traveling the ways of horus: studying the links between egypt and the levant

Traveling the Ways of Horus: Studying the Links between Egypt and the LevantAuthor(s): Carolyn HigginbothamSource: Near Eastern Archaeology, Vol. 65, No. 1, The House That Albright Built (Mar., 2002),pp. 30-34Published by: The American Schools of Oriental ResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3210895 .

Accessed: 02/07/2014 16:43

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The American Schools of Oriental Research is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to Near Eastern Archaeology.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 92.32.67.204 on Wed, 2 Jul 2014 16:43:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=asor

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3210895?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Traveling the Ways of Horus: Studying the Links Between

Hyksos scarabs from Syria-Palestine. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in connections between Egypt and the Levant. Photo ? Erich Lessing, courtesty of Art Resource.

T he most exciting research being conducted at the turn of the millennium is the work of disrespectful boundary-crossers.' Whether

the insights come from linguistics and cognitive science, from sociology, or from medieval histo- riography, cutting edge scholarship is focusing new lenses on old problems and opening up new vistas of exploration.

Too often scholars have been afraid to venture beyond their own academic pigeonholes to explore interconnections with other disciplines. This hesitation can be interpreted as prudence, a recognition of the risk of stumbling in the unfamiliar terrain of another discipline. Yet hidebound disciplinarity also deprives us of the insights we might garner from examining a problem from another angle or from being forced to acknowledge and reconsider our own presuppositions.

How then ought we to proceed in our scholarship? I would suggest that we take Albright as our model. Albright was not an Egyptologist, nor, by the way, am I, but I share with Albright, in my much more modest way, a Semitist's interest in the interconnections between Egypt and Western Asia. When questions of philology or history called for an examination of Egyptian sources, Albright did not hesitate to immerse himself in their study. Such questions called to him quite frequently: by my count, Albright published two books and more than fifty articles that dealt in some way with Egypt. Topics ranged from the proto-Sinaitic inscriptions and the Amarna letters, which everyone would agree are properly the domain of a Semitist, to subjects that we would normally consider the province of Egyptologists: the solar barks of morning and evening, the stelae of Seti I from Beth Shan, and the vocalization of Egyptian syllabic orthography.

ALBRIGHT AND EGYPTIAN PHILOLOGY The vocalization of Egyptian syllabic orthography is the one

of Albright's contributions to Egyptology that continues to receive the greatest recognition and to exert the greatest influence in the field, perhaps in part because the matter has yet to be fully resolved. Syllabic orthography, also known as group writing, is a system of writing that the Egyptians used primarily for foreign names. The system has its antecedents in the Old Kingdom and continued in use in one form or another through the Ptolemaic period. As the term implies, the difference between syllabic orthography and ordinary hieroglyphic writing is in the orthography, not in the signs themselves. In ordinary hieroglyphic writing, vowels are not indicated and individual signs are of three types: uniliteral, biliteral, and triliteral signs indicating consonants, ideograms representing entire words, and determinatives marking the classification of the word. In comparison, syllabic orthography contains extra signs not falling into any of those categories. The issue then is the signification of those signs; specifically, do they represent vowels?

Albright argued most emphatically that they do. His success is predicated on thorough familiarity with the relevant material from both sides of the "Brook of Egypt," in other words, from an interdisciplinary approach. Albright claimed that he drew on three developments, "the great increase in cuneiform transcriptions of syllabically written words, the great increase in our knowledge of West-Semitic phonology and vocabulary

30 NEAR EASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY 65:1 (2002)



Egypt and the Levant Carolyn Higginbotham

in the second millennium, and especially the recent discovery of the Egyptian vocalic system of the New Empire" (1934: 1). In fact, Albright had contributed to the last of these advances in an article entitled "The Principles of Egyptian Phonological Development" published in 1923.

Albright noted that previous studies, particularly that of W. Max Muller (1893), did not satisfactorily reflect West Semitic phonology and vocabulary. MOller, who had been the primary proponent of a syllabic interpretation of group writing, reconstructed an underlying cuneiform principle in which 3 always represents /a/, y always represents /i/, and w always represents /u/. Unfortunately a strict application of this principle produces numerous "discrepancies between the known vocalization of many Asiatic names and Semitic words, on the one hand, and Miiller's transcription of their Egyptian form, on the other" (Albright 1934: 3). Consequently, by the 1920s most Egyptologists had rejected the notion that group writing intended to indicate vowels in any consistent or meaningful way.

