Re: Why so little info about Sumerians?

This, like its predecessor from me in this thread, is a delayed reply.
That is for several reasons, some of which I'll mention below.

This is also an immensely long post. In this post, I've repeatedly
taken the previous poster at his word as wanting information, and I've
included quotes from five different books. Obtaining these quotes is
the most obvious reason for delay; I do have other things to do than
library research for people on Usenet, and I even have other library
research to do. At any rate, my own reading of this and other threads
is that I probably won't feel inclined to continue putting this kind of
work in for this particular interlocutor, so if there *are* any innocent
bystanders, don't worry, if I post again in this thread it'll be a lot
shorter.

Matt Giwer <jull43@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Joe Bernstein wrote:

> > In article <INdnf.22706$6e.12259@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> > Matt Giwer <jull43@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> >>Joe Bernstein wrote:

> >>>In article <DaRmf.22400$6e.14722@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Matt Giwer
> >>><jull43@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> >>>>Joe Bernstein wrote:

My recollection is that the point, in the particular branch of this
discussion between the two of us, that the following ties in to, is
whether ancient Egypt is a well-documented place or not. Roughly
speaking, my position is "Compared to anywhere else except Iraq from
that period, insanely well-documented", while I gather Matt Giwer's is
something like "Compared to what we'd like to know, insanely
poorly-documented".

> >>So let us review just what we have from _all_ of Egypt before papyrus
> >>of which the oldest is maybe 6th c. BC.

> > Um. I just don't know what to say to this at *all*. It's just
> > completely outside my comprehension.

> I thought I meant there are none and going from there. But I may not
> remember correctly.

Well, my reading was that you were saying no papyri survive from before
the 6th century BC. And this is what I was unable to believe you were
saying, since you spoke with such authority on ancient Egypt, and what I
called "plain false". So to proceed.

> > Taken literally, it's plain false. We have papyri going back to
> > the second millennium, and outside the exclusions you mention. In
> > particular, given my own focus on literary history, I would mention
> > the papyri that carry most of the surviving Middle Kingdom and New
> > Kingdom belles lettres.

> Where were these discovered and who possesses them at this time?

I address this for some examples below. I do not myself have a full
list of New Kingdom belles lettres - there's supposed to be a book
coming out by Antonio Loprieno that I *hope* will carry such a list,
but, well, I've been disappointed before - and while R. B. Parkinson did
include a list of Middle Kingdom belles lettres in his <The Darker Side
of Perfection>, or whatever exactly it's called, I don't have ready
access to that book, and anyway, there's a limit to how much typing I'm
willing to do in this post. SO, the examples I originally gave from
Lichtheim, I'll quote below what Lichtheim has to say; beyond that, I
can't reasonably help you.

> > See for example Miriam Lichtheim, <Ancient Egyptian Literature>,
> > volume I: <The Old and Middle Kingdoms>, pp. 59, 61, 97, 115, 136,
> > 139, 150, 163, 169, 184-185, 194, 198, 201, 205, 211, 215, 222.
> > Were I to consult Pritchard's <Ancient Near East> or Parkinson's
> > newish book on Middle Kingdom literature,
[the one whose title I just cited from memory]
> > I would expect similar
> > results, but I don't have those handy and will not postpone posting
> > this to check them - if you try to tell me Lichtheim is lying that'll
> > be soon enough.

> Not in the least. I simply do not find reference to the contents of
> this material from that time frame. I assume you have better sources
> because you say so. I am sort of amazed I missed discussions of the
> recovery methods of 4000 year old organic material in all my readings.
> It was my scientific side that got me interested in much of this. I
> grant 4000+ year old mummies of course and their linen wrappings.

> I am always willing to learn something new. But seriously 4000 yo
> papyrii does strain the imagination absent other mention of it. Yours
> is the first suggested I have come across. It should be obvious I have
> no formal education in the field. I came at it from another direction.

Well, so do I, but a closer one perhaps. (To the extent that you, or
anyone else reading this, cares about my bona fides, such as they are,
the following may be of interest. To the extent that you, etc., *don't*
care about 'em, skip to the next quote; I don't say anything about
papyri before then.) I also have no formal education in the field,
though I think it's clear that I'm much less inclined to argue with the
experts than you are.

Basically, in I think 1990 I sorted many of my books out in
chronological order. This got me interested in the idea of reading
things in chronological order; I specifically remember that I wanted to
set the Bible in context, but there were other things. Anyway, the
upshot is that I decided to read, I am not making this up, "the
highlights of world literature in chronological order". I allowed
myself some omissions - for example, did not trudge through the
incredibly tedious <Brahmanas> - but for really ancient stuff, I was
*fairly* generous in what I considered "highlights", particularly
because of the aforementioned desire to contextualise the Bible.

Anyway, I spent I think all of 1991 putting together access to the
books, partly by buying or xeroxing and partly by locating them in
libraries, and then started reading. This is why, for example, I have
copies of the Lichtheim and Pritchard books I mentioned.

The project foundered on the rocks of the Hippocratic Corpus, at
notional date 420 BC, in late 1992 or so. (Thus denying me a bunch of
what are now my favourite plays by Euripides, sigh.)

