Imhotep, the vizier and physician of King Zoser and afterwards the Egyptain god of medicine / by Jamieson B. Hurry.

Jamieson Boyd Hurry

Date:: 1926

Credit: Imhotep, the vizier and physician of King Zoser and afterwards the Egyptain god of medicine / by Jamieson B. Hurry. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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$faction \ The translation ‘ he who comes in peace ’ is the generally accepted one, although may be either the participle ‘ He who comes ’ or the imperative Come ’. The em or m can be either the preposition ‘ in ’ or a particle meaning ‘ as ’ or ‘in guise of’. The name therefore means either ‘ one who comes in peace ’ or ‘ a comer in peace h1 Variants in the Spelling of Imhotep The Egyptian hieroglyphs, like most of the Semitic scripts, do not indicate vowels, nor indeed do they always accurately represent the consonantal skeleton. For these reasons there is no certainty how words were actually sounded, and a multiform transliteration, largely based on conjecture, has resulted. The following list of variants, which does not profess to be complete, will suffice to indicate the existing confusion and the urgency of some international agreement on the subject.2 Aiemapt S. Birch, Egypt from the Earliest Times to 300 b.c., p. 29. Aiemhetp Wilkinson, Ancient Egyptians, 1878, iii, p. 204. 1 Names beginning with /j are not uncommon in the Old and Middle Kingdoms, e. g. I] I-mery ‘ come, be¬ loved ’, J I-m-snb ‘ come in health \ 2 Variants in which only small differences occur, such as the use of either the simple ‘ h ’ or the guttural ‘ h ’, have not been included. Sethe discusses in detail the question of vocalization and accepts Imhotep as a satisfactory representa¬ tion (Sethe, Imhotep, p. 1). In the Catalogue of the Demotic Papyri in the John Rylands Library, iii, p. 437, F. LI. Griffith gives the ways in which ‘ Imhotep ’ was written in the time of Psammetik I, Ahmasi II, Darius, and the early and late Ptolemies.$