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Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2017.03.36

Ghislaine Widmer, Rsurrection dOsiris - naissance dHorus: les

papyrus Berlin P. 6750 et Berlin P. 8765, tmoignages de la persistance
de la tradition sacerdotale dans le Fayoum lpoque romaine.
gyptische und Orientalische Papyri und Handschriften des
gyptischen Museums und Papyrussammlung Berlin, 3. Berlin,
Boston: De Gruyter, 2015. Pp. xii, 462. ISBN 9783110425093.
$210.00.

Reviewed by Martin Andreas Stadler, Julius-Maximilians-Universitt

Wrzburg (martin.stadler@uni-wuerzburg.de)

[The Table of Contents is listed below.]

If Publilius Syrus saying bis dat, qui cito dat were correct, then the book under
review would be worth just a quarter because it is the eagerly awaited revised version
of a PhD thesis submitted to the University of Geneva in 2002. However, scholarship
does not work along those lines, and in particular an edition of an Egyptian text in
the demotic cursive script, a cumbersome and arduous enterprise, is subject to other
conditions. The kind of graphematisation of this text adds to the difficulties in
deciphering that most evil of all evil Egyptian scripts1 by using non-etymological
or phonetic writings almost throughout. I will come back to these unusual writings
below, but mention them here to stress the enormous difficulty they pose to reading
and understanding the text. Therefore, we must congratulate Ghislaine Widmer for
this achievement.

The text is preserved on two papyri, pBerlin P 6750 and pBerlin P 8765, and I would
date both to c. 100 CE.2 The manuscripts come from the village of Soknopaiou
Nesos (modern Dim) in the Fayum in Egypt. One of the two papyri, P 6750, has
been known to scholars since W. Spiegelbergs Demotische Papyrus in den
Kniglichen Museen zu Berlin (Berlin 1902), which contains collotype plates of a
selection of demotic papyri in the Berlin collection accompanied by short
descriptions but without transliteration, translation, or commentary. All this is now
provided by the book under review for pBerlin P 6750, of which 10 columns survive
more or less complete, and for pBerlin P 8765, which is in a more fragmentary
statenot more than a third of one column and the major part of a second column
have been preserved. In presenting her edition Widmer follows the model of one of
her academic teachers, Mark Smith, in meticulously copying his system of editing
and organizing the pertinent commentaries. This is not to the detriment of the books
quality, rather to the contraryexcept for the lack of indexes, which would have
benefitted readers who want to find the wealth of information that Widmer offers in
her commentary. There is a glossary of demotic words, which allows the reader to

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find a lot of important information in the commentary, but it does not indicate much
of what she has to say about Egyptian religion. The reviewer fears that only a
minority of readers, be it of this journal or Egyptologists in general, will indulge in
reading an extensive commentary that combines discussion of demotic palaeography
and lexicography with explaining issues of Egyptian religion.

The text comprises two parts, both liturgical in nature. The first one deals with the
veneration of Osiris or Sokar(-Osiris) and covers the first seven preserved columns,
whereas the second part, entitled The writings of pampering(?; hlly) Horus, the son
of Isis is addressed to Osiris son and successor, Horus (cols. x+VIIIX), and
focuses on him. The two parts are not coherent texts, but consist of sections that are
separated by rubricized headings labelled other hymn, ritual of the night of
seeking (a composition related to the well-known hourly vigil in the cult of Osiris),
and offering litany, which is meant to accompany an offering cult for Horus, son of
Isis, while also being part of the Osiris cult. On the basis of this composition,
Widmer rightly suggests a use for this text in temple ritual. Although for us today the
two parts seem to follow a coherent sequence of eventsdeath of Osiris and
succession of his son Horuseach part was used at two very different dates in the
liturgical year, as the text itself details. The Osirian part accompanied rites during the
month of Hathyr (according to ancient Egyptian tradition Osiris was murdered on
Hathyr, 17th), the Horus part five months later during Pharmouthi.

