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Ancient Glyph Translation (Horus of Pe?)


ancienthistory

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Hello,

I am new to this forum and found this site during my research. I am researching an ancient Egyptian coffin and outer sarcophagus and have been attempting to determine the location of origin if possible. I have most of the glyphs translated, including the name of the owner, the mother, etc., however there is a reference that is puzzling me. Toward the bottom of the second register of glyphs from the left, there appears to be a reference to either "Horus, Lord of the Sky", or perhaps "Horus of Pe", or just a reference to the city of Pe (the city and "P" glyph) flowed by the Wadjet glyph with the snake wrapped around the sun.

Following this there are the glyphs forming the name of Osiris, then what appears to be "son of" and then possibly "Sesh" (scribe)?

Any help that could be provided would be greatly appreciated. I have attached a couple of pictures of the glyphs with one showing the full registers of glyphs on the front and the second with a close view of the glyphs in question.

Thank you very much in advance.

Mike

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I'd like to take a stab at this but the image is too small for me to make out. My vision is far from perfect. Could you post a large and clear image? Or failing that, do a careful line drawing in dark ink and post that instead.

The deities you can just see flanking the inscription and holding knives suggest this is a coffin from the Akhmim region. Is this coffin from the Late Period?

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Hello,

Thank you very much for your message. It looks like I will need to do some editing to make the files large enough to see, but small enough to fit in the attachment upload limit. I will attempt to do that this evening. I was able to attach photos of the vertical register of glyphs that run across the length of the outer sarcophagus. This essentially says much of the same thing as the front of the coffin.

As for some background information, this coffin has been carbon dated to the Persian Period. It has some unusual characteristics on the front that I have been attempting to explain, including a funerary bed with the head of a falcon with a "Ba" bird in the form of a snake above the bed. Akhmim has been one of the leading locations that has been discussed for its origin, but looking at the glyphs if there is a reference to Pe that could explain some of the other unusual characteristics as well.

Thanks again for your help! I appreciate any insight and opinions.

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Hello,

Here are some additional photos of the imagery and glyphs on the front of the coffin. Perhaps these will help.

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post-155374-0-92174700-1432639773_thumb.

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Yes. This is the same one. Although the translated name in the article is incorrect and it is for a male, however this is the same coffin. There are unusual features that I am trying to explain. It may not be possible to do so, but I am giving it my best shot anyway. I believe they are more than just an artist's mistake.

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Yes. This is the same one. Although the translated name in the article is incorrect and it is for a male, however this is the same coffin. There are unusual features that I am trying to explain. It may not be possible to do so, but I am giving it my best shot anyway. I believe they are more than just an artist's mistake.

Well, if you compare the artwork the artist was in fact titled "blunderer". There might be more than meets the eye but the coffin itself does not reveal it, besides, we are talking 5th century BC, or the time when Egypt was already in decline and what survived until the Romans gave it the coup d'grace was thanks to Persians and Greeks.

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True, but to that point we are also talking about a time when standards weren't quite as rigid as they were in the "classical" Egyptian period. while the funerary bed with a lion head and a human-headed Ba was the standard, perhaps this falcon-headed bed with snake "Ba" had some other significance. While not a particularly skilled painter, the artist clearly knew what deities went where and the format to use, even if he wasn't the best at drawing them. For example, if someone asked me to draw a picture of the Empire State Building I could draw a rather crude and perhaps comical image of the building, but that doesn't mean I didn't know what I was drawing... Only that I'm not a great artist.

That's what I'm trying to determine. The top of the head features the winged solar disc flanked by uraei (the symbol of Horus Behdet). With the name of the owner (Iret-Horru) and the falcon-headed funerary bed (Horus was also shown with the body of a lion), if the glyphs do indicate a reference to Pe, Buto, or even someplace such as Edfu, that would help substantiate that there was meaning behind this design, and not just a mistake. It could very well be a mistake, but it's cerrainly worth exploring.

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Yes. This is the same one. Although the translated name in the article is incorrect and it is for a male, however this is the same coffin. There are unusual features that I am trying to explain. It may not be possible to do so, but I am giving it my best shot anyway. I believe they are more than just an artist's mistake.

For one thing, the sarcophagus shows the deceased lying on a bed that's a gryphon - not the standard lion. I don't know why the person in the article calls it "the head of a ba bird" because ba birds have human heads.