Albright pointed the way back to a syllabic interpretation. The solution that Albright offered did not differ in essentials from our current understanding. Most importantly, Albright recognized the presence of a mixture of systems:

First in importance comes the practice of employing short Egyptian words, generally nouns or pronouns with fixed vocalization, as phonetic elements in transcription of foreign words or of ambiguous Egyptian words ... The second principle is the use of the sign of the dual (y) and the consonant w, in both hieratic forms, to represent the vowels i and u, respectively. (Albright 1934: 27)

Although he did not identify it as an underlying principle, Albright's discussion of the sign groups acknowledged instances in which the groups have purely consonantal value (Albright 1934: 23-27).

Current scholarship has not significantly refined Albright's theory. We still reckon with three principles that are essentially the same as those identified by Albright:

1) The Devanagari principle, in which the unmarked value of a sign group is Ca or C# and a phonetic complement is added for /i/ and /u/;

2) The cuneiform principle, in which a sign group has

the vowel of the underlying Egyptian word; and 3) The consonantal principle, in which a sign group has

only the value of the first consonant in the group and no vocalic value (Schenkel 1986: 118; Loprieno 1995: 13-14).

As Hillers notes in his review of Albright's philological contributions, the polyvalence of such a mixed system remains problematic (1989: 51). If any given sign group can have two or more meanings, how can it serve to indicate the proper pronunciation of a foreign word? For instance, if a given sign group can signify either /ba/ according to the Devanagari principle or /bi/ according to the cuneiform principle, can that sign group be said to indicate the vowel? There do seem to be limits on the polyvalence of sign groups. Sign groups incorporating w are used only for syllables whose vowel is /u/ or /a/, never /i/; sign groups incorporating y are used only for syllables whose vowel is /i/ or /a/, never/u/ (Zeidler 1993: 581-82).

What we still lack, sixty-five years after the publication of Albright's monograph, is a convincing theory explaining when each of these principles is to be employed. The only suggestions on the table at present focus on inconsistencies in scribal usage. Hoch (1994: 500) suggests that scribes more at home in the traditional non-syllabic orthography of Egyptian hieroglyphs sometimes substituted the more common signs of the /a/ series for the rarer groups representing/i/ and/u/. According to Schneider (1992: 361, 402), a number of factors contribute to the lack of standardization: modification of vocalization in transmission of the word or name to Egypt; pragmatic solutions by scribes using rare signs; diachronic changes in the system; and simple spelling errors.

In general, then, this brief look at the subject of Egyptian syllabic orthography highlights just one of Albright's many contributions to Egyptian philology, not to mention his many studies of Egypto-Semitic etymology. Suffice it say that while subsequent scholarship has modified details of his work, Albright's analyses are still judged to be correct in principle.

Albright's interest in Egyptian syllabic orthography was not, of course, exclusively motivated by a fascination with the development of the Egyptian language and hieroglyphics. As much as anything, the questions that drew Albright into the study of the syllabic orthography related to the development of the Semitic languages and the political and economic relations between the Nile Valley and the Levant. The latter provides a segue into the history of Egypt's relationship with Western Asia.

NEAR EASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY 65:1 (2002) 31



ALBRIGHT AND EGPYTIAN HISTORY Albright did not author any monographs on the historical

connections between the two regions; however, he wrote numerous articles that touch on Egypto-Levantine relations. I am at a loss to forge a connected narrative from the disparate topics Albright addressed. Therefore, rather than focusing on a specific contribution of Albright, let me emphasize instead Albright as a model of research across disciplinary boundaries in the field of history.

