3/12/2009
44
Aegypt: The Rubbing
Already
he marked and separated each rectangular sentence of hieroglyphic
drawings and began his own translation of the inscriptions,
but so far, he was largely unsuccessful. The only pictograms
he positively identified were visuals and determinatives,
which didn’t represent sounds or parts of words at
all. A determinative specified the meaning of a depiction of a group
of hieroglyphics, and a visual was a hieroglyph with a specific
and separate meaning of its own. The visuals were all the
common names of the deities on the stone. Paul identified each
of the gods along with the single hieroglyph depiction of their
names, plus two other visuals. The other two that he positively
translated were the symbols inscribed before the faces
of the enthroned women. This was the usual place reserved
for the name of the enthroned deity or person. The names
were not those of any Egyptian deity or ruler Paul ever heard
of before.