The principal deity of Dim, Soknopaios (the local form of Sobek), does not appear
in the text at all. In earlier articles analysing the religious world of the text, Widmer
tried to address that surprising fact by interpreting Soknopiais, a god attested in Dim
chiefly in Greek sources, as being the Osirian form, and Soknopaios as Sobeks
Horus form. However, neither Soknopaios nor Soknopiais appears in the text, just
Sobek a few times. Therefore, it seemed to be an unnecessarily complicated
theoretical construct.3 Now, though she does not seem to have completely given up
that position, she downgrades it to one optional hypothesis. She does so in view of
the increasingly richer corpus of attestations for an Osirian cult in Dim which make
it more likely that Dim had a cult for Osiris in its own right, along with the
well-known worship of Horus in his various forms. Thus pBerlin P 6750 and its
parallels testify to the participation of the priesthood at Dim in the religious
discourse and practices of Egypt during Roman rule as do many other texts.

As the text is a composite, it follows that each section might have a different age and
different linguistic forms. Therefore the texts of pBerlin P 6750 cannot easily be
classified as Demotic, archaic or archaizing Demotic or traditional Egyptian.
Rather they follow various idioms, i.e. Demotic with archaizing features or more
purely traditional Middle Egyptian.

While the demotic script is well suited for writing Egyptian in its penultimate
(Demotic) form, it is less good for writing earlier Middle Egyptian. To solve this
problem, demotic scribes (and to a lesser degree, their hieratic
predecessors/colleagues) used unusual orthographies. One method employs phonetic
writings (chiefly using uniliteral signs). However, some words appear in a spelling
that is even more baffling because, while keeping the original determinatives, they
combine words into new ones if the words combined are homophonous to the
syllables of the word to be expressed. Superficially such words look like two or
(rarely) more distinct words. This second sort of notation is called non-etymological,
and it is Widmer who first proposed the distinction between phonetic and

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non-etymological.4 In this nomenclature, the purpose of writing phonetically is to

display the correct sound of the word, whereas the non- etymological
graphematisation may often add a second layer of meaning to religious compositions.
Are the original meanings of those constituent words that the scribe selected to serve
as syllables of another word still valid? And if so, do they imply a further dimension?
Such cases as n s-w.t-nr that appears to be foremost of the phyle of the temple,
but stands for nty s-nr foremost of the gods booth, i.e. an epithet of Anubis,
invite scholarly speculation that might come close to ancient Egyptian priestly
speculation. The form n s-w.t-nr could be seen as stressing an intimate
relationship of the priestly personnel to Anubis by incorporating itself into the epithet
of that deity. Another example would be p-wt tpy, which looks like the first
flourishing, but is to be read pw.t tp.t the beginning of time. The former would
then be a more metaphorical, poetic expression of the latter. Demotists do not agree
on this issue, but the reviewer is inclined to follow Widmers assessment.
Unfortunately, Widmer seems to have abandoned this distinction in her glossary,
which is exemplary in giving each word in facsimile, transliteration, translation, and
references to all occurrences in the papyri. There she uses the abbreviation ENE
(criture non tymologique) throughout but not EP (criture phontique) as
opposed to her two lists on p. 456 where she still differentiates the two.

The two aforementioned examples give a sample of the enormous difficulty that the
text poses to anybody who endeavours to decipher it. The uncertainty about whether
an identically written word is always identical in meaning exacerbates the problem.
Within one single line tw.t, netherworld in a normal Demotic text, could be
image (to display older t.t), and also netherworld in tw.t tsly.t holy underworld
while elsewhere in the text tw.t tsly.t stands for holy land (in hieroglyphs and
hieratic t sr),5 not to mention tw.t hand (older r.t), time (older tr), and here
(older dy). Over other groups some demotists debated for quite a while, and these
groups still remain difficult to explain but have now been solved. An example for
this is snsn, which has been interpreted as ww, kk, and gsgs.6

It should be clear that reading the papyri is not an easy task. Consequently, the major
part of the book (p. 127328) is the commentary in which Widmer explains her
readings. This requires diving into the palaeography of demotic, the lexicography of
Egyptian, and also Egyptian religion, which often assists interpretation. The
commentary is a great achievement, and the chapters discussing certain issues of
Egyptian religion in a synthesis complement it. Those chapters will be welcome to
readers of Bryn Mawr Classical Review who are interested in religion in
Graeco-Roman Egypt.

