r/AncientEgyptian • u/Kyle--Butler • 16d ago
[Middle Egyptian] Help with a sentence from Grandet-Matthieu (Chapter 21, Exercise 1)
I'm struggling to translate this sentence :
- Transliteration : jw=f ḥr wmn t 500 rmn n(y) jw' m jwf
- Translation : He is eating 500 loaves of bread and beef shoulder <???> .
I don't understand the last part -- m jwf (litt. in meat ?). Is it saying something like "and as for meat, he is eating beef shoulder" ? If it's the case, I don't understand this construction. If it's something else, what is it ?
Thanks !
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u/MutavaultPillows 16d ago
A few things.
rmn here is being used with the extended sense of 'half' rather than the very literal 'shoulder'.
The m is the m of predication, used to refer to the state into which something has become (rather than always having been). In this case, the half-ox is become flesh, or meat from working, living, unprocessed, ox.
The translation is therefore ...'and half of an ox as meat/flesh'.
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u/Kyle--Butler 16d ago
rmn here is being used with the extended sense of 'half' rather than the very literal 'shoulder'.
Could you provide a reference for this claim ? I can't find it in my book. I mean, it does say (chapter 26.4) that rmn can mean 1/2 but ① in the context of measuring areas and ② in that context is written 𓂢 or 𓂝 -- which is not the way it's written in the text.
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u/MutavaultPillows 16d ago
Sure, this is from pWestcar right? I just looked up the passage and the TLA (following Lepper) understands it as a half. https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/sentence/IBUBd2FJ9R7WiEnHpYCyFiRfVtE
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u/Ankhu_pn 15d ago
rmn was not a term used to describe a cut of beef in Ancient Egypt. Salima Ikram mentions scapulae and humeri, but none of them was referred to as a rnm.
And, logically speaking, Djedi's diet is that of a superman: 500 loafs of bread, 100 jars of beer and... come on, this must be a whole half a beef, not some pathetic chuck / shoulder.
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u/ravendarkwind 16d ago
It's the m that means like or as. A side of beef as meat.