Will: My apologies. I now see your point. The sourceI was looking at erroneously showed the first two letters in Akhenaten’s namein Egyptian as being ax. But now that Ilook 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 seethat it’s a very important point to make, let me correct my response to whatyou wrote. You wrote: “Thisseems 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 myprior 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, notaleph. Note, however, that when maat is written in Akkadiancuneiform in the Amarna Letters, both the Egyptian ayin and the Egyptian alephare rendered by the Akkadian vowel U. That is to say, ayin and aleph are not routinely distinguished inAkkadian cuneiform, including when rendering Egyptian words or Egyptian names. mAat comes out in the Akkadian cuneiform ofthe Amarna Letters as having UU in the middle. As I noted in a prior post, it’s also the case that Akkadian cuneiformheth can represent both aleph and ayin as well. Will, you are right to point out those “differentconsonants”: ayin vs. aleph. That’s an important point, and thank you formaking that point. But I see P R (H inthe Patriarchal narratives as coming from an Akkadian cuneiform original, whereayin and aleph were not distinguished in the original writing. Sorry that I did not see your point before, but it actually fits in withmy Akkadian cuneiform approach quite nicely. Jim Stinehart Evanston, Illinois
_______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