The next and still-current stage of my interest in literary history has
to do with my ongoing work on the history of fantasy, which has had
numerous consequences, among them my share in the credit for the
existence of this newsgroup. I've been working on this topic since
mid-1995, but most heavily in early 1996 as I worked on entries for the
<Encyclopedia of Fantasy> edited by John Clute and John Grant. Some of
the lacunae in my knowledge of ancient literatures derive specifically
from that - for example, other people wrote the entries on Lucian,
Apuleius, and Plato, so I didn't get around to reading anything more by
these guys than I'd read growing up, even though all three are pretty
crucial to my topic (but all later than 410 or 475 BC). (But at least I
did write the entry on Euripides, and read the rest of his plays...)

I finished a first draft of my own book's chapter 1, covering regions
west of Pakistan up to 475 BC, in late 1995, and have tinkered with it
ever since. Chapter 2 took *years* of preposterously difficult work, to
some extent documented on my website. ("Half of Asia" *is* the first,
intentionally inflated, draft of chapter 2.) I finished it in early
2001; it covers the Asian areas covered by chapter 1, except for those
the Romans wound up ruling, from 475 BC to AD 525. By this time it was
clear to me that I needed to address some issues I'd evaded in drafting
chapter 1, having to do with "minimalist" views on the Old Testament and
on Homer (and other ideas about Homer too), so since then, to the
limited extent that I've worked on the book at all, I've been working on
old stuff again.

I hope to complete my work on revising chapter 1 this year, which would
allow me the relatively easy work of chapters 3 and 4 (Europe, Africa,
and Roman Asia, 475 BC to AD 525) for the next few years, when I expect
to have less research time.

> Actually I am quite surprised that the Old Kingdom using papyrus at
> all. That is one impressive early invention. Are you sure?

Haven't seen 'em myself, but the experts are absolutely unanimous about
this, so yeah, I'm sure.

So here's my first, relatively short, quote. It's from "Papyrus
Manufacture". This is an uncredited text box which I presume is by W.
J. Tait, on page 2201 of "Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near
East" by J. A. Black and W. J. Tait. (Black is a Sumeria specialist -
I'm pretty sure he's the guy behind the website I cited way way back in
this thread - which is why I'm guessing the text box is by Tait.)
"Archives and Libraries" is pp. 2197-2209 in volume IV of <Civilizations
of the Ancient Near East>, edited by Jack M. Sasson. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, c 1995.

"The papyrus roll was already employed in the First Dynasty, as is
indicated by the discovery of a blank roll in a tomb of the period. The
hieroglyph that depicts a sealed papryus roll was also in use then."

Now, that said, I must admit that to the extent that you're referring to
an interest in the history of technology when you say "scientific side",
well, no wonder you don't believe this. I was more than a little
shocked to find that the big fat standard history of technology
(Oxford?) doesn't, in its first volume, deal with papryus *at all*;
there's a chapter on the invention of writing *systems*, but not of
writing *materials*. Sheesh.

Anyway, there's a bibliography to this chapter on pp. 2208-2209, of
which I'm going to quote the English-language titles from the Egypt half
(p. 2209). This is partly to make this post somewhat useful to me (I
archive my own posts) and partly to give you the beginnings of access to
further info.

"G. P. F. VAN DEN BOORN, <The Duties of the Vizier: Civil
Administration in the Early New Kingdom> (1988). MORRIS L. BIERBRIER,
ed., <Papyrus: Structure and Usage>, British Museum Occasional Paper
no. 60 (1986). ... JAROSLAV CERNY, <Paper and Books in Ancient Egypt>
(1952). Sir ALAN H. GARDINER, <The Ramesseum Papyri: Plates> (1955);
his <The Wilbour Papryus>, 4 vols. (1941-1952). ... THOMAS ERIC PEET,
<The Great Tomb-Robberies of the Twentieth Egyptian Dynasty>, 2 vols
(1930). PIETER WILLEM PESTMAN, "Who Were the Owners, in the 'Community
of Workmen,' of the Chester Beatty Papyri," in <Gleanings from Deir
el-Medina>, edited by R. J. DEMARÉE and JAC. J. JANSSEN (1982). ...
PAULE POSENER-KRIÉGER and JEAN LOUIS DE CENIVAL, <Hieratic Papyri in the
British Museum, Fifth Series: The Abusir Papyri> (1968). DONALD B.
REDFORD, <Pharaonic King-Lists, Annals, and Day-books: A Contribution
to the Study of the Egyptian Sense of History> (1986); ... EDWARD F.
WENTE, <Letters from Ancient Egypt> (1990)."

If you read German and/or French, I can add to this.