In the post-Albright years, Egyptology and other areas of ancient Near Eastern study went their separate ways. Crossover between Egyptology and the history, archaeology, and literature of Syria- Palestine was largely limited to the subjects of Amarna and wisdom literature. Ironically, this development can be attributed in part to Albright's example. Those of us who follow in Albright's footsteps recognize that there will never again be another Albright. His breadth exceeds our reach. We cannot hope to achieve expertise in all of the areas of the ancient Near East from Mesopotamia to Anatolia, to Syria-Palestine, and Egypt. So, we specialize. At most, we work comfortably in two regions or two disciplines, not in the whole range that Albright covered so gracefully. Given these limits, scholars have, for a variety of legitimate reasons, focused on connections between Mesopotamia and Egypt or between Mesopotamia and Syria-Palestine, not between Egypt and Syria- Palestine. Graduate programs have encouraged students in Hebrew Bible and Northwest Semitics to study Akkadian more than Egyptian and students in Egyptology to study Akkadian more than Hebrew or Aramaic.

But in recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in the historical connections between the two regions. This resurgence is equally evident among Egyptologists and among Syro- Palestinian historians and archaeologists. One of the reasons for this increased attention is that the materials necessary for such studies have become more readily accessible. Information that once was available only in obscure journals or through oral tradition is being published in formats that are more user-friendly for scholars from other fields. Egyptian pottery is a case in point. Until recently, well-published pottery was hard to find. Compared to objects in glass, faience, stone, and metal, ceramics received short shrift. A graduate student in Egyptology once commented to me that Egyptologists had no need to study pottery since inscriptions provide more precise dating for sites than crude ceramic typologies. I trust that he modified his opinion before he graduated; his attitude certainly is not typical of the field of

Egyptology today. In the last few decades the publication of pottery from excavations in Egypt has been as rigorous and scientific as the publication of pottery from sites in Syria- Palestine. Therefore, we now have a corpus of well-published Egyptian pottery available for study.

Sidon

Zarephath

Tyre

cb Q,

Dor

Joppa

Ashkelon

Gaza v

a

Map of Palestine in the Ramesside period.




THE EGYPTIAN IMPERIAL SYSTEM Perhaps the hottest topic in historical research right now is

Egypt's empire during the New Kingdom, or at least it appears so to me, as one who is deeply interested in the subject. Much of the recent research is calling into question fundamental assumptions about the nature and character of the Egyptian Empire. For many years we have operated with a model of imperialism that is too vague and too monolithic. The term "empire" has been used without further definition as if we all knew what an empire is and as if every empire were the same. In many cases, this has resulted in the imposition on the Egyptian Empire of assumptions drawn from the best known examples of imperialism, especially Rome and Britain. But just how much like either Rome or Britain was ancient Egypt?

One of the clear trends of current scholarship is to attend to specifically Egyptian dispositions and policies. Thus, Ellen Morris examined the continuities between internal and foreign policies during the New Kingdom (1999). Noting that Thutmose III required mayors to fund th construction of quays along the Nile, she suggested that a similar policy may have been in effect in Syria-Palestine with local princes responsible for the construction of pharaonic install- ations in the Levant. This would account for the less than fully Egyptian character of many such facilities. Similarly, Donald Redford pointed out that annexation and direct administration of foreign territories by resident Egyptian officials was not customary practice (1990: 35). Even in Nubia, affairs were left as much as possible in the hands of local officials. Egyptian oversight was provided by circuit officials and emissaries who made excursions to these frontier zones as necessary, but whose primary residence was within Egypt proper.

Other studies are examining how meaning is negotiated between and within empires. Marian Feldman has demonstrated the existence of an international style that draws elements from several cultural spheres and that communicates royal prerogatives throughout the region (1999). In my own work, I have highlighted the process of elite emulation through which vassal princes adapted elements of Egyptian culture to create their own iconography of power (2000). In both cases, meaning is clearly negotiated;

one party does not impose it on another. Individuals and groups at every level of society construct their own meaning out of the cultural elements at hand.

We need to continue to refine our understanding of the Egyptian imperial system and life within it. We have only begun to illuminate the complexities of the social, political and economic forces at work in that empire. An important element in that process will be the recognition, critique, and modification of our assumptions about the nature of empires in general and this empire in particular. For instance, the material culture suggests strongly that there were significant

differences between southern and northern Palestine under the

Ramessides. Whether those differences were in pharaonic political and military

policy, in regional economic development, in local socio-

political organization, or in cultural adaptation to imperial domination remains a matter of debate.

