Hi Tory, (Sorry for getting your name wrong in my previous response.)
Since this thread is shutting down, I'll try to pack as much as I can into my one allowed reply... On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 09:12:04 +0800 (SGT), Tory Thorpe <[email protected]> wrote: > Will: > > A Moses figure (real or not) would have been literate in > Egyptian. We can at least put that question to rest. As I wrote in my previous reply, I don't think it can be taken for granted that even royalty were necessarily able to read and write in the complex hieroglyphic/hieratic script. > The question is what script and language would he use? What script > would Asiatics from Egypt and always on the move use? I'm thinking a > cursive script for fast transmission and recording of information on > just about any medium available, i.e. stone, rocks, leather, > limestone, ostraca, parchment, or whatever. Yes, cursive is much easier to use with a variety of media than cuneiform is, but the Egyptian writing system required a lot of study to master. > You wrote: "So if Moses wrote in it, it would have been in Egyptian, > which would be unintellible to non-Egyptian speaking Hebrews." > > They presumably were all capable of understanding and speaking > Egyptian by the time of the Exodus even if only relatively few were > literate. I don't think we can presume that. One can argue that: o The Israelites were in Egypt for an extended period of time, so of course they all learned to speak Egyptian. o It appears that the Israelites were pretty much located in a specific area and formed a cohesive enclave within Egypt, so they probably kept their language and only some them spoke Egyptian. Which of these (or other) possibilities is closer to the mark is a matter of speculation. But if the Hebrews entered Canaan being essentially Egyptian-speaking, and with an Egyptian-language torah, there's a lot of explaining to be done... > I do not see it as improbable the idea that hieratic was > used to write some Hebrew words. Writing "some Hebrew words" is a lot different than writing an extended narrative. > The Arabic script seems to have some connections to hieratic. I don't think so. > What I am saying is that a narrative composition in the 15th century > BC, in the region of Egypt/Canaan is more likely to be in hieratic > than anything else since the examples that survive are just that. Examples of what? Egyptian? Are there any examples of any Canaanite language written in hieratic? > Even 1,000+ kilometers in Assyria and Babylonia, their narration, > story telling, and even their year-names and annual limmu name > recording were probably all written first on perishable mediums in a > cursive script prior to being copied on non-perishable medium of > clay tablets with a stylus. Why probably? Is there any evidence they did? The very form of cuneiform reflects the fact that it was developed using clay as a medium. They didn't have the supply of papyrus the Egyptians had, but they had plenty of mud. --- In a reply to Karl you wrote: > Hieroglyphic is consonantal writing system (bi- and tri-consonants) > with hieratic being a cursive and much faster way to do it. It can > be used to "write" Hebrew easier than Akkadian cunieform -- which is > where I jumped in to disagree with Jim. Hieratic is also just as > easy to use as the method for writing Hebrew adopted on this > b-hebrew list: i.e. ")" for aleph, "B" for beth, and "G" for gimel, > and "$" for shin, etc. Hieratic writing is also much faster than > carving or chiseling proto-Sinaitic or proto-Hebrew unto stone which > takes time. Are there any examples of this other than the > non-perishable types? So maybe the "ten commandments" were written > this way on two tablets of stone in the non-cursive script, but not > the larger Pentateuch in books which needed a cursive script, not if > all of it was written down in the 15th century BCE and then copied > and updated in the centuries that followed. Any introductory book on Egyptian will show a hieroglypic "alphabet", each of whose glyphs has a hieratic equivalent, so we have what could have been used as a hieratic "alphabet". But I've put "alphabet" in quotes for a reason - these sets of symbols never (that I know) seem to have been actually *used* as an alphabet, but only as part of a script that also included more complex phonograms, logograms, and determinatives. A hieratic alphabet *could* have been used to represent other languages, but assuming it *was* so used is pure speculation. (The Meroitic alphabet was derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs, but that was much later than the period we're discussing, and on the other side [South] of Egypt.) -- Will Parsons μὴ φαίνεσθαι, ἀλλ' εἶναι. _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
