ood; this is bad;' repeat not to me your
opinion. Come, I will tell thee all that lies before thee at the end of
thy journey.
"I begin for thee with the palace of Sesetsu (Sesostris). Hast thou not
set foot in it by force? Hast thou not eaten the fish in the brook ...?
Hast thou not washed thyself in it? With thy permission I will remind
thee of Huzana; where is its fortress? Come, I pray thee, to the palace
of the land of Uazit, even of Osymandyas (Ramses II.) in his victories,
[to] Saez-el, together with Absaqbu. I will inform thee of the land of
'Ainin (the two Springs), the customs of which thou knowest not. The
land of the lake of Nakhai, and the land of Rehoburta thou hast not seen
since thou wast born, O Mohar. Rapih is widely extended. What is its
wall like? It extends for a mile in the direction of Gaza."
The French words introduced from time to time by Dr. Brugsch into the
translation represent the Semitic words which the Egyptian writer has
employed. They illustrate the fashionable tendency of his day to fill
the Egyptian vocabulary with the words and phrases of Canaan. It was the
revenge taken by Palestine for its invasion and conquest by the armies
of Seti and Ramses. Thus _armee_ corresponds to the Semitic _tsaba_,
"army," _jeunesse_ to _na'aruna_, "young men." The Egyptian scribe,
however, sometimes made mistakes similar to those which modern novelists
are apt to commit in their French quotations. Instead of writing, as he
intended, _'ebed gamal Mohar na'amu_ ("a camel's slave is the Mohar!
they say"), he has assigned the Canaanite vowel _ayin_ to the wrong
word, and mis-spelt the name of the "camel," so that the phrase is
transformed into _abad kamal Mohar n'amu_ ("the camel of the Mohar has
perished, they are pleasant"). (It is curious that a similar mistake in
regard to the spelling of _'ebed_, "_slave_" or "_servant_" has been
made in an Aramaic inscription which I have discovered on the rocks near
Silsileh in Upper Egypt, where the name of Ebed-Nebo is written
Abed-Nebo.)
Most of the geographical names mentioned in the papyrus can be
identified. Aupa, the Ubi of the Tel el-Amarna tablets, was on the
borders of the land of the Hittites, and not far from Aleppo. The Zar or
"Plain" of Sesostris makes its appearance in the lists of conquered
towns and countries which were drawn up by Thothmes III., Seti I.,
Ramses II., and Ramses III., in order to commemorate their victories in
Syria. The word prob
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