On Understanding of Some Fragments in the Hieroglyphic Satrap Stela
The article considers a serious problem in the research of major Egyptian hieroglyphic sources dating to the Greco-Roman period (priestly decrees, historical inscriptions): many of them were discovered still in the heroic period of the Egyptology, before the late 19th century, and their first publications were rather signal and were not accompanied by comprehensive research. Thus, a number of interpretations (hieroglyphic writings, lexical meanings of words and syntactic connections between them, etc.) were not initially given a full motivation, though they were accepted by scholarship and did not cause further doubts. The article considers two fragments of the Satrap Stela, the hieroglyphic text originating from Buto and preserved now at the Cairo Museum (No. 22182), which describes the deeds of Egypt’s actual ruler at the time, the Satrap Ptolemy (in particularly it registers the guarantees on the estate “Land-of-Uto” to the temples of Buto). A detailed analysis of the semantics and the syntax in the passage allows reconstructing the initial perception of the fragments by their earlier scholars that founded a number of standard translations of these pieces. The analysis given in the article brought to confirm some established interpretations of the writings, lexica and syntax in lines 8-9 and 10-11 of the text (xntan s(w) xft(y) #SryS “before the adversary #SryS turned it away”; HAtynTrwxpr(w) Hr-sA “the foremost of gods (that) came into existence afterwards”; the absence of a passive construction of the verb wdiin line 11); the article shows contradictions within a recent reinterpretation of these passages by Dr. Alexander Safronov. The conclusion of the article is that any serious correction to an established interpretation of this and other Egyptian texts should take a good account of earlier experience in their research.