The hieroglyphs are strange, and there's every chance that the person writing them couldn't actually read them. I haven't seen the "serpent encircling the sun" sign before.

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Yes. This is the same one. Although the translated name in the article is incorrect and it is for a male, however this is the same coffin. There are unusual features that I am trying to explain. It may not be possible to do so, but I am giving it my best shot anyway. I believe they are more than just an artist's mistake.

Males and females often had the same name (Ahotep, for one.)

My own guess here (realize that it's just a guess and I-am-not-an-Egyptologist) is that the coffin decorations were done FOR a deceased Egyptian...but the artist isn't Egyptian though they may have been trained by an Egyptian.

And in all honesty, although the art is reasonably bad, it's not THAT far off from that of some of the non-royally trained artists. Royal artists were selected from the best and they were the ones whose art we generally see in the museums. Back in the collections, however, are more crudely done pieces.

I have some photos of a limestone stele in the Houston museum that's amusingly bad... and if memory serves, it's from the 2nd Intermediate period. It was undoubtedly an expensive piece but a very provincial one (done for an important person from a small village away from the large cities.)

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Greetings, all, and thanks for the improved images, ancienthistory. First I'd like to address the lineage, because as I read these glyphs, I am compelled to disagree with the online articles which state the coffin belongs to a woman named Denit-aset. That name is indeed there, but the hierarchy of the names as seen in the inscription seems to indicate the coffin belonged to someone else, who was male.

I believe there to be fundamental errors with the facts in the article, which is nothing new when one reads such things from online news outlets. Moreover, as Kenemet noted, the extant hieroglyphs are strange. In fact, in some spots they're just sloppy and extremely difficult to read. I state firmly that I believe the coffin to be authentic, regardless of its simple quality , sloppy glyphs, and clumsy vignettes. This is what one often encounters (though not always) with Late Period coffins. I've actually worked on translations of coffins in worse condition. At least the glyphs here are usually easy to see (the pigments are well preserved). Based on stylistic grounds I would assign this coffin to the region of Akhmim. This is preliminary on my part but is based on the depictions of deities along the sides, each of whom squats while clutching a knife. This is typical of Akhmim coffins from the Late Period and later. What would nail it, for me at least, is the presence of a winding snake along either side of the coffer. I can't see the sides well enough to determine this, but it's a hallmark of Akhmim coffins.

In any case, for this post I'll just provide my translation of the offering formula, which mentions the lineage:

Dd-mdw in Asir-wn-nfr Htp di nsw n irt-Hrw sA n dnt(?)-Ast msi nb-prt BAst...

"Words spoken by Osiris-Wennefer: An offering which the king gives to Iret-Horu, son of Denit-Aset, born of Bastet..."

From there it goes on to mention an offering given to the Lord of Heaven.

(Kenemet, the serpent encircling the sun disk throws me a bit too, although I have come across it before. Off the top of my head I can't recall its precise meaning, but here it follows the "Lord of Heaven" title so I'm presuming it's a determinative for that,)

The first (human) name mentioned, then, is Iret-Horu, a common male name in the Late and Ptolemaic periods. What follows is "son of" Denit-Aset, in such a manner that Denit-Aset is not a female but a male and Iret-Horu's father. I put a question mark in my transliteration of "Denit," because although I can see the glyphs for it, I frankly don't understand it. And after this name it says "born of Bastet." The phrase "born of," as I recall, usually referred explicitly to the mother, so Iret-Horu's mom was named after the goddess Bastet.

Unless I'm missing something fundamental, I would argue that this coffin belongs not to Denit-Aset but to Iret-Horu.

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Oh this is exciting! I'll watch this thread with great interest (granted I'm not Egyptology major).

And I'm with kmt_sesh on this one. Its nice to see some legitimate discussion here.

Edited by DecoNoir
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Central%20Panel_zpsmeryehmh.jpg

Now, as to the real substance of ancienthistory's question: House of Pe. Ancienthistory, you mentioned in your PM to me that you came across an old post of mine in which I wrote "House of Pe." Are you absolutely certain what I wrote was "House of..."? Do you remember where this post was? I did a search using keywords and came up blank.

