Part III.
Project Gutenberg EPUB edition
Renouf, P. Le Page (Peter Le Page) and Naville, Edouard
Shu and Tefnut, who are brother and sister, play the same parts as the two goddesses.
There is a picture, which appears in the vignette of Chapter 17 in most of the papyri of the second and later periods, of two male deities bearing the Eyes over their heads (see Pl. XXXV). If the beards upon their chins are not a mistake,[117] copied from one papyrus upon another, they must represent not Isis and Nephthys but the two Rehu Rā and Thoth, Sun and Moon, instead of the .
It is important to note that if Sun and Moon are Eyes of Osiris or Rā or Ptah, the deity is not to be confounded with them: they are but manifestations of himself.
3.Kindred, . The sign of plurality does not here, any more than in Chapter 1, necessarily imply more than one person. The crime in question is one to which men are easily tempted in certain stages of society. Abimelech, in the book of Judges (ix, 5), “slew his brethren, the sons of Jerubbaal.” Jephthah had to “flee from the face of his brethren.” Absalom had his brother Amnon assassinatedassassinated, and all the king’s sons fled in fear of sharing the same fate. Solomon put to death his elder brother Adonijah. Athaliah, the queen mother, “destroyed all the seed royal” of Judah. The annals of eastern[118] and even western[119] nations are full of such occurrences. But, in positions less exalted than that of claimants to royalty, ambition or covetousness are motives to crimes like that of the wicked uncle of ‘the Babes in the Wood.’[120] The reading , which has for determinative the sign of smallness, seems to indicate that the victims of the crime are minors, perhaps wards.
Some of the papyri (even that of Nebseni) have a calf, , as determinative of the word, and as the ‘slaying of calves’ is not necessarily a crime, other scribes have added , ‘sacred,’ and thus made the sin one of sacrilege.
The same word, like the Greek μόσχος and the Latin pullus, might be applied to the young of all kinds of animals; but the Egyptian scribes have in such cases a propensity to use a determinative which forces a wrong sense upon the word.
4.Instead of truth, . There are two ways according to which this expression may be translated, but only one of them can be the right one. is a compound preposition, instead of, in loco, anstatt, au lieu de, بمنزلة. And this is evidently the right construction. If be taken as the simple preposition governing , the meaning will be that the deceased did not “tell lies in the cemetery.” The Pyramid Texts (Unas, 394) have the expression (sic), “Right instead of Wrong.”
5. This is only an approximate version of a passage, the true text of which was lost at an early period. M. Maspero (Origines, p. 189) understands it as follows: “Je n’ai jamais imposé du travail à l’homme libre quelconque, en plus de celui qu’il faisait pour luimême!” The last words are the translation of , according to Td. (tomb of Ramses IV) all the other ancient texts having , ‘for me.’ But the chief difficulties occur at the beginning of the sentence.
6.Shorten the palm’s length, . Many papyri read , which is a superficial measure, more in place under the next precept.
7.The fields’ measure, .
8.The beam of the balance, .
The tongue [rather plummet] of the balance, .
The balance is so frequently represented in false perspective by Egyptian artists, that Sir J. G. Wilkinson has given an account of it, which is quite unintelligible to those who have ever so moderate a knowledge of statics. Mr. Petrie’s description is the true one. “The beam was suspended by a loop or ring from a bracket projecting from the stand.... Then below the beam, a long tongue was attached, not above the beam as with us. To test the level of the beam, a plummet hung down the tongue, and it was this plummet which was observed to see if the tongue was vertical and the beam horizontal.”—A Season in Egypt, p. 42.
In Pl. XXXVI, a few pictures will be found which give a more correct notion of the Egyptian balance than some of the absurd representations which defy a scientific explanation.
It is evident that if the tongue is fastened at a wrong angle, the beam will not really be horizontal when the tongue is shown by the plummet line to be vertical. This seems to be the fraud alluded to in the text.
The word , , the name given to the plummet, apparently signifies a cup full of liquid. It is etymologically identical with , a toper (ⲑⲁϧⲓ, ϯϩⲉ, ebrius, ebrietas), , ⲧⲓϧⲓ, a crane, and the crane-god, Thoth.
The apparatus of which the plummet forms so important a part, whether for the balance or for building purposes, is called (Denkm., III, 26), .
9.The manors of the gods, . I understand as property acquired by royal grant. Aâhmes at El Kab says that he has acquired () much land through the royal bounty. The deceased in the later copies of the Book of the Dead (Ch. 1, 24), acquires the allotment of land, , in the Garden of Aarru, and Ani (Pl. III) acquires “a permanent allotment () in the Garden of Hotepit like the followers of Horus.”
10.Ponds. The right reading is , as Birch already noted in his Dictionary, from the excellent papyrus Ao of the XVIIIth dynasty.
Hieratic papyri also give the determinative .
The determinative which some of the papyri give to the word, and which is a self-evident blunder, is probably copied either from , or from . The sign , and a man striking with an instrument, which also occur, are mere symbols of the operation by which either quarries, or ponds, are cut.
11.Thou of the Nose, or rather Beak, , in allusion to one of the chief characteristic features of the Ibis god (πρόσωπον ἐς τὰ μάλιστα ἐπίγρυπον; Herodotus, II, 76, in his description of the bird). Thoth, the god of Chemunnu, is meant by this appellative.