Separately, here's where I quote from Lichtheim, op. cit., pages cited.

p. 59: "This is the final portion of an Instruction [book of advice]
that is addressed to *Kagemni* by a sage whose name stood in the lost
beginning. The text occupies the first two pages [?] of the great
Papyrus Prisse of the Bibliothèque Nationale. After a blank stretch,
from which another text had been erased, it is followed by the
<Instruction of Ptahhotep>."

p. 61: "The Instruction of Ptahhotep. This long work has survived in
four copies, three of which are written on papyrus rolls while the
fourth, containing only the beginning, is on a wooden tablet. The only
complete version is that of Papyrus Prisse of the Bibliothèque
Nationale, which dates from the Middle Kingdom. The other two papryi,
both in the British Museum, are from the Middle and New Kingdoms,
respectively. The wooden tablet, Carnarvon Tablet I in the Cairo
Museum, also dates from the New Kingdom. The version of P. Prisse
differs considerably from that of the other three copies."

p. 97: "The Instruction Addressed to King Merikare. The text is
preserved in three fragmentary papyri which only partly complement one
another. They are Papyrus Leningrad 1116A, dating from the second half
of the Eighteenth Dynasty; P. Moscow 4658, from the very end of the
Eighteenth Dynasty; and P. Carlsberg 6, from the end of the Eighteenth
Dynasty or later." Oops, this means this is New Kingdom papyri; sorry.

p. 115: "a hieratic copy on a leather roll, made by an Eighteenth
Dynasty scribe". Not only the wrong period but the wrong material;
again, sorry.

p. 136: Dangnab it, I'm getting tired of these Eighteenth Dynasty
papyri...

p. 139: And more so.

p. 150: *Nineteenth* Dynasty. Why on Earth are these all in the Middle
Kingdom book?

p. 163: Ah, *finally*. "The Dispute between a Man and His Ba. Papyrus
Berlin 3024. This famous text is preserved in a single manuscript which
dates from the Twelfth Dynasty."

p. 169: "The Eloquent Peasant. This long work is preserved in four
papyrus copies, all dating from the Middle Kingdom. The individual
copies are incomplete, but together they yield the full text, which
comprises 430 lines. The three principal copies are P. Berlin 3023
(B1), P. Berling 3025 (B2), and P. Berlin 10499 (R); the fourth is P.
Butler 527 = P. British Museum 10274."

pp. 184-185: Again with 18th-19th dynasty copies.

p. 194: And again.

p. 198: "A Cycle of Hymns to King Sesostris III. The six hymns are
written on the recto of a single large *** of papyrus which measures
114 x 30 cm and dates from the Middle Kingdom."

p. 201: "A Hymn to the Red Crown. This hymn to the Red Crown of Lower
Egypt comes from a cycle of ten hymns addressed to the crowns of Upper
and Lower Egypt. The crowns are here not associated with a king but
rather with the crocodile-god Sobk, the lord of the Fayyum town of
Shedyt (Crocodilopolis). The papyrus, P. Golenischeff, dates from the
Hyksos Period."

p. 205: "The Hymn to Hapy [the Nile]. ... The work undoubtedly dates
to the Middle Kingdom, but none of the surviving manuscripts are older
than the Eighteenth Dynasty. In the New Kingdom, the hymn served as a
classical text copied in schools. Unfortunately, the aspiring scribes,
sometimes writing from dictation or from memory, produced copies
incredibly garbled and corrupt. Only the Eighteenth Dynasty manuscripts
are reasonably good. But for the bulk of the text we possess only
Ramesside papyri and ostraca with their abundance of errors." Cited at
some length as one of the clearer statements Lichtheim makes about why
she assigns texts that survive only in later copies to the Middle
Kingdom.

p. 211: "The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor. The only preserved
papyrus copy of the tale was discovered by Golenischeff in the Imperial
Museum of St. Petersburg. Nothing is known about its original
provenience. The papyrus, called P. Leningrad 1115, is now in Moscow.
The work, and the papyrus copy, date from the Middle Kingdom."

p. 215: "Three Tales of Wonder. From Papyrus Westcar (= P. Berlin
3033). This important papyrus ... dates from the Hyksos period."

p. 222[-223]: "The Story of Sinuhe. ... The two principal manuscripts
are (1) P. Berlin 3022 (abbr. B) which dates from the Twelfth Dynasty.
In its present state, it lacks the beginning of the story and contains a
total of 311 lines; (2) P. Berlin 10499 (abbr. R) which contains 203
lines and includes the beginning. It dates to the end of the Middle
Kingdom."

> > I looked at a couple of books claiming to be about papyri trying to
> > find out whether *non*-literary papyri this old are common, but I
> > didn't get much out of them.

> You tell me. I do not have an available library.

I am, however, not here to do all of your library research. As it
happens, it turned out that I was *wrong* about whether the books in
question would answer that question, so I can offer you a long quote,
which follows. But please do not expect this to become routine.

<Papyrus>. Richard Parkinson & Stephen Quirke. A volume in "Egyptian
Bookshelf". [London]: British Museum Press, c 1995. This is a slim
trade paperback with a price tag of £9.99 on the back. I would imagine
you could order it online, and given your statements about your
interests, I would strongly encourage you to do so. The chapters are
"Natural History and Manufacture", "Practical Usage", "Contents and
Storage", and "Usage and Survival outside Pharaonic Egypt". There is a
bibliography and an index; there's also a list of papyri held by the
British Museum, which are nearly all in Egyptian of various periods (in
1840 most of the Greek ones were assigned to what is now the British
Library, see).

