Chapter 110

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And here too I would instead of ⁂⁂ read ⁂⁂, and the sense of the passage would be “let not reverse of mine come to pass through Sutu, when his time cometh.”

34. _Cares_, ⁂⁂ in the later texts. The older texts differ greatly from each other: ⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂ is the most frequent reading.

35. _The Ass and the Cat in the house of Hept-ro._ The two personages who take part in this dialogue are known from other portions of the Book of the Dead. The Cat is Rā in the 17th chapter. And the Ass appears in the 40th chapter, as the victim of the devouring Serpent. The Sun-god overcome by darkness is Osiris; and he is so called by name in the Demotic version of this chapter.

_Hepṭ-ro_, ⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂, ‘god of the gaping mouth.’ The word ⁂⁂⁂ is not found elsewhere, but the meaning of it seems to be indicated by the determinative. It is very probably akin to the more common ⁂⁂⁂, ⁂⁂, which does not mean ‘squat’ or ‘sit,’ but ‘stretch out,’ _distendi_. _Cf._ Note 6, Chapter 63B.

The ‘house of the god of the gaping mouth,’ seems to be the _Earth_, considered as the universal tomb (ἀλλ’ αὐτοῦ γαῖα μέλαινα πᾶσι χάνοι, Il. 14, 417). And here Osiris and Rā (the Ass and the Cat) meet daily, ‘Yesterday’ speaketh to ‘To-day.’

יוס ליוס יביע אמר

36. _Verdict_, ⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂, ⁂⁂⁂⁂, ⁂⁂⁂⁂, ⁂⁂⁂⁂.

A note of M. Guyesse in the _Recueil_, X, p. 64, contains references to the chief passages in which this word occurs. I will add a very important one, the picture of a god (Lefébure, _Tombeau de Seti_, p. III, pl. 33) with sword in hand, whose name is this word. The ideographic signs which express it imply (1) ‘a _cutting_ in two,

## parting, division,’ (2) that the act is one of speech or intellect, such

as ‘judgment, decision, verdict.’ The phonetic equivalence of the signs ⁂ and ⁂ or ⁂ show that the value is that of _Seb_.

37. _Covereth._ The right Egyptian word here, as in a similar passage in

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