Monday, 19th February 2007
Prof. John D. Ray (Cambridge University)
LOVE POEMS, SCHOOLDAYS AND THE ALPHABET THAT NEVER WAS: EGYPTIAN INFLUENCES ON THE HEBREW MONARCHY
The first part of this lecture recalls the passages in the Old Testament which are generally agreed to show the influence of Egyptian literature. These include Psalm 104, with its strong echoes of the Great Hymn to the Aten (mid-14th century BC), Proverbs 22-24, which show a strong affinity with passages from the 13th-century BC Wisdom of Amenemope, and The Song of Songs, which has many points in common with Egyptian love poetry of a similar date. Transmission of these ideas may well have been indirect rather than direct, but transmission of some sort has clearly occurred. There are other cases in ancient literature where the influence of Egypt is clear, even if the route of that influence cannot be traced. One analogy is the strong resemblances between Egyptian love poetry and the work of poets such as Theocritus in later Alexandria. Here too there must be influence at work, even though we do not know how it came about.
The second part of the lecture describes the unusual alphabetic scheme which appears in several Egyptian texts from the demotic period (latter half of the first millennium BC). This starts with the letters HLÓ, rather than the ABG or ABC which is familiar to us. This alternative alphabet has now been recognised as the order which appears in South Arabian texts, and which is also known in Ethiopic, and it has therefore been argued that the concept was borrowed by the Egyptians from Arabia. However, this scheme is far older than the South Arabian script, since it has now been recognised on a tablet from Ugarit and on a near-contemporary tablet from Beth Shemesh. The most likely explanation for this, according to the speaker, is that the HLÓ alphabet originated in Egypt. If the Egyptians had waited until the fifth century BC before adopting an alphabetic scheme, they could easily have adopted the ABG-order which was familiar to them from the Phoenician, Aramaic and Greek scripts. Maritime trade will have taken the Egyptian alphabet to Ugarit and Beth Shemesh, since the latter is not far inland, and along the Red Sea to the Yemen. The Egyptian scheme might have originated in a hymn to the ibis, the sacred bird of the god of writing, since the word for ibis in Egyptian began with the letter h.
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