Friday, January 26, 2007
Magic spell stumps experts
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Storms in the USAPosted by Posted by Ninja T. Penguin
(Laurie Copans - News24.com) from Egypt.
Jerusalem - A magic spell to keep snakes away from the tombs of Egyptian kings, adopted from the Canaanites almost 5 000 years ago, could be the oldest Semitic text yet discovered, experts said on Tuesday.
The phrases, interspersed throughout religious texts in Egyptian characters in the underground chambers of a pyramid south of Cairo, stumped Egyptian experts for about a century, until the Semitic connection was found.
In 2002 one of the Egyptologists e-mailed the undeciphered part of the inscription to Richard Steiner, a professor of Semitic languages at Yeshiva University in New York.
Steiner discovered that the phrases are the transcription of a language used by Canaanites at some point in the period from 25th to the 30th centuries BC.
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Storms in the USAPosted by Posted by Ninja T. Penguin
(Laurie Copans - News24.com) from Egypt.
Jerusalem - A magic spell to keep snakes away from the tombs of Egyptian kings, adopted from the Canaanites almost 5 000 years ago, could be the oldest Semitic text yet discovered, experts said on Tuesday.
The phrases, interspersed throughout religious texts in Egyptian characters in the underground chambers of a pyramid south of Cairo, stumped Egyptian experts for about a century, until the Semitic connection was found.
In 2002 one of the Egyptologists e-mailed the undeciphered part of the inscription to Richard Steiner, a professor of Semitic languages at Yeshiva University in New York.
Steiner discovered that the phrases are the transcription of a language used by Canaanites at some point in the period from 25th to the 30th centuries BC.
