Saturday, December 18, 2010

I've removed my translations.

At present, I am going to start working on a book with a systematic reinterpretation of virtually all of Sinai, Petrie's Theban ostraka, Wadi el-Hol, the Timna Valley inscription; and the connection of all of these to Arabian and Ugaritic corpuses (and... because I am far less interested in this, the Proto-Canaanite script - personal opinion; it's received too much attention).

Until then, Wadi el-Hol says:

V: These are for Athtar, the bow and KPT_-headdress (?). El /
H: Is the powerful lord who brings peace to her soul and The Child.

Timna:

Right Tablet: May the Shasu (or PN) cut the head
Left Tablet: Of the ewe-of-the-new-moon-festival.

If you'd like my thoughts on Petrie's Theban ostraka or on the faults of translating Sinai, please email me. I'll give you a hint, there are two entirely separate fish-graphemes in Sinai. One is 7 hawt - "beast/whale" the other is dg "fish"; they are both not original elements of the alphabet; they were derived by a man named Henni or Hennihotep whose name appears in at least three inscriptions.

It would appear that he was taught the alphabet by the Wadi el-Hol scribe and he derived (secondarily) a number of the graphemes common in Sinai. This will sound ridiculous without the evidence I have for this... so let's hope that's forthcoming.

I'll give one more hint, because it's so frankly amazing. The Theban ostrakon (in Petrie's book it's upside-down at the top of the page) that Colless labels 6, which is unfortunately in his pictures missing the left quarter of the tablet (I am unaware of a freely available and digitized copy of the whole picture; i have a printout of Petrie's 1912 book) says the following:

'D . M$ . D_ [...] cNT . QST . H.PZ. B . $cW . WT_[...] . GT_R . L$QY

Then, the Lord of... girds Anat the archer with his offering. And [she] off[ers] the Gether-drink that he may drink.

This would thus be the most complete Ugaritic literary text (dialectic) discovered outside Ugarit.

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