings, <face stroke> ḥer Her. 

EAWB offers perhaps the principal meaning for Her, ‘over’ (or ‘upon’). But if we accept EAWB’s choice, then the sentence begins to sound like nonsense: ‘enter thee over me’? ‘over’? Really?

Possible meanings for Her found in the Nedj Nedj Database are:

over (upon, above), to, at, in, on, on account of, because, for, by, about, before, through, distant (far),

as well as nouns:

terror, Horus, rope, road, sky, face

and a verb:

prepare

In this instance JMS has opted for 'before'.

[c] Another multi-meaning preposition is <mouth> er, which JMS usually translates broadly as ‘in relation to’. And it seem possible that this is what applies here. Rather than Wallace Budge's single-word reading of the above 'over me' glyphs (Her-i), what might have in fact been intended possible was two words:

Her er-i

before / in relation to me

(d) With <reed water> in ‘saith’, the EAWB translation is beginning to look truly bizarre.

“Not will I let enter thee over me, saith the bolt of the door this, except thou sayest my name.”

This might be idiomatically rendered:

‘I will not let you enter over me’ says the bolt of this door unless you say my name’.

A door bolt talking? You enter over me? What is supposed to be going on?

But perhaps <reed bolt> does not mean ‘saith’— although in sometimes can indeed have this meaning as indicated by Gardiner in the examples below:

(ỉn⋅sn: in-sen)	"say they"	speak  they-all	Gardiner	[348:436.33]	<reed water cloth water PLURAL>
(in: in)	"says"	speak	Gardiner	[554.1:1]	<reed water>

The AE word in also has the prepositional meaning ‘by’:

(in: in)	"by"	by	Col/Man	[9:7]	<reed water>
(ỉn: in)	"by"	by	Faulkner Concise	[22:3.1]	<reed water>
(in: in)	"by"	by	Gardiner	[553.2:12]	<reed water>
(in: in)	"by"	by	Kamrin	[250.2:12]	<reed water>

If in the present instance the meaning should be ‘by’, then the sentence could be viewed as reading, idiomatically:

“I would not let you enter before me by the bolt of this door unless you spoke my name.”

While this is still somewhat obscure (entering by the bolt?), it is not so quaint as the first version.

... thou enter before me by the bolt of ...

EAWB:238:6

sba pen [å]n - ås ¬´teṭ - nek ren - å

sebA pen nis djeden-ek ren-i

door / this / unless / speak did thou / name me-of

There is little to note in relation to this line. Perhaps the only item to remark on is the use of the past tense marker <water> en in:

Wallace Budge translates this in the present, but it is not. It is past tense:

speak did thou

... this door, unless you spoke my name.

INTERMISSION

As light relief, here are photographs of the temple at Luxor:

This is the great pylon at the front of the Luxor Temple, seen floodlit at night in 2009. There is one obelisk remaining today. Obelisks were made in pairs, and the second, which once stood to the right of the seated figure, is now in the Place de la Concorde, in Paris, having been a gift to France. The pedestal for it  is still clearly visible. To enter the temple you walked between the huge seated pharaoh-figures, and between the towering obelisks.

Above is the same location somewhat earlier that day. It shows that the obelisks once stood either side of the great division between the two portions of the pylon. 

Perhaps this entranceway was viewed as a ‘door’. It certainly led to the interior of the temple.

Below is a plan of the temple, viewed from the other direction. That is to say the plan has to be turned the other way round, to match the direction of the photographs.

The plan comes from:

Baines, John, and Jaromir Malek. 1984. Atlas of Ancient Egypt. Oxford: Equinox (Oxford) Ltd.

JMS has picked the pylon is out with a faint yellowish tint, and the obelisk with green. As can be seen, the huge temple extends far beyond the pylon.

Could it possibly be that a scene like this was being described in the text we have been looking at? For the first word on the next line is challenging: teKH, written tex by Wallace Budge.

EAWB:238:7

teX en bu maā ren - t

teKHen bu mAya ren-et

obelisk / place / true / name thee-of]

Wallace Budge (EAWB)  translates it as 'Weight'.

But here we get far fetched again. ‘Weight of the place of right and truth’?

The database offers meanings for teKH: 'plumb-bob', 'inebriate', and 'oil'. This is not much help. Can we look at the glyphs in any other way?

While the <water> en sign following teKH often is indeed the preposition ‘of’ as denoted by EAWB, perhaps it might simply have been joined to teKH to make teKHen. After all, the sp;aces between the hieroglyph groups we are looking at here were introduced by EAWB to make it simple. In reality all the hieroglyphs ran one after the other without spacing or punctuation, interrupted only by new lines as the necessity arose.

Before we examine the tekhen possibility, what is the word for ‘weight’ in the database?  We find it is not teKHen but deben:

(dbn: deben)

"deben-weight, of about 91 grammes"

weight

Gardiner

[602.2:5.32]

<clip-Z water stone>

The following are some of the database results for 'weight':

There are other examples, but already it can be clearly seen that the word for ‘weight’ is deben; not so different in sound from teKHen, but different nevertheless.

And now for tekhen. What has the database to say about that? 

