Der Himmel uber Esna: Eine Fallstudie zur religiosen Astronomie in Agypten.

• Author: Depuydt, Leo
• Position: Book Review

BY ALEXANDRA VON LIEVEN. Agyptologische Abhandlungen, no. 64. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2000. Pp. 248, plates. DM 128 (paper).

In southern Egypt, a number of monumental structures dating to Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine times (ca. 300 B.C.-ca. A.D. 600) have survived in remarkably good condition. The principal sites in question are Dendera, Edfn, Esna, Qom Ombo, and Philae. It is a little appreciated fact that the Ptolemaic temple at Edfu is the best preserved of all of antiquity. The walls of these temples are densely inscribed with texts and adorned with reliefs, but three characteristics make interpreting them difficult.

First, hieroglyphic signs often exhibit values and shapes not found anywhere else in the hieroglyphic corpus (for a survey, see D. Kurth, "Die Lautwerte der Hieroglyphen in den Tempelinschriften der griechisch-rfmischen Zeit--Zur Systematik ihrer Herleitungsprinzipien," Annales du Service des Antiquites de l'Egypte 69 [1983]: 287-309, with a "Nachtrag" in Gotringer Miszellen 103 [1988]: 45-49). These innovations follow patterns to some extent, but there is also much playfulness. Some signs are probably just functionless filler. What has been deciphered of the values in question is listed in a valuable reference tool, the Valeurs phonetiques des signes hidroglyphiques d'epoque greco-romaine, 4 vols. (Montpellier: Publications de la recherche--Universite de Montpellier, 1988-95), edited by F. Daumas in collaboration with an international team.

Second, the inscriptions are a faltering attempt to write Middle Egyptian, spoken about 2000 years earlier. Ignorance of Middle Egyptian, influence from the later spoken stages of the language, and presumably some degree of unfettered grammatical imagination have produced linguistic composites that are probably of as many types as there were authors. Writing grammars of such texts is not possible, only grammatical indexes in conjunction with essays on selected topics (cf. L. Depuydt, "Analyzing the Use of Idioms Past," Studien zur altagyptischen Kultur 27 [1999]: 33-63).

Third, a profuse pantheon is described in mystical, esoteric, and perhaps sometimes even deliberately obfuscating terms. Earlier material is re-used to some degree, but one imagines clever and sometimes even mischievous scribes delighting in variation for its own sake. Some portions of text were probably not even intended to be meaningful.

The bulk of the late temple texts have by now been published, but...