Monday, July 19, 2004

Online paper alert Dave Smith has posted a paper on "Blindness" in Ancient Egypt - A New Interpretation of Some New Kingdom Texts

It's PDF but here is a short abstract provided by the author on a mailing list:

This paper discusses a class of inscriptions appearing on a number
of artefacts traditionally interpreted by researchers as referring to
blindness. I am proposing an alternative hypothesis, namely that these
record the witnessing of total solar eclipses. In the paper I show
that this hypothesis is not inconsistent with the dating evidence.

The paper may therefore be of interest both to those studying absolute
chronology and also those who have an interest in religion and personal
piety in Ancient Egypt.


This is largely outside of our area of expertise, so we'll leave to our intrepid readers to read and comment on it.