It is daily use that proves the scholarly value of a book. Now the present reviewer is
working himself on the Daily Ritual of the Temple of Soknopaios, a religious text
from the same site, with manuscripts dating roughly to the same period, and its
orthography being the same phonetic or non-etymological form of notation. The
major difference is that the Daily Ritual has many more hieroglyphic and hieratic
parallels than the texts of pBerlin P 6750 (cf. p. 8 where Widmer lists the few lines
for which she could identify parallels). In many cases, the reviewer can confirm
Widmers readings by the parallels in the Daily Ritual, and in other cases her
commentaries are useful for the reviewers own research. Thus, the book has already
proven to be useful in scholarly daily routine. Therefore, it may be safe to say that
Widmers book is important and good. Unfortunately, it is also quite expensive, and
one might expect more attention to the colour plates on the part of the publisher. The

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museums photographer, Sandra Steiss, always provides excellent images that rival
the original, but here the photos appear too reddish and are reduced in scale, even if
the page would have allowed for a larger reproduction.

Sommaire

Avant-propos xi
Avertissement xiii
1. Prsentation des papyrus Berlin P. 6750 et Berlin P. 8765 1
2. Contenu et structure des papyrus Berlin P. 6750 et Berlin P. 8765 11
3. criture et palographie des papyrus Berlin P. 6750 et Berlin P. 8765 23
4. La langue des papyrus Berlin P. 6750 et Berlin P. 8765 31
5. Les marques de remplissage et de ponctuation du papyrus Berlin P. 6750 49
6. L'univers gographique des papyrus Berlin P. 6750 et Berlin P. 8765 55
7. L'univers religieux des papyrus Berlin P. 6750 et Berlin P. 8765 63
8. Harpsenesis (r-p-r-n-s.t) 81
9. Translitration et traduction du papyrus Berlin P. 6750 87
10. Commentaire du papyrus Berlin P. 6750 127
11. Translitration et traduction du papyrus Berlin P. 8765 recto 303
12. Commentaire du papyrus Berlin P. 8765 recto 317
13. The Greek document on the verso of papyrus Berlin P. 8765 Preliminary
description and translation (Nikos Litinas) 331
14. Conclusion 337
Traduction continue du papyrus Berlin P. 6750 345
Bibliographie 359
Index des papyrus Berlin P. 6750 et Berlin P. 8765 379
Planches 445

Notes:

1. Und zwar von allen bsen gyptischen Schriftarten die bseste.: H. Grapow,
Review of Erichsen, Demotische Lesestcke, OLZ 40 (1937), 487.
2. Widmers argument for dating the papyri is a bit puzzling because, following
Lippert and Schentuleit, she uses the flesh determinative as criterion (p. 24) and thus
implies roughly 100 CE as date of writing. At the same time, she classifies my dating
of a papyrus that she herself deems to be very similar to pBerlin P 6750, as less
conclusive although I apply the same method (albeit not exposed in the preliminary
report that she cites p. 23 n. 90). In the end she leaves the question unanswered.
3. Cf. M. A. Stadler, Archaeology of Discourse: The Scribal Tradition in the
Roman Fayym and the House of Life at Dim, in: M. Capasso and P. Davoli (eds),
Soknopaios, the Temple and Worship: Proceedings of the First Round Table of the
Centro di Studi Papirologici of Universit del Salento Lecce - October 9th 2013
(Edaphos 1; Lecce, Rovato, 2015), 215216.
4. G. Widmer, Une invocation la desse (tablette dmotique Louvre E 10382),
in: F. Hoffmann and H. J. Thissen (eds), Res severa verum gaudium: Festschrift fr
Karl-Theodor Zauzich zum 65. Geburtstag am 8. Juni 2004 (Studia Demotica 6;
Leuven, Paris, Dudley, 2004), 651686.
5. The glossary inadvertently omits this translation, p. 425.
6. P. 1656: Widmer cites M. A. Stadler, Demotica aus Dime: Ein berblick ber
die in Dime whrend der Kampagnen 20012009 gefundenen demotischen Texte,

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in: M. Capasso and P. Davoli (eds), Soknopaiou Nesos Project I (20032009) (Pisa,
Roma, 2012), 258, is mentioned but the wording does not make clear who proposed
the reading snsn earlier on the basis of a hieratic parallel.

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