Thursday, March 27, 2025

pQeheq

A couple days ago I mooted that the Berber languages of the western Egyptian oases were intrusive, from the great Imazighen west. I despaired of figuring what was spoken there before the Dorian invasion of the Cyrenaica - hence the questionmark on the title. Perhaps I should have posted that two years before I did. A little rooting-around pulled up Silvestri 2023.

The Hittites were known for incorporating foreign-language rituals and vocalising them into cuneiform. The Egyptians, it happens, did that too; there's a famous papyrus in demotic transliterating Canaanite hymns. What I didn't know is if the Egyptians ever bothered doing that favour for the tjehenu, excepting personal names like Osorkon and Sheshonq (when Libyans ruled as pharaohs). Says Silvestri - they did. One is in the "Qeheq" tongue, written in Merneptah's hieratic.

The DOI is 10.3917/edb.049.0319; but we can't read that UPDATE 3/29 here. So here is Silvestri's talk about it.

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