going into the light of the day

This is trippy.

All of the people are so kind and formal. A woman who is not in any of the Yahoo translating groups popped in to ask questions and advice related to language translation. She said the copy of the scrolls in Ani's tomb, now chopped up and displayed in the British Museum, are all translated nicely but there is nothing about what ties them together. They're in different styles of speaking. She's writing an essay and hoping to discover an Ariandne's thread (I looked that up) that may be used as a tool.

Then the rudest guy shows up. Antagonistic in his first sentence. "Since you respect so much the texts as the ancient Egyptian people, I suggest that you consider 'prt m hrw' as meaning 'prt m imnt'."

That's go to the light" and "go to the west."

"You keep using the age old translation, 'Coming forth by day' which is entirely meaningless."

His email is disjointed. Copy/pasted from different sources. It's jolting. And in different fonts. He continues being offensive, "This is a language-oriented group, all right, but the entire Egyptology is but language-oriented.

They play around with grammar but they are unable to understand the ancient writer."

He makes very good points. They're cogent. He insists The book of the dead is derived from oral tradition. So what we see written by living people for living people did not make sense even to them. The oral traditions were ancient to the ancients. They didn't understand the phrases. The forms change in the various copies brought down to us.

He concludes his unfriendly challenging remarks, "Have you ever tried to understand the judgment mentioned in the “Merikare” text?

Your Jungian excuses cannot apply to a non-religious, non-philosophical text."

He provides a pdf file of his own work. It's a mess. He really needs an editor worse than I do. But trying to follow the positions he's taking, testily against other scholars, I kept thinking, man, this is great!

I found his PDF online. Here, look at it. Is that a beautiful mess, or what?

I have a copy of the papyrus of Ani and to my dismay it's written in hieratic, not hieroglyphics, and that short-cut handwriting is all Greek to me. The spells are confusing as heck. But Dimitrios' discussion is all in hieroglyphics and for the first time I can see portions in authentic hieroglyphs and it all becomes clear. I can see firsthand they do not write, "Going forth by day" rather, they write, "going to day."

And the variations say, "going to west."

Going to day

prt              m          hrw 

Going to west

prt              m          imnt 

Not from a tomb. Not from a cave, Not from the underworld, rather, from a boat. It's a man and his ba (portion of soul) going from a boat to the west, into the sunset, to join the purified ones.

And all these interpretations by top Egyptologists from various countries in various languages over various ages, that Dimitrios brings together in c/p when compared reach separate conclusions. They all add quite a lot of their own spin. Like turning American sign language into English each interpreter will provide their own English.  Dimitrios sticks with what he sees at hand for an idiosyncratic interpretation different from published scholars. And I like that a lot. Strange as it is, I really appreciate his presentation and his unique view of the various lines of text. And all that just shows you that some really super smart people have terrible personalities.

I can deal with that.

I'm going to study the rest of his papers  He is interesting. He's already changed my views significantly with this one paper. He has other papers where this pdf came from.

And right at the start Dimitrios caused me to think all the way through based on his initial challenge, his reinterpretation, and his examples that show the word "day" and the word "west" but do not show the word "light,"  hey, we have a very similar saying for someone who's dying. Similar advice from the living. It's almost a joke based on what people who've experienced death and returned related to us, "Go into the light, Sam, go into the light."