A "MOSES" INSCRIPTION

Shannon News, 15 January 1926, Page 1

A "MOSES" INSCRIPTION

ARCHAEOLOGICAL COMEDY. It •.■would seem tiiat scholars can still make mistakes in the interpretation of ancient inscriptions which recall the story of 'Bill Stumps His Mark,' in the 'Pickwick Papers.' An inscription which was discovered in Sinai by Sir Flinders Petrie hi 1904 furnishes an apparent lnr stance. The record differed entirely from other inscriptions found there, and it was not even certain what was the language in which it was writWn, though, as it was '• known that there were a number of SemitiG tribes iii the peninsula at the period to which the inscription belonged, it" was conjectured that it was Semitic. Dr. Grimme, professor of Semitic languages at the University of Munich, who has been working at the inscription for some time on the asFiimption that th<*» language is Semitic, by comparing the old Phoenician characters, claims to have deciphered it and to have arrived at its meaning, which, he .says, is that Moses, here called Manasseh, captain over ■the Stone Workers and the Chief of (he Temple, thanks Hatshepsut, the. daughter of Pharaoh,.,for having pulled him out of the Nile. That, indeed, would be a sensalional discovery if it could bo substantiated. Sir Flinders Petrie has .no'doubt, however, that Dr. Grimme has, arrived at' his conclusion by the ingenuous process of mistaking certain weather cracks and similar marks ?hc-wn in photographs of the inscription for' characters in the unknown script, and iiion interpreting them.. In ; a letter to the 'Observer' he writes; "More than twenty years ago I found in Sinai, at the Egyptian temple of the goddess Hathor, some rough inscriptions which differed widely from the many records left there by the Egyptians. These inscriptions seemed, "and still seem, to me to fce -the product of the local tribes employed there, using the general body of signs which were common around the Mediterranean for writing, and which' are the basis of all the modern alphabets. Naturally, some Egyptian signs were also brought into use. . "Several attempts'have been'made to, read these brief. inscriptions, and some of the words may have been j understood, such us the name of the Semitic goddess Tanit. Unfortunately Dr. Grimme, not content- with th? published copies, has been 1 transcribing the flaking and weathering of the slones, seen in photographs, as being additional signs. Thus he has produced inscriptions which he has interpreted in a most sensational way All his results were set "out in a booh which he published two years ago and which was,, known in England, though a. page shictly prohibited its being sold to anyone out or Germany' "The transcriptions and translation have not been accepted by any scholar, so far as is knokn; now that this stale production is being exploited i\ Is time to repeat a published compari son of the facts and the theory. - "To take the most important key the asserted name of an Egyptian cmeen, in Fig. 1, is all that was observed in copying the stone; in Fig 2 is all that could be credited,from Dr. Grimm e's photograph, a few ai.clitional strokes; in Fig. 3 is what Dr. Grimme has added from naturally weathered cracks and breaks, moro than doubling the number of the known signs; in Fig. 4 are the signs really important for the asserted name. Yet in Fig. 5 are the forms of the same signs claimed by Dr. elsewhere, very different in one sign. In Fig. 6 are the Hebrew eqtiivalents | claimed for those signs. v Only three - signs out of the seven are really to I be credited, and the values of those are really not proved. "These are the various loose links in this chain, which will not carry its own weight, to say nothing of the heavy historical theories which the supposed to depend from it." Dr. Alan H. Gardiner, who first studied the inscriptions found by Sir I Flinders Petrie in Syria, writes: ! "And now comes Professor Grimme and reads whole sentences out of i these f-adly-battered inscriptions. Not J only this, but has been unable to I s resist the lure of such well-known j Biblical and historical names as Moses I and Hatshepsut. In order to arrivi I at these he is obliged to correct the j hand-copies made by Sir Flinders • Petrie*s expedition. -' and uses the very precarious help of enlarged i photographs for the purpose. I do not hesitate to state that he sees in . the photographs a great deal that is ' not there; and, reluctant as I am to | speak disparagingly of work that has i evidently cost its atithor much labour, I I do not hesitate to qualify his results as both fantastic and imposI sible." <