Anyway, I'm going to restrain myself to one long quote, which answers
the above question and which I want to have in my archive of posts, and
one really short quote that I can't resist.

This is eleven paragraphs from pp. 51-54, less whatever I decide is
ancillary enough not to type (generally stuff describing Egyptian belles
lettres).

"In the following pages, the different categories of texts are briefly
described. From the Old Kingdom, there are the remains of various types
of administrative documents, including decrees, letters and contracts.
Official archives, discovered during the 1890s and 1970s in the Fifth
Dynasty pyramid field of Abusir, cover a wide spectrum of work records,
including even a pass to allow access to a restricted area of the
pyramid complex. The monumental record of the end of this period also
included a large body of royal funerary spells and rituals that were
inscribed in the chambers of the royal pyramids (now known as the
Pyramid Texts); linguistic evidence suggests that some of them were
composed earlier, implying that they must have been passed down until
then on papyrus or in oral form. Many of the texts, including decrees,
eulogies, hymns and liturgies, had probably been transferred from
papyri. Fragments of administrative texts survive from most periods and
range from state archives to the business papers of individual
officials. Legal documents are preserved from all the principal
periods.

"It is difficult to assess how much has been lost. The majority of
administrative papryi will have been kept in the exposed environment of
towns in the Nile valley and have decayed; funerary texts which were
deposited in the dry sands of the cemeteries have fared better. There
was presumably a vast mass of administrative paperwork, from which only
a few examples have survived. Such practical documents and archives
probably consumed the greatest quantities of papyrus: in the
Graeco-Roman Period, an office of the minister Apollonios is known to
have used an average of thirteen rolls a day for the period of 258-257
BC. One surviving roll of the state bureaucracy is a Ramesside account
of crops in a part of Middle Egypt (now known as Papryus Wilbour in the
Brooklyn Museum, New York). The papyrus is 10.33 m long, with some four
and a half thousand lines over one hundred and two pages, giving some
impression of the amount of paperwork that was a feature of all periods.
An earlier example is the fragmentary 'Semna dispatches' (BM EA 10752,
10771), which comprises copies of reports from the fortresses in Nubia
such as Semna; the reports indicate a similar obsession with detail in
Middle Kingdom bureaucracy.

"The Twelfth Dynasty seems to have witnessed a proliferation in the use
of writing, although it is sometimes uncertain whether a genre that
first appears then was an innovation or one that had existed earlier on
manuscripts that have not survived. Religious texts on papyri included
hymns and rituals and there were papryus versions (BM EA 10676) of the
Coffin Texts, the Middle Kingdom funerary texts that were written in
cursive hieroglyphs on coffins of wealthy private individuals.

"The Egyptian concept of literature was different to the modern one and
can be defined as a body of written high culture which excluded the
recording of practical information, such as administrative accounts.
Literature consisted not only of fictional or poetic works but also of
[p. 52] technical texts about mathematics and healing. These were not
analytical discourses, but lists of problems and practices with
encyclopaedic tendencies. The oldest surviving example is a papyrus of
the early Middle Kingdom (now in the Egyptian Museum, Turin) with spells
for healing, in this case against snakes and eye-ailments. It is clear
from references in inscriptions that 'medical' texts had already existed
in the Old Kingdom, although none are extant. Three early Eighteenth
Dynasty papyri, which were probably found together in a tomb, are good
examples of these technical texts. Firstly, Papyrus Ebers is a large
compendium of prescriptions and contains signs added in the margin to
note that a prescription had been 'used' or had been found 'good'.
Secondly, in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus (now in the New York
Historical Society), injuries to the body are examined from the skull
down, with diagnosis, prognosis and (if possible) a treatment. The
third manual is the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus [evidently now held by
the British Museum], which is a series of division tables and problems
with solutions, intended to act as general models. Other similar texts
list 'magical' spells, gynaecological and veterinary problems and other
such examples. The Egyptian tradition of knowledge as compendia is
epitomised in the so-called <Onomastica>, 'lists of words'. They simply
list words in categories, although fragments show that such lists were
sometimes expanded into treatises on, for example, types of serpents.
One papyrus shows that a list could codify historical information: the
fragmentary 'Turin Canon' lists the kings of Egypt and the length of
each reign.

"Also in the Twelfth Dynasty appeared imaginative 'literature' (in the
narrow modern sense of the word). ... [p. 53]

"In the New Kingdom both writing and types of written text proliferated.
The late Eighteenth Dynasty saw the official written language of papyri
change from Middle Egyptian (which was by then archaic), to the more
'colloquial' Late Egyptian. ... and new genres appeared, including
scholastic <Miscellanies>. These were anthologies of short texts
intended, in part, for teaching; manuscripts include didactic passages,
model letters, lyrical panegyrics, hymns and prayers. ... Texts from
public contexts, such as commemorative inscriptions, were sometimes
copied onto papyri and writing boards.