He is so called, , on the statue of the King Horus in the Museum of Turin (l. 8), and on the very much more ancient altar, of the VIth dynasty, belonging to the same museum. The same appellative[121] is found in the list of gods upon each of the Memphite cubits described by Lepsius.[122]
12.Eater of the Shadow. The Demotic version interprets this of “his own shadow.” I am rather inclined to interpret it by “the gnomons which were without shadows at noon,” and the “well of Syene” (Strabo, 817) at the Summer Solstice; when the Sun was vertical.
13.Thou of Lion form, . The Demotic has “Shu and Tefnut.” But as there are only forty-two gods in all, we must here think of a single god with a lion’s head, as in such pictures as Wilkinson, III, Pl. XLIX; Denkm., III, 276, and many sarcophagi (e.g., Leemans, Mon., III, L, Pl. III).
Even some of the Theban papyri have two divinities by way of determinatives to the group.
14.Sluggish, ; , , sluggishness. Coptic ϭⲛⲁⲩ. See my note (Proc. Soc. Bib. Arch., XI, p. 76) on the Inscription of Kum el Ahmar.
There are however other readings; none of them apparently of any value.
15.Thou of the Bright Teeth, . The Demotic equivalent is, “who openeth his teeth,” and so exhibits their brightness.
16.Âati, , a name about which the copyists have bungled. It is one of the names of Râ in the Solar Litany, where it appears (l. 23) as , or . Whether applied to the Sun, to the Fish of the name, or to a Ship, the name means Cutter, ‘that which cleaves’ its way.
17.Ṭuṭu, , with many variants, showing that the scribes did not understand the sense of the syllable , some of them adding the bird of evil , others the determinative of mountain. The name on the Sarcophagus of Seti (Bon. II, A. 30) has a snake for determinative, and some papyri call him Ṭuṭu. The god may be recognised in later texts. In the Calendar of Esneh there is a feast on the 14th day of Thoth, in honour of , Tutu, ‘the son of Neith,’ and the text gives the important determinative , of a serpent, worm, or slug. I feel sure, therefore, that we should in the text read the name Tutu, and consider as a determinative.[123] The symbolism would then be identical with that in Pl. XXIII, illustrative of Chapter 87. The Sun-god there rises up like a worm out of the Lotus of Dawn, whereas in another picture a slug () is seen moving upon the flower.
, Ati, where the god makes his appearance, is the name of the ninth Nome of Lower Egypt.
18.I trouble myself only with my own affairs. I understand this of the virtue spoken of by Cicero (de Officiis, I, 34), “nihil praeter suum negotium agere, nihil de alieno anquirere, minimeque esse in aliena republica curiosum.” It is the same to which Plato refers in the Timaeus, 72 A; εὖ καὶ πάλαι λέγεται τὸ πράττειν καὶ γνῶναι τὰ τε ἑαυτοῦ καὶ ἑαυτὸν σώφρονι μόνῳ προσήκειν, not in the sense of a selfish indifference to a neighbour’s welfare or the public good, but in opposition to the ways of the busybodies, who tattle and “speak things which they ought not” (1 Tim., v, 13).
The Egyptian is a rare word. Brugsch’s etymology of it is an impossible one, and his identification of it with ϣⲱⲥⲙ is not less unfortunate.
19.Amu, or Amit, , , . This seems to be the favourite reading. It means the town of Palm. But, as the name was written ideographically, it appears in some copies as the town of other trees, such as Nehait, or Nārit.
Amu was a place in the north of Egypt, which Brugsch thinks he has identified with a town called Apis (the site of which is itself doubtful).
The most interesting thing known about Amu (Dümichen, Rec. de M., IV, Pl. XV, 90 a), is that in the rites performed on the 16 Choiak, Horus is represented as raising up the body of Osiris out of the water in the form of a crocodile; and that Osiris was known under the name of , The Crocodile, Lord of Amu.
The 142nd chapter of the Book of the Dead, which gives a list of the names of Osiris, has (l. 17) that of , ‘Osiris of Crocodile form,’ or ‘with Crocodile head.’[124] The variants of this group, however, show the reading , ‘king,’ or , ‘of kingly form.’ There is but little doubt that (as M. Naville says, Zeitschr., 1882, p. 190) on the Turin tablet published by Professor Piehl, means ‘King of the gods,’ and that Ptahhotep in the Prisse papyrus (IV, 1) addresses not Osiris, but King Assa as ‘my Lord the King,’ Goodwin had already asserted this meaning in his “Story of Saneha,” and in the Zeitschr., 1874, p. 38.
The orthography of the crocodile name here played upon is remarkably vague, , , and (rapax, Louvre, C, 26). It is this last form which enables us to see the paranomasia in , rapax sicut Raptor (crocodilus) of the Prisse papyrus (VII, 6), and brings the word into connection with ȧta, or ȧti, ‘he who is seized’ of the Sovereignty (see supra, Ch. 40, note 10).
20.Chemiu, , ‘one who overthrows.’ His appearance is made at Kauu, , the Canobic entrance to the Nile, which the Libyan invaders had taken possession of in the time of Rameses III (Great Harris Pap., 77, 2).