Le Papyrus de Nesmin: Un Livre des Morts hieroglyphique de l'epoque ptolemaique, vol. 10.

• Author: O'Rourke, Paul F.

With the death of Jacques Jean Clere on June 5, 1989, Egyptology lost one of its greatest philologists and grammarians. A dedicated student and teacher, J. J. Clere made many and significant contributions to the field, his books and articles appearing regularly over a period of more than sixty years. His works cover a range of topics, among which are philological notes, textual criticism, editions of texts, and historical commentaries that span virtually all of ancient Egyptian history.

One of Professor Clere's particular interests was the Egyptian Book of the Dead. During his stay at The Brooklyn Museum as a Wilbour Fellow in 1967-68, Professor Clere undertook the first systematic study and evalf the Ugaritic version of what is known in Assyriology as the summa izbu series (omens based on births of malformed animals); of the very fragmentary Ugaritic text belonging to the same general genre but devoted to human births; of the single Ugaritic astronomical omen text; of an enigmatic text apparently dealing with some form of astronomical conjunction; and of a text referring to consultation with the deity Ditanu, here interpreted as necromantic.

Because Dietrich and Loretz have devoted their Ugaritological energies in the past to transliterating the Ugaritic texts (Die keilalphabetischen Texte aus Ugarit einschlie[beta]lich der keilalphabetischen Texte au[beta]erhalb Ugarits, Teil 1: Transkription, Alter Orient und Altes Testament 24.1 [Neukirchen-Vluyn: Kevelaer, 1976!; henceforth KTU) and to scores of relatively brief studies of various textual and lexicographic topics in Ugaritology, it is a pleasure to welcome this attempt at a more comprehensive view of a group of Ugaritic texts. It is also a pleasure to welcome the contributions from specialists in related areas of inquiry, notably ominology and astronomy, to the elucidation of these texts. The problem here is that unless the specialists are themselves Semitists, they are prisoners of the philological analyses with which they are provided (cf. below on RS 12.61).

The studies presented here are serious studies prepared by serious scholars, and as such they will be consulted for decades to come as important contributions to the elucidation of these texts. That being the case, one can only lament that the quality is not all that it should be. The two primary areas that users of these volumes should view with caution are those of epigraphy and comparative philology.

As regards the epigraphic basis for the studies provided here, it is on a par with what users of KTU have come to expect. (For detailed analyses, see the sign-by-sign comparative descriptions in my various epigraphically oriented publications.) As nearly as one can determine from the transcriptions, no new collations of the tablets were carried out for these studies (no information regarding this matter is provided in the preliminary sections), and one must conclude that new readings were reached by re-examination of photographs or were adopted from the epigraphic contributions of other scholars. Though Dietrich and Loretz have taken umbrage at my hypothetical explanation of the state of the texts in KTU (see UF 22 [1990]: 1-4, and the resolution of the matter in UF 23 [19911: 1-8), they have generally followed here my readings where such were available - even to the extent of including readings in their primary text which I proposed as largely hypothetical. (This is clearest in the case of RS 24.272: compare the text here, pp. 211-12, with the one I proposed in Les Textes para-mythologiques [Paris: Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1988!, 180.)

In one case, that of the Ugaritic version of summa izbu, these...