My website server was being upgraded this weekend and as a result my website was down. Apologies to anyone who tried to look at my article linked in my thread below. It is back up now. One of the topics in my article is the itr. In his article about Behdet, Gardiner discussed the inscribed cubit rods that give the dimensions of Egypt in itr. His article is available on jstor which is a pay site, but you can have a free restricted membership for 6 articles a month and this is an interesting one.
Also referenced by Gardiner and Griffith in my article is the inscription at Edfu recorded by Brugsch. The pages of his Thesaurus that have a drawing of the relevant inscription (p. 604) and commentary (in handwritten German) are freely available here:
[books.google.com]
Click on the book and it should open to the correct chapter. You can see on the 10th column of the inscription the lines that Griffith gives as 27,000,000 arura for the total area of Egypt. There are clearly a whole bunch of additional numbers in this inscription. I believe these are dimensions for the nomes and for Egypt.
After reading what Gardiner said about the White Chapel inscriptions, and the measures that Gardiner got from Lacau, and his statement that there were a bunch of additional measures from the chapel that he was not at liberty to publish, I looked for a copy of Une Chappelle de la Karnak - Lacau, Chevrier (1956), and I found a complete free pdf copy online here:
[www.nakala.fr]
This is an interesting book. It is in French but it can be run through an online translator. The White Chapel was a small chapel covered with high quality bas reliefs and inscriptions that was taken apart and the blocks were used for interior blocks for the large third pylon of the subsequently constructed temple at Karnak. Lacau says that this is actually very fortunate because the inscriptions and bas reliefs were preserved inside the pylon, and the chapel probably would have been defaced and/or destroyed because of changing cultural/religious beliefs if it had not been 'hidden' in the pylon. The first part of the book talks about the chapel itself. The second part talks about inscriptions that are mostly religious in nature. The third part talks about inscriptions that describe each of the nomes, including a geographical descripion of the length and area of each, and also a geographical description of Egypt. Lacau says that scribal errors in some of the hieroglyphs that are the same as scribal errors in much earlier inscriptions indicates that the source material is much older. I was a bit disappointed that Lacau did not emphasize the actual geographic dimensions that he described. He only gives the inscribed dimensions of two of the nomes, and he does not explain the basis of his translations, and his descriptions do not make a lot of sense. He also gives the same dimensions for the length of Egypt that was inscribed on the cubit rods found by Borchardt. One thing that Lacau does emphasize is how much the inscriptions talk about the levels of the inundation in different parts of the country. He says that Pi-Hapy was in Rodah, I think because there was a nilometer in Rodah, even though Gardiner had already rejected Rodah as the site of Pi-Hapy before Lacau went to print. In my article I cite Sheehan's 2015 book about Rodah that also excludes Rodah as a Pi-Hapy candidate. Lacau, like Borchardt, Gardiner and Goedicke, believed the itr was a road and river measure of an itenerary route down the length of Egypt, rather than the accurate meridian measure of the country that it is.
Also referenced by Gardiner and Griffith in my article is the inscription at Edfu recorded by Brugsch. The pages of his Thesaurus that have a drawing of the relevant inscription (p. 604) and commentary (in handwritten German) are freely available here:
[books.google.com]
Click on the book and it should open to the correct chapter. You can see on the 10th column of the inscription the lines that Griffith gives as 27,000,000 arura for the total area of Egypt. There are clearly a whole bunch of additional numbers in this inscription. I believe these are dimensions for the nomes and for Egypt.
After reading what Gardiner said about the White Chapel inscriptions, and the measures that Gardiner got from Lacau, and his statement that there were a bunch of additional measures from the chapel that he was not at liberty to publish, I looked for a copy of Une Chappelle de la Karnak - Lacau, Chevrier (1956), and I found a complete free pdf copy online here:
[www.nakala.fr]
This is an interesting book. It is in French but it can be run through an online translator. The White Chapel was a small chapel covered with high quality bas reliefs and inscriptions that was taken apart and the blocks were used for interior blocks for the large third pylon of the subsequently constructed temple at Karnak. Lacau says that this is actually very fortunate because the inscriptions and bas reliefs were preserved inside the pylon, and the chapel probably would have been defaced and/or destroyed because of changing cultural/religious beliefs if it had not been 'hidden' in the pylon. The first part of the book talks about the chapel itself. The second part talks about inscriptions that are mostly religious in nature. The third part talks about inscriptions that describe each of the nomes, including a geographical descripion of the length and area of each, and also a geographical description of Egypt. Lacau says that scribal errors in some of the hieroglyphs that are the same as scribal errors in much earlier inscriptions indicates that the source material is much older. I was a bit disappointed that Lacau did not emphasize the actual geographic dimensions that he described. He only gives the inscribed dimensions of two of the nomes, and he does not explain the basis of his translations, and his descriptions do not make a lot of sense. He also gives the same dimensions for the length of Egypt that was inscribed on the cubit rods found by Borchardt. One thing that Lacau does emphasize is how much the inscriptions talk about the levels of the inundation in different parts of the country. He says that Pi-Hapy was in Rodah, I think because there was a nilometer in Rodah, even though Gardiner had already rejected Rodah as the site of Pi-Hapy before Lacau went to print. In my article I cite Sheehan's 2015 book about Rodah that also excludes Rodah as a Pi-Hapy candidate. Lacau, like Borchardt, Gardiner and Goedicke, believed the itr was a road and river measure of an itenerary route down the length of Egypt, rather than the accurate meridian measure of the country that it is.