Although a number of factors have converged to pro- duce this increased attention to Egypto- Levantine relations, we would not be wrong

Current scholarship is reexamining what we think we know about Egypt's New Kingdom empire, epitomized by the 18th Dynasty pharaoh, Tuthmosis III. Photo courtesy of Art Resource.

to see here a late flowering of the Albright legacy. Consciously or not, the current generation of scholarship follows closely in the footsteps of Albright as it ventures into this interdisciplinary territory. Although there will probably never be another Albright, we can jointly embody the tradition that he bequeathed to us when we collaborate on topics of mutual interest across disciplinary boundaries.

NOTE 1. As a beneficiary of the Albright legacy both at the Albright Institute in Jerusalem and at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, I am honored to contribute to this celebration and assessment of the work of W.E Albright. "The House that Albright Built" is not simply the venerable institution in Jerusalem, but also a tradition of interdisciplinary study of the ancient world, a tradition which the Albright Institute helps to keep alive. In a tribute to Albright, Delbert Hillers refers to "Albright's disrespect for academic pigeonholes" (1989: 46). It is precisely that disrespect, evidenced in a wide-ranging intellectual curiosity and an ability to see patterns and connections in disparate fields, that I celebrate here.

NEAR EASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY 65:1 (2002) 33



REFERENCES Albright, W. E

1923 Recueil de Travaux relatifs at la philologie et a l'archeologie egyptiennes et assyriennes 40: 64-70.

1934 The Vocalization of Egyptian Syllabic Orthography. New Haven: American Oriental Society.

Feldman, M. 1999 The Borrowed Past: The Adaptation of Egyptian Royal

Iconography in a Pair of Ivory Furniture Panels from Ugarit. Paper presented at the American Research Center in Egypt annual meeting.

Higginbotham, C. 2000 Egyptianization and Elite Emulation in Ramesside Palestine:

Governance and Accommodation on the Imperial Periphery. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, 2. Leiden: Brill.

Hillers, D. R. 1989 William F. Albright as a Philologian. Pp. 45-59 in The

Scholarship of William Foxwell Albright: An Appraisal, ed. Gus Van Beek. Atlanta: Scholars.

Hoch, J. 1994 Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom. Princeton:

Princeton University. Loprieno, A.

1995 Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Morris, E. 1999 Reformation Politics and the Transformation of the Syro-

Palestinian Frontier. Paper presented at the American Research Center in Egypt annual meeting.

Miiller, W M. 1893 Asien und Europa nach altagyptischen Denkmailern. Leipzig: W

Engelmann. Redford, D.

1990 Egypt and Canaan in the New Kingdom. Beer Sheva 4. Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Schenkel, W 1986 Syllabische Schreibung. Lexikon der Agyptologie 6:114-22.

Schneider, T. 1992 Asiatische Personennamen in agyptischen Quellen des Neuen

Reiches. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 114. Freiburg: Universititsverlag.

Zeidler, J. 1993 A New Approach to the Late Egyptian "Syllabic Orthography."

Pp. 579-90 in Atti. Sesto Congresso Internazionale di Egittologia. Turin: International Association of Egyptologists.

Carolyn Higginbotham is the Vice President, Academic Dean, and Professor of Hebrew Bible at the Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, Indiana. Her book Egyptianization and Elite Emulation in Ramesside Palestine: Governance and Accommodation on the Imperial Periphery (Brill, 2000), explores a new thesis to explain the Egyptianization of Canaan in the Ramesside era. This process represents the emulation of Egyptian culture by the local elite rather than a massive influx of Egyptian Carolyn Higginbotham soldiers and administrators into the region. Higginbotham has excavated in Israel at Ashkelon and Megiddo and in Syria at Tel el-Raqai.

REVISED EDITION HOW TO READ EGYPTIAN H I E ROG LYPH S A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO TEACH YOURSELF

Mark Collier and Bill Manley With Illustrations by Richard Parkinson

"Whether you're a budding Indiana Jones or just curious, translating ancient tomb inscriptions is now possible ... [Collier and Manley] reveal the bizarre idio- syncrasies of hiero- glyph construction, ,* syntax and grammar."

- American Scientist

$24.95 hardcover

At bookstores or order (800) 822-6657 www.ucpress.edu

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS




traveling the ways of horus: studying the links between egypt and the levant

Documents