"The funerary literary tradition continued to be written in formal
Middle Egyptian but a major revision produced a new corpus first
attested from the Seventeenth Dynasty on the coffin of Queen Mentuhotep
(now unlocated and known only from hand copies of the hieratic texts by
John Gardner Wilkinson, who presented them to the British Museum in
1834). From the reign of Hatshepsut, the revised corpus was copied onto
papyri that were placed in wealthy burials (the <Books of the Dead>).
At about the same date, the <Underworld Books>, which illustrate the
journey of the night sun, appeared on royal tomb walls in cursive
hieroglyphs, as if imitating a papyrus. This and other features suggest
that papyrus copies already existed by this date, and the works may have
been composed as early as the Middle Kingdom. It is probable that in
royal tombs painted walls and gilt wooden shrines were used for funerary
texts, rather than papyri. Only one papyrus survives from an Eighteenth
Dynasty royal tomb (that of Amenhotep II), but this may date to the
Twenty-first Dynasty when the royal mummies were reburied. There was a
papyrus charm around the neck of the mummy of Tutankhamen, but this
disintegrated upon discovery.

"Most genres are known by the New Kingdom. Traditions continued to be
elaborated then and later, although the increasing variety of scripts
may have restricted literacy more. Surviving papyri of the Third
Intermediate Period are more limited in scope than those of the New
Kingdom, probably because of the accidents of preservation. The centre
of economic and political activity was by that time in the Delta, which
is too humid to preserve organic matter such as papyrus. Almost all
extant manuscripts from the Delta have survived only because they were
accidentally charred in fires. Most other surviving papyri from this
period are [p. 54] funerary texts from Thebes, written in either cursive
hieroglyphs or hieratic. In addition to <Book of the Dead> papyri,
wealthy Theban burials normally included a second papyrus called the
'What is in the Underworld' (<Amduat>), which contained elements from
the New Kingdom royal <Underworld Books>.

"Few administrative documents or letters survive from the Third
Intermediate Period, a position which changes with the introduction of
demotic in the seventh century BC."

Note that this is the bit of this account that goes toward justifying
your assertion of the 6th century BC as a milestone in the history of
papyrus. Anyway, continuing within that paragraph:

"A great number of demotic papyri are legal contracts ranging from sales
of land to marriage contracts, providing a mass of detailed information.
>From the fourth century BC new literary texts in demotic are found ...

"In the Late Period some ancient texts written in Old and Middle
Egyptian were provided with translations into the contemporary
vernacular; this had become necessary because the later phases of the
language were as different from the classic Middle Egyptian phases as,
for example, Italian is from Latin. After the conquest of the Persian
Empire by Alexander the Great, texts continued to be composed in the
native language and in the Ptolemaic Period, texts on temple walls
collected or elaborated Pharaonic religious traditions. A surviving
parallel on papyrus is a hieroglyphic manuscript concerning the
sixteenth to eighteenth provinces of Upper Egypt, which is now known as
Papyrus Jumilhac (now in the Louvre, Paris).

"From the period of Roman rule the quantity of extant manuscripts in
native scripts decreased. Demotic contracts became scarce and funerary
papyri no longer contained a substantial <Book of the Dead> but short
compositions such as the <Documents for Breathing>. Roman Egypt
produced lengthy literary manuscripts in Egyptian as well as in Greek;
one cycle of fables known today as the <Myth of the Eye of the Sun>
existed in both Greek and Egyptian demotic versions. From the same
period come copies of the <Book of the Fayum>, a diagram of the Fayum
area accompanied by hieroglyphic texts reminiscent of the concerns of
Papyrus Jumilhac. The only astronomical papyri from Egypt date from the
late Ptolemaic and Roman Periods and are written in demotic; two provide
a commentary on the astronomical ceiling in the cenotaph of Sety I at
Abydos (then 1500 years old). It is possible that these types of text
existed in earlier periods."

End long quote. I'm not going to quote from, for example, the account
of the private collections now known as the Ramesseum library and as the
Chester Beatty papyri, on pp. 62-64, but I simply *can't* resist, given
some of what's in the rest of this thread, the following from p. 65:

"The oldest preserved papyrus from outside Egypt was written in Hebrew
(c. 750 BC) and comes from Murabba`at, a cave by the Dead Sea."

> >>One major exception to this is "The Book of the Dead" which happened to
> >>be preserved as painted writing inside one pyramid. And I think that is
> >>the longest sample of writing from all of Egypt.

> > Being allergic to all things pyramidal, I've generally avoided the
> > Book of the Dead and its predecessors (of which it sounds like
> > you're referring to the Pyramid Texts, but I'm not sure). But
> > this violently conflicts with what Lichtheim says on pp. 119-120
> > of volume II, <The New Kingdom>. Except the part about "longest
> > sample", which I would guess might be true.

> I have no idea what is in that book. Every reference I have found to
> it gives the pyramid as the original source. That does not exclude a
> later finding of an older and similar source but those are always in
> fragment form and such, making them questionable. I have the same rules
> for fragments for Egyptian sources as I have for Christian and Jewish sources.

Well, I can't help you with your "rules", but to add to what Parkinson &
Quirke say up above, here's Lichtheim, from p. 119 of the book cited.

