A Tourist's Memento
NOTES:
1. The first word, iwt 'coming', is a verb form called the "narrative infinitive". The phrase iwt in X is equivalent to the English phrase X came.
2. Egyptian names were meaningful phrases in Egyptian. The name of the pharaoh, xpr-kA-ra, means Manifestation of the ka of Re. The scribe's name, DHwty, is the Egyptian form of the name of the god popularly called Thoth.
3. There are two examples here of "honorific transposition" (the placing of the glyph for a god at the beginning of a phrase when it is actually pronounced after): in the name xpr-kA-ra, where the glyph for ra comes first, and in the phrase dwA-nTr, where the glyph for nTr 'god(s)' comes first. This last was evidently considered a compound verb in Egyptian, and might be rendered 'to god-praise'.
4. The phrase Hr dwA-nTr 'praising god' is actually a noun phrase using the preposition Hr 'upon'. It meant something like 'on the action of praising god' and implies continuous activity, that he kept enthusing about the tomb the whole time he was there.
This is a piece of graffiti from a visitor to the tomb of Senet,
mother of Intefiqer, who was vizier under Senwosret I (c. 1920 B.C.E.). The
tomb was built in Western Thebes in the 12th Dynasty, and was a
popular tourist
destination in the early 18th Dynasty, from which this graffito dates. By
this time, 400 years after completion, the tomb was already broken open
and looted, and probably looked much like it looks today. Yet it's
many carved and painted scenes must
have still been impressive, for a contemporary of Djehuty named Bak left
another graffito, and declared that the tomb was "like heaven inside."
The piece was originally written in hieratic, and a copy of the original
can be found at the top of the page. The hieroglyphs below it are my
reading of the hieratic. Hieratic signs correspond directly to hieroglyphs,
so there is a one-to-one relationship between the hieratic and hieroglyphic
signs in the inscription (but note that the original was
written right-to-left!). You can put your mouse pointer over a set of glyphs
to see the transliteration of each word. If you leave the pointer on the
word for a moment, the translation of the word will appear in the "tool tip"
window, if your browser is IE 4.0 or NN 4.0 or later (otherwise, the translation
appears in the Status Bar at the bottom of the browser). I hope this gives
you something close to the feel of actually reading the hieroglyphs.
