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  • From: Uri Hurwitz <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] Refutation
  • Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2007 08:54:13 -0800 (PST)

Shortly after the sensational claim of the earleist proto- Canaanite
inscription ever discovered was made - see below - what appears as complete
refutation by an Egyptologist appeared :

In response to the announcement of the alleged discovery
of
Proto-Canaanite spells in the Pyramid Texts by Richard
Steiner
distributed via the EEF and Agade lists (a pdf-file in
Ivrit is
available at
<http://hebrew-academy.huji.ac.il/PDF/steiner.pdf >),
I think it is imperative to be extremely cautious.

As far as I see, the author did not account for the most
recent
Egyptological treatment of the spells in questions (C.
Leitz, Die
Schlangensprüche in den Pyramidentexten. Or 65 (1996):
381-427) and
not all the lexemes pretended to appear in the spells can
be
assumed to have existed around 2500 BC within a single
dialect
(e.g. Hw "snake" is Old Aramaic and more recent; with a
chronological gap of 1500 years). Most notably, the sound
correspondences postulated by the author would in many
instances
not be possible in the Egyptian transcription systems of
the 2nd
millennium, and seem to be outright impossible for the 3rd
millennium. These IMPOSSIBLE correspondances include:

- Eg. <k> for Semitic /q/ (line 5, 8, 12 on p. 3f.) (the
correct
correspondance would lead to kbb "to burn" instead of qbb
"conjure"
etc.)
- <t> for /Tet/ (line 7)
- <t> for /Dalet/ (line 7) (possible from the 2nd mill.
onward;
around 2500 the Eg. Ayin-grapheme still represented the
voiced
dental)
- <T> (t with diacritic stroke) for /t/ or /Tet/ (line 13,
14, 18)
(<T> represents a palatalized /k/)
- <Ayin> for <Ayin> (line 18) (possible from ca. 2000 BC)
- <S> for emphatic sibilants/interdentals (line 18) (never
possible).

This makes the assumptions put forward by the author
highly
unlikely.

Best regards,
Thomas Schneider
--
Prof. Dr. Thomas Schneider
Chair in Egyptology
Department of Classics, Ancient History, and Egyptology
University of Wales Swansea
Singleton Park
Swansea SA2 8PP Wales, United Kingdom

tel. ++44 1792 513538 (office)
++44 1792 202804 (home)
==============================================================

The above post has been put up (temporarily) on the EEF
Website:
<http://www.egyptologyforum.org>



---------------------------------


On 1/25/07, Yitzhak Sapir wrote: >..... "Proto-Canaanite-Spells in >
Hieroglyphics: An Initial Review of the Development of Hebrew in the > 3rd
Millenium BCE" ......<




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Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2007 12:06:25 -0500 (EST)
From: "Dr. Joel M. Hoffman" <joel AT exc.com>
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Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] numbering of 10 commandments (Exodus 20)
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Thank you to everyone who has written about the (lack of) the 10
commandments in Exodus, and about the root d.b.r. (BTW, I have a
short chatty essay about DBR and its various meanings:

http://www.lashon.net/JMH/Publications/Davar.pdf

on-line.)

But still, does anyone know where the two numbering traditions come
from in Exodus 20?

Many thanks.

-Joel

Joel M. Hoffman, PhD
http://www.lashon.net/JMH







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