« Happy Birthday Charles Darwin
Main
The Cat is On the Roof »
February 13, 2006
A Frustrating Day at the Library
Those who read this blog regularly know that I am working on a tablet from Taanach (KTU 4.767) that may be written in the short cuneiform alphabet. You also may know that I have been waiting for an article to arrive through interlibrary loan. Any way, while I was waiting I thought I'd reopen a line of inquiry that I have thought about from time to time with regard to a specific issue in this small text. How best to understand the words, ‛ţ krpt that occur at the end of line 1 and the beginning of line 2. While there is some room to debate, the highest probability is that krpt means henna. As I discussed once before, even the reading of ‛ţ is up for discussion. Most recent scholars would read it ‛s2.
It is well known that the Egyptians used henna for medical purposes. So last Wednesday I set out to visit the UCLA library to look at a very old edition of Papyrus Ebers in their medical library. I know from other sources that Papyrus Ebers talks of the use of several different types of henna in mixture with other stuff for skin and even toe treatment. What I am wondering does one of the types of henna mentioned in Papyrus Ebers reflect, perhaps in translation, the difficult phase in lines 2 and 3 of the text I'm working on. My problem is that Papyrus Ebers is written in hieratic script, a cursive version Egyptian hieroglyphics. I've never read a single word of Egyptian in hieratic and I'm far from an Egyptologist in any case. But I have from time to time looked at hieroglyphic texts so I thought that if I could find the word for henna, which is phonetically very similar to the word in the Taanach tablet, then I could transcribe the hieratic around it and eventually sort out the modifiers to see if any of them enlighten me with regard to my problem. The more I thought about all this the more I feared that it would be nearly impossible without knowing exactly which lines, in the over one hundred page papyrus, to look at. So I abandoned the visit to the UCLA library in favor of looking at what I thought was an English translation of Papyrus Ebers from which I could identify the page and lines numbers and then take another shot at the papyrus text in the original or at least transcription.
The book that I thought had an English translation (Papyrus Ebers: translated from the German Version by Cyril P. Bryan) was at the science library of the University of California Riverside. So, I went there today. I found the book without difficulty. It is a 1937 translation of a German book by Joachim. But Joachims' book was an interpretation, not a translation, of Papyrus Ebers. And there is the rub. It does contain a good deal of the papyrus in translation but without a single line number or usable reference.
So back to interlibrary loan for Walter Wreszinski's Der Papyrus Ebers; Umschrift, Übersetzung und Kommentar which was published in 1913. It is available on microfilm at UC Berkley. And to think, we just gave away our microfilm reader. Why would we ever need that old technology? The good news is that if I can get this it has both the original and a modern translation but in German. Well I've needed to work on German anyway.
The real problem is that I am interested in resolving a philological issue. If I were only interested in writing a history of Egyptian medicine, there are lots on good secondary sources and I might be able to get away without looking at the hieratic. Unfortunately, philology requires that one look at the actual words and symbols.
Posted by Duane Smith at February 13, 2006 8:59 PM | Read more on Ugarit |
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telecomtally.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1574
Comments
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.
Send me an email if it is important.