Biblical Hebrew Forum

[jimstinehart AT aol.com]

Will:

My apologies.  I now see your point.  The source I was looking at erroneously showed the first two letters in Akhenaten’s name in Egyptian as being ax.  But now that I look at other sources, I see that in fact, the first two letters are Ax.  The first letter is aleph/3, not ayin.  So now that I understand your point and see that it’s a very important point to make, let me correct my response to what you wrote.

You wrote:  “This seems less reasonable if we consider the Egyptian form of this name, 3ḫ-n-ỉtn (i.e., divided Akh-en-Aten, but note the different consonants).”

The one and only difference in consonants [pardon my prior mistake] is that the first letter is Egyptian aleph, whereas in P R (H, the first letter in the segment containing the last two letters is ayin, not aleph.

Note, however, that when maat is written in Akkadian cuneiform in the Amarna Letters, both the Egyptian ayin and the Egyptian aleph are rendered by the Akkadian vowel U.  That is to say, ayin and aleph are not routinely distinguished in Akkadian cuneiform, including when rendering Egyptian words or Egyptian names.  mAat comes out in the Akkadian cuneiform of the Amarna Letters as having UU in the middle.  As I noted in a prior post, it’s also the case that Akkadian cuneiform heth can represent both aleph and ayin as well.

Will, you are right to point out those “different consonants”:  ayin vs. aleph.  That’s an important point, and thank you for making that point.  But I see P R (H in the Patriarchal narratives as coming from an Akkadian cuneiform original, where ayin and aleph were not distinguished in the original writing.  Sorry that I did not see your point before, but it actually fits in with my Akkadian cuneiform approach quite nicely.

Jim Stinehart

Evanston, Illinois