Found the following on the Web. Can anyone help confirm or refute this.
NEBUCHADNEZZAR'S CONQUEST OF EGYPT....
Attention has recently been called to a hieroglyphic inscription in the Louvre, which brings us unimpeachable testimony, from a contemporary Egyptian source...the statue of a royal official Nes-Hor...The inscription was first translated by M. Pierret,...reproduced in an English dress in Records of the Past...It is to the acumen of a German Egyptologist, Dr. A. Wiedemann of Leipzig, that we owe a clear unfolding of the sense and reference of the inscription...
This translation is inexact in several particulars. To mention only the most important, a closer attention to the symbols employed would have shewn that the word rendered "Shasu" (Bedouins), cannot be a noun, much less a proper noun, but must be a verb, and a verb of motion: the determinatives used prove this...
There are at least four extant statues of Neshor, from Mendes, Sais (Lower Egypt), Abydos and Elephantine (Upper Egypt). The last, at the Louvre (A90), deals with the mercenary revolt in the south. It depicts Neshor as cradling a triad of gods, with hieroglyphic inscription on its back pillar. As translated by Breasted (1906),
Ancient Records of Egypt, IV, §§ 990-995, it doesn’t mention a Shasu people or an “ark of the Aamu,” although it names a place, Shas-heret.
So it is obvious that Pierret’s work has been corrected. He mentions both the people and the ark (an obvious Hebrew reference) but not the place name. Note the racism as well. Perriet (1873) says in
Records of the Past VI, 83:
Here is a clip from Maspero’s transcript of the Neshor statue text, published in the 1884 issue of
Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache. I have circled the two words,
tA-pDt “land of Nubia” (lower left) and
SAys-Hrt “Shas-heret” (center right), which Breasted identifies in his passage on the rescue of Neshor from the predicament caused by the revolt.
History of the Nubian frontier extends back to a possibly related Middle kingdom toponym, first among three headwords taken from Hannig (2006),
Ägyptisches Worterbuch II:
Shas-heret seems correspondent to Middle Kingdom
SAat “Sai,” a town in Nubia (Hannig 2978); however the “group writing” used in later Egyptian vexed 19th century translators. It is now known that Shas-heret should be rendered as
Sst-Hrjt “Sheset-herit,” without the consonant the bird sign represents—the bird was, roughly speaking, used to tell the reader to interpret the previous marsh sign as a uniliteral, often transliterating a letter from another language into Egyptian, as we do when we write Russian Cyrillic words in Latin script.
Bringing us to the verb of motion: The first five signs in Sheset-Herit might be read as the Middle Egyptian word
SAs “Shas,” to traverse or pass through (Hannig 2423), used to form group writing with the previous three signs. This is because of the walking legs determinative. Yet doing so would leave the following
Hrt (feminine nisbe) as object, by itself with a foreign lands determinative, a usage not seen in other texts.
The previous three signs are instead read without group writing as the phrase
Sm r “go to,” with Sheset-Herit as object. Setting the word boundary here makes
rdt Sm r “arranging or allowing to go to” parallel
rdt SAs.sn r “arranging or allowing them to travel to” seen in the next Maspero line. Walking legs in a place name isn’t unthinkable if the location is far away, as Upper Nubia is. Breasted’s note (b), imaged at top of post, shows that the modern understanding of Sheset-Herit is over a hundred years old.
Wiedmann was oriented toward biblical hermeneutics. He published his findings as “Der Zug Nebukadnezar’s gegen Aegypten” in the
Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache for 1878. I will omit this discussion, which became polemical as archaeological evidence supporting events reported in the Hebrew texts was sought. (Albeit the biblical societies funded excavations which otherwise would have gone undone, and have published research, including the recent Society for Biblical Literature edition of James Allen’s Pyramid Texts translation.) Wiedmann had no access to Maspero or to any of Flinders Petrie’s work.
In Column 6, Wiedmann apparently did not group read, but read three verbs as in
m jb.sn rdt Sm r SAs Hrt “(something, a grammatically feminine antecedent) in their heart causing them to go, in order to traverse the upper land,” although he does not transliterate, simply putting the German under the hieroglyphs:
“...in their inclination, namely to pull out to cross the upper country.”
rdt “give, put” is in its causative sense and conjugated as a relative form;
Smj is a suffix conjugation, and
SAs the infinitive after
r of purpose.
Hrt is then “pathway” (Erman, Worterbuch III, 144.5-6) unless it is the sky. With the foreign lands determinative in the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period, it always means “tomb, necropolis” so that this would be a variant spelling. Tombs are rarely if ever the objects of verbs of motion; rather one is
m “in” them. As tomb,
Hrt appears in one Saite burial, TT128 at Thebes, noted by Pischikova et al, eds. (2014),
Thebes in the First Millennium BC, Cambridge, p. 332:
For latest interpretation of the text on Neshor’s statue, which does not dispute
Sst-Hrjt, see
Bassir (2016), Neshor at Elephantine in Late Saite Egypt ,
Jl. Egyptian History (9)1, pp. 66-95.
DOI: 10.1163/18741665-12340027
Brill Online, $30 or university access
booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/18741665-12340027Bassir also translates and discusses a fragmentary commemorative inscription on the Neshor statue at Mendes in the Nile Delta, which would have been canvas for any material on a northern campaign.
Etudes et Travaux XXIX/2016, PP. 19-32 (PDF book chapter)
etudesettravaux.iksiopan.pl/index.php/en/current-issue/363-protecting-the-temple-of-god-on-the-self-presentation-of-neshor-on-his-mendes-statue
Statue of Neshor from Elephantine, Louvre A 90