"The Book of the Dead, or, 'the coming forth by day,' as the Egyptians
called it, was a large compilation of spells designed to bring about the
resurrection of the dead person and his safety in the afterlife. It is
the direct successor of the Middle Kingdom Coffin Texts. Like the
Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts, the Book of the Dead reflects ritual
acts performed during and after the burial. Gathered into a collection
and inscribed on papyrus scrolls, the spells acquired the form of a
mass-produced book that could be purchased by anyone. The prospective
owner merely had to have his name and titles inserted in a ready-made
scroll, or he could have a copy made to order. The finished scroll was
buried with its owner, either placed on the sarcophagus, or on the body
itself, or in a special container.

"At the beginning of the New Kingdom, the Book of the Dead was still in
the process of formation. It achieved its final form in the Saite
period (the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty), when all its spells were put into a
fixed sequence of chapters. Modern scholarship has added numbers to the
chapters; the total number of chapters presently known is 192. No
individual scroll contains all the chapters. In their fixed sequence
the chapters offer a certain degree of order but no precise plan or
progression."

Now. I do not claim *any* separate expertise on the <Book of the Dead>,
nor do I intend to go do any research on it; what I've read from it is
quite enough to convince me that I don't need to, for my history of
fantasy. It's always *conceivable* that your claim that the entire text
derives from some single pyramid is correct. My point is simply that
this claim, as I said, "conflicts violently" with what I've now cited
both Lichtheim and Parkinson&Quirke as saying.

[I'm snipping a bunch of "whose documentation is greater?" comparison
stuff.]

> One place just
> announced found in western Iraq shows an "advanced" city existed before
> the current idea of the origins of civilization went that far upriver.

Got any URLs or other references? I'm curious about this.

(Not that I have any *objections* to it. Pretty much right up until
Sargon, the west seems to do OK at keeping up with, if not surpassing,
Mesopotamia; see for example Çatal Hüyük, Jericho, and Ebla. Later
there's Mari too. So honestly, I mean I'm *curious*, not that I'm
questioning your assertion here. In particular I'm wondering what
millennium this is about.)

Snipping more of us agreeing, far as I can tell, that it's Bad to
compare all of Egypt's history with, for example, Rome in the 2nd
century BC, or (to this thread's point) Sumer in the 21st century BC, to
get to:

> Around 2000 BC there was a major change in the official gods

Got any cites? Again, I'm curious. It would be neat if this were true
and linked in to the apparent upsurge in literature just then (for
example, if Thoth were one of the new gods).

Snipping the first go-round on the date of the Old Testament, and some
stuff beyond that...

> > And I don't know why you think that the only thing the Mesha Stone,
> > for example, does is "show the OT is total myth". It certainly
> > does puncture some of what the Old Testament says, but it also
> > tells us a fair amount about what was actually happening in Jordan
> > in the century in question.

> The fact that today's Israel is the most dug place in the world by
> professionals, by amateurs, by housing developers, by road builders
> and by highrise developers and the total failure to find any
> evidence of a biblical Israel in any form shoots the *** out of any
> such claim.

What on Earth is this supposed to mean?

I say the Mesha Stone - yes, the Moabite Stone - tells us stuff about
Jordan in the 9th century BC. Your reply is that because (you claim)
Israel's archaeology doesn't support the Biblical account, I'm wrong.

If there's a logical connection there, I'm absolutely unable to follow
it. For something like the fourth time, what I'm doing here is
asserting (in this case) that the Mesha Stone contains historical
information. I'm *not* arguing with you about whether the Old Testament
does, and whether the Old Testament contains historical information or
not has no bearing at all on *my* claim.

> >>If we did not have a religious interest in the region and
> >>the OT books were known only to obscure scholars the finds in
> >>bibleland would be confirmation OT books were an early form of the Book
> >>of Mormon.

> > If this isn't another attempt to troll me into iteration 8493,
> > what do you mean? (If it is another such attempt, don't bother.)

> In s.h.a that is not a troll but a statement of fact as believers
> must present their evidence here. If there are believers here they
> came to be trolled and there are no apologies for it. They are
> clearly stupid people and should stick to judaic newsgroups.

Whatever. Since I'm not a believer, this has nothing to do with me, and
does not explain what you meant in the paragraph now given three quote
marks.

What follows is part of why it's taken me so long to produce this reply.
In essence, I now proceed to answering lies which I would have preferred
not to have to answer; I'm somewhat disappointed that nobody else chose
to answer them in my defense. At any rate, these assertions of yours
are part, but not all, of why my view of you - in any event a rather
more charitable view than most I've seen over the years - is changing.

> I have been here for over a decade

Liar. soc.history.ancient was created February 10th, 1997.

Reference: <ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/control/soc/soc.history.ancient.gz>

I do find posts referring to you as using the pseudonym "William
Wallace" in November 1997, and the first posts to sha at Google from
"William Wallace" appear to date to September 7, 1997.

Reference: um, do the search yourself, anyone who cares; fwiw I used a
date-sorted search on William AND Wallace as terms, not on William
Wallace as author.

Of course, you could have been lurking before you posted, or you could
have posted X-No-Archive, so this is not proof that you weren't here
from the beginning. But until February 11th, 2007, *nobody* will have
been here for over a decade.