If I wrote this phrase, I'm not sure what it was about in my post. What I know I have written about, however, is "Bas of Pe" (or "Lords of..." or "Powers of..."). This comes from the Book of the Dead, and one often sees excerpts from the Book of the Dead on Late Period coffins. There were sacred regions with which the deceased needed to be familiar, although it's not fully understood how these regions in the spells relate to the underworld. Pe is only one of them. The other three are Hermopolis, Nekhen, and the West.

In the image above I've outlined two examples in red. At left is the phrase nTrw n nxn, "gods of Nekhen" (ancient Hierakonpolis). At right the circle glyph is tough to make out, and this phrase doesn't seem to fit with the standard sacred sites, so I am largely guessing when I transliterate nTrw (n) r(?)S. What it might mean I don't know, because none of the glyphs work for the ancient Egyptian spellings for Pe, Hermopolis, or the West.

In any case I can't find glyphs for "gods of Pe" in the available images. I've little doubt they're somewhere on the coffin, however.

The bottom line is, these phrases are not relevant to places where the person, Iret-Horu, lived or dwelled when alive. They belong to spells which would outfit his soul with the knowledge required to proceed at certain points in his journey to the afterlife. As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm reasonably confident this person, Iret-Horu, lived in the Akmim region.

Postscript: You mentioned in your OP a specific spot where you think Pe is mentioned. The accompanying image is, however, too small for me to make out. Is this spot in one of your larger images? If so, is there some way you can specifically mark it?

And thanks for bringing this discussion to us. It's been awhile since I've been able to write about logical, reasonable, solid pharaonic history. No aliens, Atlanteans, "secret lost" knowledge, or other such falderal. :tu:

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In looking at my notes from the ARCE meeting, where Dr. Judas spoke about griffins, I can confirm that the bed is actually the Egyptian style griffin, with the hooked beak and without the crest feathers.

There is a snake, by the way, but it's at the feet which are painted in a way that suggests a shrine with a canine deity on the left and on the right (appears to be Anubis.) egyptian-coffin-2.jpg?1417582932

I've seen similar setups (dual jackal gods within a shrine) on Greco-Roman mortuary objects, so I agree that this is a very late period coffin. The canopic deities are almost unrecognizable (it suggests that the artist hadn't encountered any baboons)

Also, on the band across the chest, I notice that "words spoken by Osiris" actually appears in front of what is probably Anubis. The four canopic deities' names aren't spelled, either

Do you suppose those are representations of the incense cones on their heads?

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Thank you for your message. I typed my message to you on a phone and may have had an autocorrect. What I meant was "Horus of Pe". It was a post from 2012. Sorry about that.

Attached is the section that I thought may have referenced the city of Pe. It is between the two blocks in your attachment and consists of what is translated as Horus, lord of the Sky and is followed by the snake wrapped around the solar disc "Wadjet or Uachit". The city of Pe was written with a "p" glyphs next to the determinative for city (the circle with the crossroads representing a city center). These appear to be present below the "Horus" reference and above the Wadjet reference. My thought was that this represented the city of Pe, or perhaps in conjunction with the Snake glyph immediately following, it could have been a strange form of Per-Wadjet. Or the reference could be part of the Horus reference as Horus lord of Pe... But that was a bit of a shot in the dark.

Do you have other photos of Egyptian Griffins being used in this way as the central funerary bed? I've never seen one with anything other than the head of a lion. Also the Ba Bird is also always a human, however in this case it is a winged snake wearing the crown of Hathor. That is difficult to explain, but the duality of Pe and Dep (Buto) shows this relationship between the falcon and the snake deities, which could form some sort of explanation.

You are completely correct that the snake starts at the feet of the coffin and wraps around, disappearing into the headcloth at the top of the coffin. This may be from Akhmim, and shares many characteristics with coffins from there, however I haven't seen this funerary scene with the lion-headed bed or snake on Akhmim coffins. Often, but not always, their glyphs reference the ancient city of Khent-Min. I don't see that here though.

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Kenemet,

If you have references to Griffins bein used in this way that would be helpful. I haven't seen them in lieu of a funerary bed.

Also I think you are correct that on the heads are the incense cones... Just crude versions.

Kemet-Sesh,

Underneath solar disc with wrapped snake glyph on the front of the coffin, it follows with "Osiris, son of" and then two glyphs that seem to be "s and sh". Could this be an odd way of writing "sesh"/ scribe?

I enjoy this discussion as well. It is an interesting topic. At least to me anyway. :-)

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Kenemet,

If you have references to Griffins bein used in this way that would be helpful. I haven't seen them in lieu of a funerary bed.

