A Bad Piece of Art
We are so familiar with the beauty of Ancient Egyptian artwork, as
represented by
the other images on this website, that we tend to assume that all Egyptian
art was of the same high quality. This image should dispel that notion.
The beautiful artwork was the product of the most talented scribes,
made for the most wealthy members of society. But the majority of
scribes must not have been so skillful, and these are the craftsmen
with whom the average Egyptian dealt. This crude stela (from Abydos,
late 18th dynasty) is surely more
typical of Egyptian art on the whole.
In addition to being an inept illustrator,
the author of this stela is an indifferent scribe.
The text at the top is clearly a version of the offering
formula, but defective. Several signs are
either missing, or so poorly drawn that I can't make them out. The word
Htp "offering",
is consistently mis-spelled
*Hpt. The entire
first line is problematic. To the best of my ability (the signs I am
unsure of are written in green), the text at the
top reads (right-to-left!)
An offering2 which the king1 gives3,
an offering1 which Geb3 gives2,
an offering1 of the Great3 Ennead2,
to the Great2 God1,
Lord of Abydos (i.e., Osiris),
that he might give
a voice-offering of bread, beer, cattle, fowl, and oil
for the Osiris Montu-Hotep,
born of Benenet, possessor of reverence.
(Place your mouse over the glyphs for their transliterations. The subscript numbers show the order of the Egyptian words in the phrase, when it differs from the English.)
While most of the text is relatively clear, the first line
has me stumped, and the above is my best guess. I am particularly puzzled
by the glyphs
.
I've translated them as a relative form of the verb
'to give' rdi:
'which Geb gives', but this is usually written
dd.
Budge notes that Geb was occasionally invoked to give the offering, and
cites the formula
. Maybe
the above is our scribe's garbled attempt
at this.
Our scribe's handling of the word
Htp
leads me to speculate that
the Egyptians learned their glyphs as whole units, and not in the analytic
way that modern students usually do. When we moderns see this word, we
reason something like the following: "There's the 'offering tray' glyph, paired
with 't' and 'p' monoliteral
glyphs, so this is the word
Htp,
which means 'offering'". I can imagine
the ancient scribe approached it differently: "I need to write the word
'offering'; I know it is made up of a certain three glyphs, and the long one
goes on top." It's not hard to imagine the scribe reversing the other
glyphs, if their phonetic values were not uppermost in his mind.
Almost the opposite process may be the source of
the extra
w in the initial
phrase
Htp-di-nsw.
This is a fossilized phrase; each word in the phrase is abbreviated,
and the word order is inverted due to honorific transposition
of the word
nsw
'king'.
Our scribe may have been unaware of the constituent meaning of
the phrase. He would know the prononciation, know that it ended
with a 'w' sound, but not realize that the 'w' was part of the
glyph
sw,
and so mistakenly "correct" the text to include it.
I wonder what process was at work in the
spelling of the town of Abydos, usually
AbDw
but here spelled
Dw{w}. The scribe
has completely
omitted the initial glyphs, but has added an extra
w and hyper-corrected the determinative for
"town". As a determinative, it is usually written
and has no sound value in a word. The glyphs
are the actual word for "town" and when used as such have the prononciation
niwt. The scribe has retained the entire form
of the word, but used it only as a determinative, possibly in complete
ignorance of the phonetic implications of the fuller form.
I don't want to be too harsh on our unknown scribe, however. These
"average" works of Egyptian art are rarely seen, and should be cherished
all the more for their rarity. Besides, there is an undeniable
poignancy in the image of Montuhotep sniffing a lotus blossom.
The text in the lower left I have not been able to figure out. If anyone knows what this text means, or can correct any of my errors in analyzing the offering formula, please e-mail me with your observations.
