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Dude! FCollins! You cracke it!!

:)

Honestly, I imagine there are many, many tablets like this from Egypt and though they are foreign and interesting to most of us they are not actually worth $$$. If they are, cheers to me. !! :) (though I would honestly donate it to someone who cares). Still, I imagine it is one of many things chiselled off of walls by people with little regard for the sanctity of the Egyptian ruins. Oh well.
 
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Thump said:
I always find the following useful when deciphering my hieroglyphics.

rosettaSTONE.jpg


For those of you who don't know, it's the Rosetta Stone.


I saw it in London last year, it's pretty freaking neat!
i saw it 2 posts ago and it was still pretty freaking neat!
 
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The extremely helpful chaps over on that Egyptian website I referenced earlier came through for me. Here was a good description:

Nice to meet you, kinch. I can't help you with the book, but the piece of tablet is wonderful. I'm very jealous of you.

The falcon is definitely a depiction of Horus; note the double-crown he is wearing. And anneke's correct about the sun disk in the upper-left corner, as well as the ankh just to the left of the falcon (at least the bottom half of the glyph looks to be an ankh; the upper half is damaged and quite unclear on my screen). We have a very similar piece in our museum that dates to Ptolemaic times.

The hieroglyphs are trickier to identify because so much is lost. My guess is that this probably is not a serekh but all that remains of a votive stela. The sickle-glyph is in fact transliterated as m3 (we just pronounce it "ma" as anneke indicated), and is a common element in many Egyptian words. The tether might help us date it. Prior to the Middle Kingdom the tether represented a completely independent tj or tch sound, but by the Middle Kingdom, while it still could be used for those sounds, it began to be used interchangeably with the simple t sound, particularly in the case of pronouns, genetives, and various other suffixes (some Egyptologists state that this shift didn't take place till around the 18th Dynasty, though).

As a suffix pronoun it would indicate the feminine "you," used in the sdjm.n=f (past tense) form. The m3 could easily be an abbreviation for (or all that remains of) the word m33 ("to see," "to view," "to behold"). So with the Horus figure it could be taken to mean m33.n=tj Hr, "You viewed Horus...," depending on what other glyphs were there. It would be referring to a woman, perhaps for whom the stela was made.

Alternatively, and similar in concept, is the tomb of Meres-ankh. Glyphs very similar to the ones on your tablet are used to describe her as "Beholder of Horus and Set." The tether in this case is simply the feminine ending in the word "beholder." This was a common sort of epithet, even for women, and this is the translation I myself favor for your tablet.

As a third choice, the sickle is often used as a component in the common epithet m3'-khrw, which translates literally as "true of voice" but is often simply rendered today as "the justified." It is often (but not always) an epithet applied to the dead, which was the purpose for which votive stelae were often (but not always) produced.

Hope this helps. It's a beautiful piece, kinch. Hold on to it!
 
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