Sadly, I'm just a first year student and what I saw was at the ARCE conference. The presentation was "Griffins, Egyptians, and Keftiu in Early New Kingdom Egypt. Beth Ann Judas, PhD, University of Pennsylvania - she could better answer the question.

For an Egyptian who died away from Egypt and whose body and coffin was prepared by a non-Egyptian, it might make sense. Griffins do appear in Egyptian art in certain regions (I'm not sure where... I'm just starting to study apotropaic knives so my understanding is VERY small).

Also I think you are correct that on the heads are the incense cones... Just crude versions.

It really was the only thing I could think of for them.

I did note the city sign that you said might be Pe, but my ability to translate is still very poor (and to me, the signs for Bast were unrecognizable until Kmt_Sesh pointed them out.) The artist who wrote the signs writes hieroglyphs as poorly as I do... the nsw sign was another one I found unrecognizable.

Also noted (suggesting non-Egyptian artist) was that there's very little bilateral symmetry on the coffin.

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Kenemet,

Thanks for the info. I looked up Dr. Judas and will read through what I can find. It looks like she has a few articles on griffins in Egypt.

You're correct that there are some oddities in how the glyphs were written. The "Di" in the Hotep-Di-Nsw formula is missing. Also the viper glyph is written backwards.

One other trait that I find interesting is that this coffin is clearly for a male and the face is red, which represented males. If you look closely on the funerary bed you can see that the face of the deceased is painted yellow. Yellow was generally used for women, but at some times it was used for men to represent the male at an older or weakened age. That being the case, if not a fluke or mistake, that does show a level of understanding and knowledge by the artist, even if he wasn't the best painter.

It is an interesting coffin. I've been hopeful the glyphs would give some hint of a city or an o curation, but to this point bo luck.

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Kenemet,

Thanks for the info. I looked up Dr. Judas and will read through what I can find. It looks like she has a few articles on griffins in Egypt.

I also found the following, which gives the link between the griffin (specifically the Egyptian griffin) and Western Semetic artistic tradition:

Wyatt, Nicolas. "Grasping the Griffin: Identifying and Characterizing the Griffin in Egyptian and West Semitic Tradition." Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 1.1 (2009): 29-39. (available as a free PDF, thank the gods.) I haven't really finished the preliminary database on the knives, but my sense is that "things with griffins" are from the delta or along the western edge of the Mediterranean. As far as I know, the symbol really didn't make any headway down into Elephantine or Hieronkopolis.

Do the names give any clues?

You're correct that there are some oddities in how the glyphs were written. The "Di" in the Hotep-Di-Nsw formula is missing. Also the viper glyph is written backwards.

Ah! Yes. I thought I noticed some backwards symbols, but when I looked, I couldn't find them.

One other trait that I find interesting is that this coffin is clearly for a male and the face is red, which represented males. If you look closely on the funerary bed you can see that the face of the deceased is painted yellow. Yellow was generally used for women, but at some times it was used for men to represent the male at an older or weakened age. That being the case, if not a fluke or mistake, that does show a level of understanding and knowledge by the artist, even if he wasn't the best painter.

I can think of a couple of reasons why this might occur -- it could have been a gifted coffin from someone else, or it could have been an 'in stock" coffin from a workshop. It might have been reused, but nobody's indicating that this happened.

You might ask on EFF... someone may know.

It is an interesting coffin. I've been hopeful the glyphs would give some hint of a city or an o curation, but to this point bo luck.

I'm enjoying this exploration.

Is there anything on the back or inside the lid (that you know of?)

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Ancienthistory, I see where you're going. Thanks for clarifying. The bird glyph in question is badly rendered and indeed could be Horus, making him the Lord of Heaven, The next set of glyphs—the "p" phoneme and city marker—could indeed be Pe. I might translate this as "Horus, Lord of Heaven and of Pe."

You're identification of the snake and sun disk as Wadjet does make sense. This goddess was closely identified with Dep and Pe, but I must confess I can't figure out what she's doing just sitting there. You pointed out Per Wadjet, and this is the name by which Dep and Pe were traditionally called by this late point in pharaonic history. So it's a logical conclusion. I'm just having a hard time working it sensibly into the inscription.

