« Where is Ba'al?
Main
Congratulations Al Gore »
October 12, 2007
CSI: Tebtunis
The ancient town of Tebtunis is about seventy-five miles south of Cairo and is famous for the papyri that archaeologists are still finding there. Archaeology has an update. Among the recent finds are 300 cards that seem to be tools for divination. The papyrologist, Claudio Gallazzi of Milan University, calls them "oracular cards." Someone apparently used several of these cards to help solve a crime: the theft of his bronze pot.
Among the cards, Gallazzi found one that reads ". . . if Thamista was the man who has stolen my bronze pot, give me this card. . ." He found five others just like it, each containing a different name--essentially a suspect lineup from which Sobek could pick out the culprit. "We didn't know this ritual before," he says. "So we think now that all over Egypt people used to write these cards when they couldn't find a thief or a killer."
The cards come from the third century BCE. Sobek, the crocodile god, is the addressee. They are clearly part of a process of deductive divination whose aim in this specific case to find the guilty party. This method might not pass constitutional muster today. But then again, one never knows.
Assuming Gallazzi's understanding is correct, both the protases and the apodoses on these cards are of abnormal interest. And I really mean abnormal. In each protasis the differing personal name (PN) is of one of several "suspects." The protasis itself contains, by virtue of its unique PN, the "result" of the divination. More commonly, the protases contain the conditions that points to "results." Here they contain the conditions for selecting a particular card. In most omina the "result" is, as one would expect, in the apodosis. But here the apodoses take the form of a plea that Sobek select the correct card rather than pointing to the "results." From our point of view, each card need only say, "PN stole my bronze pot." But for those who used the cards the protasis / apodosis structure appears to be important and perhaps even necessary.
Via ArchaeoBlog
Posted by Duane Smith at October 12, 2007 8:39 AM | Read more on Archaeology |
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telecomtally.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2282