Akhenaten (Box, Carter Archive 001K)

[rymerster]

I'm going to hold off from starting a new thread for now but I will build up a bank of images and links relating to the Tuthmose works - the intention to bring together in one thread as many of the pieces as possible - starting with the plaster/gypsum "masks" and some sculptures that may relate to them. Not all of the faces are in Berlin, at least 1 is in the British Museum collection (though not on display) and others are at the Met and possibly Brooklyn museum.

 

[Alcandra]

The German wiki gives a brief dissection of the name "Akhenaten" and uses the translation of Ludwig Morenz from 2010 that the name may have been pronounced as Achan-yati or Achan-yatin. "Achanyati" seems to be gaining a little traction, but I don't see it becoming a thing, at least in the short term. Echnaton – Wikipedia

That's only due to the "Mayati" from the Amarna letters--which may or may not be a reference to Meritaten. The reason that was considered in the first place is because there is other evidence that the word "mry" was vocalized as "may" [but not like the English word "my" as in "my house"]. The /r/ obviously became weak. But your example doesn't really speak to how the other element "Ax" was pronounced. That we can only infer from how it survived into Coptic because there is no clue from remote antiquity. As I said, it's "olk". The grapheme /A/ is a very complex topic. Take for example "Ozymandias" the title of a poem by Shelley. It's a very credible vocalization of "wsr-mAat-ra". Again the /r/ in "wsr" is weak and "man" has to do with a nasal sound caused by the /a/ in "mAat"--a sound the Greeks could only approximate as they did not have it in their alphabet as a grapheme nor probably could not say it exactly. The fact that "dias" is there means the /r/ in "ra" was a tapped one and that the /r/ at the beginning of a word or name was not weak in relation to that which came before it--nor could it be weak when said alone. Tapped /r/ comes out more like a /d/. If you watch as many old British films as I do, you will hear it more than in modern posh English. "Merry" and "very" were "meddy" and "veddy". As everyone knows, the weakest final /r/ in existence is in British pronunciation. The Greeks added the final sibilant "s" to the end of many of the names of the Egyptian kings as was their habit. The name "Ozymandindias" was written by Diodorus Siculus in his Bibliotheca historica as:

"King of Kings am I, Ozymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works."

​

 

[rymerster]

One of the things I don't doubt is that Meritaten is Mayati - she was the acknowledged eldest daughter, shown in public since early in the reign, and I'm pretty sure first in line when her sisters are shown (they are usually in birth order, right?). The fact she later became queen might mean that she was introduced to diplomacy at a young age, following the example of Tiye and I'm sure Nefertiti. Is Nefertiti ever named or referenced in the letters? Tiye unquestionably is.

 

[Alcandra]

One of the things I don't doubt is that Meritaten is Mayati - she was the acknowledged eldest daughter, shown in public since early in the reign, and I'm pretty sure first in line when her sisters are shown (they are usually in birth order, right?). The fact she later became queen might mean that she was introduced to diplomacy at a young age, following the example of Tiye and I'm sure Nefertiti. Is Nefertiti ever named or referenced in the letters? Tiye unquestionably is.

She was referred to as "your daughter", certainly, but the name was also written "ma-ia-tu-ma". A bit confusing.

 

[Ayrton]

Here's something to consider. While I know that the thread is not user friendly, and for anybody fresh to at least reading it, then I can understand that to make head or tail of it will be a nightmare, and probably dissuades some people from joining. However, the nature of this thread leads to almost a "stream of consciousness" about Amarna, where if anybody gets a sudden thought about this that or the other, they can make a post here and that can be taken up and run with, or swiftly dropped even. Atomizing Amarna will remove this, for I doubt if anybody will want to create a thread just for a sudden thought that comes into their head, which may be a thing, or nothing. This leads of course to "General thread on Amarna". But by divination I can see that it would become maybe the only thread used, and would simply recreate this thread and, by further divination, can see that any thread on Amarna on any topic could easily find itself expanding due to the interconnectivity of the subject as a whole.

With ancient Egypt as a whole it is easy to have separate threads for different topics, for while there is still this interconnectivity, it is possible to discuss pyramids, farming, coffins, weapons, social structure, and countless other topics without recourse to wandering too far off into other areas. But with Amarna we are looking at a very tight time frame of, at it's core, 17 years, though the lead up to Amarna has to be considered, and it's aftermath. This tight time frame, and the events and personalities involved, make Amarna not just a special case, but the most studied period of all ancient Egypt, and to the general public probably the most interesting aspect along with the Great Pyramid and sphinx. Joe public is not really interested in Senwosret III, or the evolution of the rishi style coffin, let alone the arcane minutiae of temple ritual, but they cannot get enough of "King Tut" and Nefertiti.

A think tank and discussion centre...and, mostly, it has been non-combative (hooray!), but it probably can seem hard to enter for newcomers.... Oh well... all good things come to an end. 😎

 

[Naomasa298]

We would be prepared to consider an Egyptology subforum, but before we can do that, I think we would need to see the amount of activity in separate threads. We'd like to see a range of posters participating and a variety of topics with good levels of participation.

 

[AlpinLuke]

Let's be patient. Egyptology means audience, but if the contents are poor ... the failure is certain. Simply because Egyptology is a very specialist field of historiography, so that who is interested in it expects professional contents.

It's a possibility. I'm going to make an analysis of a couple of section to see how many threads could be moved to an eventual section about Egyptology.

 

[Alcandra]

I'm going to hold off from starting a new thread for now but I will build up a bank of images and links relating to the Tuthmose works - the intention to bring together in one thread as many of the pieces as possible - starting with the plaster/gypsum "masks" and some sculptures that may relate to them. Not all of the faces are in Berlin, at least 1 is in the British Museum collection (though not on display) and others are at the Met and possibly Brooklyn museum.

I guess you mean the ones found in the Thutmose workshop. Is there such a thing as an inventory of objects from that place?

 

[Alcandra]

Let's be patient. Egyptology means audience, but if the contents are poor ... the failure is certain. Simply because Egyptology is a very specialist field of historiography, so that who is interested in it expects professional contents.

It's a possibility. I'm going to make an analysis of a couple of section to see how many threads could be moved to an eventual section about Egyptology.

Yes. Anything but another Egyptian Nightmares or a Hall of Muud.

 

[Corvidius]

Egyptology means audience, but if the contents are poor ... the failure is certain.

Like I mentioned before, the viewing figures, nearly 192,000 for this thread since it began in 2017, and with an extremely low number of posters, two, then three and recently about eight on and off, must show that despite not all posts being of the best quality, there is a lot of interest. That a "name" such as Marianne Luban has taken part is testament to the worth of the subject, and I doubt we would do better if, for instance, Aidan Dodson or any of the other familiar Amarna experts, or even "experts", popped up, and who was that last year who made a few very erudite posts and then disappeared.