There are half a dozen entries for tekhen but only one stand-out meaning: ‘obelisk’. One of these entries follows:

tekhen: 'obelisk' — with an obelisk as the determinative at the end

Here is the actual database entry for teKHen for the 238:7 line in question, from Wallace Budge:

Interestingly, the second determinative (the fourth glyph above) in Wallace Budge’e example is ‘stone’. While an obelisk determinative would have been even more convincing, ‘stone’ is also indicative that the word might well be ‘obelisk’ that had been intended by the original writer (after all, obelisks were carved out of single stone monoliths), rather than the improbable Wallace Budge suggestion of ‘weight’.

The meaning of the sentence might then be something like:

‘Obelisk: the place of truth’ is your name.

Somewhat obscure still, but perhaps less than Wallace Budge’s interpretation seen above.

And that completes page 238.

PAGE 239

On the next page much of the foregoing is more or less repeated, except that the text refers to (door)posts, and to these being to the right and left. 

Could it be that the ‘posts’ were in fact giant obelisks, which indeed originally stood to the right and left of a ‘door’, or entrance to a temple, through its pylon?

The remaining lines follow, in each case with a suggested revised translation below it in blue.

EAWB:239.1

ån ṭā - å āq - k ḥer - å ån

en di-i aq-ek Her-i in

not / permit I / thou enter / before / in relation to me / by

I will not let thee enter before me by ...

EAWB:239.2

ārit unem ent sba pen

arit imenet enet sebA pen

post / right / of / door / this

... the right post of this door ...

EAWB:239.3

[å]n-ås ¬´teṭ - nek ren - å  ḥenku - nef

nis djeden-ek ren-i Henekun-ef

unless / speak did thou / name me-of // offer entity did he

JMS has translated EAWB's ḥenku as 'offer' rather than 'weigheth'. EAWB himself offers a different translation at the foot of the page in 239:7: 'Judge'. The database provides numerous examples of the word, meaning 'offer'.

... unless you say my name. 

He did offer ...

EAWB:239.4

fat maāt ren - t enen (i. e., ån)

fAt mAyat ren-et enen (i. e., en)

carry what is / truth / name thee-of // not

... ‘carry [?] truth’ to be thy name.

Not ...

EAWB:239.5

ṭā - å āq - k ḥer-å ån ārit

di-yi aq-ek Her-i in arit

permit I / enter thou / on account of me / by / post

I would not permit you to enter before me by the (post) ...

EAWB:239.6

åbet ent sba pen [å]n-ås ¬´teṭ - nek

iyabet net sebA pen nis djeden-ek

left / of / door / this / unless / speak did thou

... left-hand post of this door unless you spoke ...

EAWB:239.7

ren - å  ḥenku en årp ren - t

ren-i Heneku en irep ren-et

name me-of // offer entity / of / wine / name thee-of

... my name.

‘Offer of (offered?) wine’ is your name.

CONCLUSION

How can one dare question such a monumental scholar as Wallace Budge, with his immense knowledge? And yet the glyphs themselves, with the aid of the Nedj Nedj Database, make it possible to conceive of alternative interpretations. And Wallace Budge himself interpreted the same word in different ways from time to time, as has been shown here and there above.

And is it such a wild leap to suppose that the door, the posts, and the entering might have been about a temple pylon with its attendant obelisks (posts) to the right and left of the gap forming the entranceway to the sanctuary?

Jeremy Steele

Saturday 3 August 2013

===================

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.

--------------

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

peti, peter: who? what? see

It is probably impossible to resolve now, but did the Ancient Egyptians (AE) say peti or peter for ‘who’, ‘what’?

The fact that peter also was used for ‘see’ is probably just a coincidence of language. Its use for senses of vision is usually marked by an appropriate determinative suggesting ‘eye’. 

We look at the ‘see’ examples first:

Table 1: peter: ‘see’

In this group the basic <stool bun mouth> 

configuration provides the reading ptr: peter, and the vision determinative shows it is to do with seeing. The last two examples have no vision determinative.

Table 2: who, what

In the ‘who / what’ interrogative pronoun group above, the determinative used is not vision but <SQUATTERMOUTH> 

— once again except for the last two. Once again, too, in every case the basic <stool bun mouth> 

configuration provides the reading ptr: peter.

Table 3: peti

There is, however, another group for which the scholars give a different reading, although it might in reality have been the same. Here are the examples:

All of this group has the <SQUATTERMOUTH> 

determinative, and the only difference in the ‘spelling' is in the first example, with < twig> 

instead of < twig: mouth> 

— the <mouth> portion of which does suggest /r/ of ptr: peter. It seems the scholars have decided the < twig: mouth> sign is a determinative and not part of the spelling of the sound of the word, on the basis that it occurs after the <pair> 

sign. But was it correct to assume this? There are many instances when scribes did not follow the strict sign-sound order, and not only for honorific (gods, pharoahs first) or graphic (what looks nicest) reasons. The <pair> 

sign in these examples indicates agency, the do-er of an action or role. Why the scribes chose to put it in front of the <twig> sign is unknown, but it does not really assure that the /r/ in the < twig: mouth> 

sign was NOT to be pronounced. In fact the first two examples in Table 3, repeated below:

Table 4: peter-i

include the alternative agency sign <reed> 

making the form peter-i: ‘who agent’, rather than peti.

Consequently to your amateur student of the hieroglyphs, it would seem that the probable correct reading of the peti examples might be peter-i.

Jeremy Steele

Sunday 28 July 2013

=================