I still don't think this has anything to do with the home or origin of the coffin owner and remain confident that he was from Akhmim. I just wish I could get a clear and detailed image (or images) of all available glyphs. I tried but had no success. There's not much out there on this coffin, yet. If I could find the name ipw in the glyphs in a relevant context, that would confirm it.

I wouldn't put too much stress on making sense of all of the oddities on the coffin. The inscriptional material is not well done, as you're aware. Many of the scenes and vignettes are very clumsy. I have never seen a bird-headed funerary bed like this one. Kenemet's identification of a griffin is convincing, especially given the time period. Given the crown on the bird's head, I had just thought it was Horus. To me the serpent-form ba is what's really unusual. I've never seen that before. Otherwise it's a fairly typical, if awkward, funerary scene depicting the return of the ba to the body (Spell 89 from the Book of the Dead).

I would also emphasize the fact that most coffins were not custom made. Most were set-piece affairs which were pre-carved and perhaps already largely painted, with space left for texts. This might be all one needs to explain the red face of the coffin and the yellow face of the little mummy painted on the bird-headed bed. Moreover, this being the Late Period, a lot more varieties in pigments were used. At the Field Museum, off the top of my head, I can think of male coffins with green, orange, tan, black, and pink faces.

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Since the coffin dates to the Persian period between 500-450 BC, perhaps if it is a griffin it shows some Persian influence in Egyptian thought during this time, even though the Egyptians had no love lost for the Persians. Like Kemet-Sesh, I've always assumed it was Horus, or some form of Horus. That could make some sense of the falcon head. The winged snake above is still a mystery though, which is part of the reason why I was attempting to see if there were references to Pe of Per-Wasjet (Buto). This would help explain the connection between the falcon and the winged snake. In that case the crown on the snake would represent the snake taking the form of Isis hovering over the deceased, who has now become Osiris.

As far as the back is concerned it has a large plumed Djed pillar. Another oddity is that the plumes appear to be the falcon plumes of Horus rather than the Ostrich plumes typically found on a Djed Pillar. The front and back are also covered with the cross-hatched pattern to represent the beaded net covering the deceased. I've seen this quite a bit on Sokar figures, especially from around Saqqara, but not so much on coffins.

I agree with Kemet Sesh that this has many traits of Akhmim. The rows of guardians holding cloths and knives, the depiction of Horus on the shrine at the feet, the striped headcloth and several other traits are common with Akhmim coffins. Still there are several well provenanced coffins from Akhmim and I haven't seen some of these depictions before from that location. This could just be a one-off situation.

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MMmkay... a thought, here. I notice that the trading tribes would have used Akhmim as a center, but is it possible that it might be from Coptos?

See reference here in the Wikipedia article:

Herodotus mentions the temple dedicated to Perseus and asserts that Chemmis was remarkable for the celebration of games in honor of that hero, after the manner of the Greeks, at which prizes were given; as a matter of fact some representations are known of Nubians and people of Punt (southern coastal Sudan and the Eritrean coast) clambering up poles before the god Min. Min was especially a god of the desert routes on the east of Egypt, and the trading tribes are likely to have gathered to his festivals for business and pleasure at Coptos (which was really near Neapolis) even more than at Akhmim. Herodotus perhaps confused Coptos with Chemmis. Strabo mentions linen-weaving and stone-cutting as ancient industries of Panopolis, and it is not altogether a coincidence that the cemetery of Akhmim is one of the chief sources of the beautiful textiles of Roman and Christian age, that are brought from Egypt.

SOURCE - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhmim#History

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In looking at my wands database, I found a gryphon inscribed on an apotropaic wand from Akhmin. It's dated Middle Kingdom. My database is small; the other wands with gryphons are from "unknown" locations. According to my lecture notes, there is one written association of gryphons with Horus (I didn't note where/when/etc... it's possible that this is one of the lectures I recorded...but I first have to find the recording.)

(terminology that I'm trying to match - falcon-headed griffin is also called a hieroakosphinx.)

The Pectoral of Mereret shows the folded wing griffin. Folded or wingless griffins are shown as tamed/friendly animals in some contexts (can you tell that I really like the griffins?)

3u110.jpg

I also located THIS - note the orb encircled by Wadjet as well as the hieracosphinx. Sadly, no location is given for this... perhaps someone can figure it out? Here the sign appears to be "protecting" the hieroglyphs below, much as a cartouche would.

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...an that's all I got.

Edited by Kenemet
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