Richard A. Parker

The Durative Tenses in P. Rylands IX

the same verb in the infinitive, imperative or sdm.f, takes its object directly. This has been interpreted as the sporadic beginnings of a construction (the indirect object) which only in the Roman period attained wide use, though not to the extent which Coptic exhibits.2 The rules for the latter were first formulated by P. Jernstedt.3 They are that in the tenses called durative, that is the First and Second Present, the Imperfect, the Circumstantial, and the Present Relative, the infinitive never uses a pronominal form, and any definite object or personal pronoun or noun with the indefinite article must be introduced by ii/Z or .iVtoafter the absolute infinitive. Nouns without article, indefinite and interrogative pronouns are preceded by the construct infinitive. When reading Rylands IX in class recently it occurred to me that it might be instructive to examine all instances of the

The Orthography of Article Plus Prothetic r in Demotic

IT is a commonly held tenet of Demotic grammar that when the participle r-wnw or a relative form with prothetic r is preceded by an article, a demonstrative, or a copula, the prothetic r is not written.1 I believe this to be consistently true only in the case of theophoric personal names of the type P?-(r)-di-N. There are rare exceptions, but in the vast majority of other cases I suggest that the combination of a definite article and prothetic r is shown in writing by a form identical with that of the copula.2 That this is also true of a demonstrative and prothetic r is probable, but for reasons we shall look into later, uncertain. The proof of my thesis depends upon texts which clearly differentiate in writing between article, demonstrative, and copula. Happily this is true of Pap. Rylands 9 (sixth century B.C.) which is thus in all respects eminently suitable for initiating our investigation.3 The forms are those of table 1.

The Beginning of the Lunar Month in Ancient Egypt

IN 1950 as part of a study of Egyptian calendars I marshaled all the evidence which seemed to me to bear upon the beginning of the lunar month in Egypt-the beginning of the day, the names of the days of the lunar month and their astronomical basis, the lunar calendar of Pap. Carlsberg 9, and the double dates (lunar month days in the civil calendar) of the Graeco-Roman period.1 The conclusion to which I was inevitably led by the complete harmony of the evidence was that the lunar month began on the morning when the old crescent could no longer be seen just before sunrise. The application of this rule to various known lunar dates throughout Egyptian history, from the Twelfth Dynasty to the Ptolemies, has resulted in several significant results for chronology. Recently, however, in an article in the pages of this Journal, John G. Read, as the byproduct of an attempt to improve the chronology of the Eighteenth Dynasty, made this sweeping statement: