These are ancient texts, deciphered in the pyramids in Egypt, which are spells spoken to snakes * The findings of the discovery were presented yesterday by Prof. Steiner, in a lecture at the Hebrew University
Yesterday the earliest continuous sky texts ever deciphered were published for the first time. Reuven (Richard) Steiner, professor of Semitic languages and Semitic literature at Yeshiva University, presented the discovery in his lecture "Proto-Canaanite Spells in the Pyramid Writings: A First Look at the History of Hebrew in the Third Millennium BC". The lecture is an event sponsored by the Hebrew Language Academy in collaboration with the Hebrew University and the World Association for Jewish Studies.
Prof. Steiner, a former fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University and a member of the Hebrew Language Academy, deciphered a number of Hebrew texts in several types of Egyptian script in the last twenty-five years. The first of these, a pagan version of Psalm XNUMX, an Aramaic text in Demotic script, aroused great interest. Now he was able to decipher heavenly passages in the pyramid writings in Egypt. These texts were discovered more than a century ago; They were carved on the underground walls of the pyramid of King Unas in Skara, Egypt. The pyramid is from the twenty-fourth century BC, but Egyptologists agree that the texts are older. The dates they suggested are from the twenty-fifth century to the thirtieth century BC. No continuous Semitic text from this period has ever been deciphered.
The passages, serpent incantations written in the Khartoum script, puzzled scholars because they tried to read them as ordinary Egyptian texts. In August 2002, Prof. Steiner received an e-mail from Robert Ritner, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Chicago, asking if he thought the texts might be heavenly. "I immediately recognized the Semitic words that mean 'mother-of-serpent,'" Steiner said, "later it became clear that the other spells, written in Egyptian and not in Semitic, are about the mother-of-serpent, and that the Egyptian and the Semitic texts clarify each other."
Although the texts are written in Egyptian script, it turned out that they were written in a Semitic language spoken by the Canaanites in the third millennium BC, a very archaic phase of the languages that later became known as Phoenician and Hebrew. The Canaanite priests of the ancient city of Byblos, in today's Lebanon, submitted these texts to the kings of Egypt, who were patrons of their temples.
The coastal city of Byblos was known to be of great importance to the ancient Egyptians. From there they imported wood for construction and resin for embalming. The new discovery shows that they also imported magical spells to protect the kings' mummies from poisonous snakes; According to their perception, the serpents understood Canaan. Although the Egyptians considered their culture far superior to that of their neighbors, their morbid fear of snakes made them willing to borrow from the magic of the sky.
"This discovery may be of great interest to cultural historians," says Prof. Steiner. "Linguists will also be interested in these texts. They show that Proto-Canaanite, the common parent of Phoenician, Moabite, Ammonite and Hebrew, existed as early as the third millennium BC as a language distinct from Aramaic, Ugaritic and the other Semitic languages. The texts also provide the first direct documentation of Egyptian pronunciation in this early period." The texts will also be important to biblical scholars because they shed light on some rare words in the Bible.
"This is a sensational discovery," says Moshe Bar-Asher, professor of Hebrew at the Hebrew University and president of the Hebrew Language Academy. "This is the earliest record of a Semitic language in general and Proto-Canaanite in particular."
Within a day or two the lecture will appear on the Hebrew Language Academy website: hebrew-academy.huji.ac.il