> and you are new

Liar. I was one of the proponents for soc.history.ancient.

Reference: <ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/news.announce.newgroups/soc.history.ancient>

As it happens, the group had existed for several days before my first
post to it.

Reference: <http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.ancient/msg/f675436
620b14cac?dmode=source&hl=en>
- at least, my archives show that as the first, though Google disagrees
(and shows what it calls the first about half a day *earlier* than my
archives claim).

But I've been here for nine years less one month, and certainly not a
significantly shorter time than you.

I'm not particularly interested in using the fact that I was a proponent
to "pull rank", but my point is, I do think of soc.history.ancient as,
in some sense, the elder (and more obstreperous) of my children
(soc.history.early-modern being the sickly younger one), and I've never
fully abandoned it. However, I've also never been a prolific poster
here. I find flamewars utterly tedious, and generally avoid them.
Since most of the content of sha has been flamewars, from a quite early
date, I've normally not been one of the more prominent posters.

If you were to examine my posting record here with care, you'd probably
find a bunch of months-long gaps during which I didn't take the trouble
to wade through the flame threads to find ones (like, initially, this
one) worth reading; and you'd certainly find one long gap, possibly a
year and a half, during which I lacked the ability to post to Usenet
(it's a long story).

> so please to not tell me what is a troll here.

Well, thanks for asking politely.

But I'm serious. In fact this thread *has* now become iteration number
(guesstimate) 8493 of this endless flamewar over the COMPLETE TRUTH or
the UTTER FALSEHOOD of the Scriptures Of Your Choice.

There is *so much* of ancient history that can be discussed. I've been
reading this thread, and frankly, most of it is just ***, although I do
appreciate the several articles you've posted (or was that the one
*originally* about Israel that I chose to join in?). What's especially
frustrating to me about this is that I seriously doubt the people are
still here who *can* discuss anything other than this endless religious
war. Why *didn't* anyone contradict your lies about our histories? Why
didn't anyone jump on your ignorance about papyrus? I mean, when we
created this group, the endless flamewars we *expected* to fill it were
about the Pyramids. We had professional Egyptologists here for years.

Now, we only have professional flamers. At least Roger Pearse does
something productive when he isn't name-calling, putting all those
ancient texts online, but the rest of y'all?

So here's why I have this weird take on you. Unlike most of these
flaming idiots, you have, repeatedly that I've seen over the years,

a) tried to answer random unrelated questions;

b) not *always* lumped 'em back into the Endless Flamewar.

I'm well aware of your reputation. Before you showed up here, people
would refer to you by leaving letters out of your name, because they
expected you to ego-grep and didn't want you to show up. As I
understand it, you probably hold as a political view that I should be
killed. But if you're an acceptable interlocutor here, then in the
absence of others such, I'm stuck taking what I can get.

The question is, are you an acceptable interlocutor? You don't provide
references; you expect me to do the library work to back up *your*
claims; you make breathtaking assertions of new finds and then don't
stand behind them. (We're going to get to those latter two, below.)
I'm wondering what on earth I used to see in your posts, that justified
my not accepting the consensus take on you.

> > That's
> > something like a five or six century leap. No, I'm talking
> > about things like the Mesha Stone, and further north the
> > autobiographies of people like Kilamuwa. Pre-Persian, post-
> > New Kingdom.

> The Mesha stone shows in its opening lines the OT has to be corrected.

Somewhere way up there, I said as much. Please note that while we're
arguing about a bunch of things, I'm *still* not willing to argue with
you about your favourite topic.

> Read it and compare to the OT connection. Presuming you mean what is
> also called the Moabite stone. Please give a URL to what you mean by it.

Why? Yeah, that's the one I mean. Here's Pritchard's version, actually
by that notorious believer, W. F. Albright:

"I (am) Mesha, son of Chemosh-[...], king of Moab, the Dibonite - my
father (had) reigned over Moab thirty years, and I reigned after my
father, - (who) made this high place for Chemosh in Qarhoh [...] because
he saved me from all the kings and caused me to triumph over all my
adversaries. As for Omri, king of Israel, he humbled Moab many years
(lit., days), for Chemosh was angry at his land. And his son followed
him and he also said, 'I will humble Moab.' In my time he spoke (thus),
but I have triumphed over him and over his house, while Israel hath
perished for ever! (Now) Omri had occupied the land of Medeba, and
(Israel) had dwelt there in his time and half the time of his son
(Ahab), forty years; but Chemosh dwelt there in my time."

Etc. etc. My point in all this was simply that the first half of the
first millennium BC is, comparatively speaking, a pretty well-documented
bit of the history of the Levant. And this inscription is a big chunk
of that.

(Yes, I know, "Levant" is one of the dozens of words you object to. I
don't know of another word for "Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria west of
the Euphrates, and Lebanon", however, so I'm going to keep using it.)

[Another massive snip where there's nothing left to say.]

> >>Pharaoh is the name of an adminstrative complex and it was not until
> >>about 600 BC that it became a word which would today be the equivalent
> >>of White House or 10 Downing Street. Thus Pharaoh said is the same as
> >>The White House said.

