Hello and two questions

[Josep Cervello Autuori]

Dear Kathryn, dear Alain and dear all,

It’s a pleasure to meet all of you in this Google group website. I have just read all the abstracts and the subjects seem very interesting to me.

May I open the discussion with two initial questions?

The first one is addressed to John Darnell. You say: “The use of rock art in Upper Egypt (…) appears to have led to the increasing “symbolic” nature of Upper Egyptian cultures, a necessary precursor, if not direct antecedent, to the development of true writing in Egypt”. And you speak also about “The later developments of some of the [rock art] motifs into pharaonic iconographic elements...”. Can we state that the “pictorial aspect” of at least some of the Egyptian pictograms has its precedent in the desert rock art? Following Frankfort and Leclant, I maintain that Egyptian civilization shares a basic “cultural substratum” with other Saharan and Nilotic protohistoric civilizations, which is visible, for example, in the figurative universe. I deal with this matter in my book Egipto y África. Origen de la civilización y la monarquía faraónicas en su contexto africano (Sabadell, 1996) and in some papers, among which is a communication to the VIII International Congress of Egyptologists held in Cambridge in 1995. In these works I compare some Saharan and Upper Egyptian rock art motifs with pharaonic art motifs including some hieroglyphic signs (only from a “plastic” point of view!) (I will try to attach to this message some comparative figures). As you, I think that this comparison is very significant in order to understand the “symbolic” nature of Upper Egyptian cultures. What do you think about?

The second question is addressed to Elise MacArthur. You say “I conclude that (…) slightly later epigraphic material appears to demonstrate the first uses of modified verb forms”. Can you advance to us an example of such a use...?

Best wishes,

Josep