> > Y'know, this sounds interesting, but your reliability record so far
> > in this post has been so low that I'm not inclined to take your word
> > for it. Got any references?

> You can look that up for yourself as it is so well known outside of
> believer circles. If you want someone to specifically say it, consider
> it said. If you can produce non-biblical sources prior to that date
> using the term Pharaho you can show the observation is false. You claim
> detailed knowledge of such material. Why not simply produce a reference
> to other than king significantly before that time frame?

Because, silly, I'm not invested in it.

This is an example of what I'm complaining about. You make an
assertion. I say "I'd appreciate a reference". You say "No, if you
don't believe me, you have an obligation to disprove it." Um, there's a
wide gap between disbelief and disagreement, and people who can't see
that gap are *never* acceptable interlocutors.

In my ongoing effort to pretend that these conclusions I'm reaching
about you are wrong, I *tried* to take you at your word here. And as it
happens, oddly enough, in this case you were *right*. I checked a bunch
of books, most of which used the word "king" and not "Pharaoh", and
didn't even mention the latter. Finally I opened a coffee-table book,
hardly a reliable source, but it said the same thing. Since I don't
*care* enough about this to go check dictionaries, fine, I'll take
y'all's word for it.

Which is a sharp contrast to an example further below.

The reference you were too lazy to give is, undoubtedly among many
possible places, to p. 14 of <Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs> by Jo Forty.
[North Dighton, MA]: JG Press, c 1998.

> > 2) Countries taking ownership of their pasts.
>
> > Since the countries in question are generally not anglophone, or
> > even European-language-phone, 2) would not result in textbooks I
> > could read. The English-language textbooks on Jordan, Syria, and
> > Turkey are expressions of 1) instead.

> Can I ask where the local arkies got their PhDs? I rest my case.
> It was not the U of Ankara or Tehran. It was Oxford, Cambridge,
> Harvard or something similar. That is the way it is in Egypt.

Well, I don't know whether that's the way it is elsewhere in the Muslim
world. In India most of the archaeologists get their Ph.D.s locally;
one of my favourite books of Indian archaeology is the doctoral thesis
of Makkhan Lal, done I think at Allahabad but I'm not sure any more.

> >>>>Or all of Iraq if someone ever manages to analyze satellite photoes
> >>>>and find likely places for cities when the rivers had different routes.

> >>>Satellite photos might help too, but I doubt there are very *many*
> >>>cities we don't know about left, in that region.

> >>Sat images have found Mayan cities in the middle of the Brazilian rain
> >>forest. Trust results not doubts.

> > Um. First off, this is yet another assertion I find profoundly dubious.
> > You do mean "Brazilian"? Not "Belizean"?

> I have no interest in arguing modern political boundaries.

This is a difference between *continents*.

Look. Belize is a country in between Guatemala and Mexico. It is a
core part of the Mayan heartland. A Mayan city in the middle of the
Belizean rain forest is news, but it's not earth-shaking; it's
comparable, say, to "US President Visits Russia".

Brazil is a country in *South America*, which is to say, across either
the isthmus of Panama or the Caribbean Sea from Belize and the other
Mayan territories. Furthermore, while I don't know if there are any
exceptions in Brazil's Andean reaches, *in general*, Brazil was a
backwater before Columbus. The Incas and such weren't there. A Mayan
city in the middle of the *Brazilian* rain forest would be utterly
astonishing; it's comparable to "US President Visits Andromeda Galaxy".

So which did you mean? If Brazil, can you provide a reference, or is
this going to be another game of "If you don't believe whatever I say,
you're obligated to research it for yourself" ? Sorry, but on *this*
one, I'll happily call you wrong without researching it for myself.
Before I rearrange my picture of the world's past enough to accommodate
a Mayan city in the Amazon Valley, I'm going to need more evidence than
a post to Usenet.

> > That said, look, I'm not making funding decisions for archaeologists.
> > If someone who does make such decisions wants to fund archaeologists to
> > look in satellite photos of Iraq for cities, fine. This strikes me as
> > a weird choice - I mean, most of Iraq is *not* rain forest! - but
> > whatever. I still say that until such time, my personal opinion worth
> > every penny you pay for it is that such a search will not find very
> > *many* cities in Iraq that we haven't already found by other means.

> Other than a New York interest in discounting Iraq against the mythical
> biblical Israel what is your point?

That question cannot be answered as asked, of course. I have no "New
York interest", whatever that means, "in discounting Iraq"; I've been
explicit, throughout this thread, about how Iraq is the best-documented
part of the ancient world (and indeed probably better documented than
anything in the mediaeval world too). But we'll pretend you asked
politely what my point was.

You were advocating looking at satellite photos to find new cities in
Iraq, and I was saying I doubted that would be very useful. That was my
point.

And my overall point, in this post, is that I've *tried* to follow my
usual ethic in answering questions on Usenet, but I'm coming to the
conclusion that in your case, as in the cases of many other people who
post to soc.history.ancient, it's not worth it. I would be pleased if
you'd prove that conclusion wrong.

Joe Bernstein

--
Joe Bernstein, writer <joe@xxxxxxxxxxx>
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/>
.

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