SOME NOTES ON THE NAME OF SARAPIS

GERARD MUSSIES (Utrecht)

"In fact, Hellanicus seems to have heard pronounced YCIPIC by the priests, for in this way he always mentions the god ..." says .! Is it too bold to conclude from this one­ word quotation, like a casual sherd embedded in foreign soil, that Hellanicus of Lesbos pronounced the ypsilon as in "book" ? It might almost seem that here we have definite proof of what has hitherto been considered only probable,2 for when the Egyptians themselves replaced their unvocalized writing systems by the Greek alphabet, when "Egyptian" in other words becomes" Coptic", they spelt the name of ' brother-husband, according to their dialect, either as OYCI pi (Lower Egypt) or as 0YCI pe (). However, the initial vowel must have been pronounced so much like a closed o-sound that two spellings became possible in Greek: the god's name was regularly written 'OO'~p~c;, but on the other hand P(r)­ Wsirj or "House of Osiris", the name of several Egyptian towns, always appears as BouO'~p~c;, just as in Coptic: BOYCI pi or TTOYCIPI, which has been preserved to this day in the modern names AbU$tr -Malaq and AbU .?tr Banii.3 In personal names derived from Osiris the spelling with -0- is also predominant, as for instance in the very frequent name rre:'t"OO'~p~c; "The one given by Osiris". But -ou- does occur, e.g. rrll(-rouO'~p~c;, a variant form of the same name, 'P'e:vouO'~p~c; "The son of Osiris", and Te:vouO'~p~c; "The daughter of Osiris". A similar uncertainty may be seen in trans-

1 De Is. et Os. 364d, ed. F. C. Barbitt, Loeb Classical Library, vol. V (1962), p. 83 and 85. 2 According to C. D. Buck, The Greek Dialects (Chicago, 1955), p. 28 this pronunciation is probable for most of the ancient dialects of Greek except Attic. Cf. E. Schwyzer, Griechische Grammatik, vol. I (Miinchen, 19684), vol. I, p. 181. 3 The Assyrian transcription Pusiru is ambiguous since "u" can also stand for "0"; d. H. Ranke, Keilschriftliches Material zur altiigyptischen Vokalisation, in AbhBerlin (1910), p. 49.

53 822 GERARD MUSSIES literations of the well-known compounds of the name of Osiris with that of a deceased person or sacred animal, which indicated their deification, but can according to context also be rendered more profanely by "the late X". So we have 'OcropO!lV€UL~, "Osiris of " or "deceased Mnevis-bull"; 'O(J0p~OUX.L~ (as part of the personal name Ih't'ocrop~oux.L~), "Osiris of "; and so likewise 'Ocropiim~, "Osiris of "; but also OucrOpOU~PL~, "Osiris the Great", alongside 'OcrOpO~pL~. For "House of Osorapis" one would perhaps expect Boucropiim~ on the analogy of BOUcrLPL~, but in the only passage where it occurs it so happens that we have IIo(J€piim.' When "Osorapis" in its turn becomes an element of compound personal names we may also find -ucropiim~ or -u(J(xpiim~, for instance in TlXucropiim~ and TlXucrlXpiim~ beside TlXocr€piim~ and even TlXcropii­ m~. Following a vowel these forms could have arisen either from TlXocropiim~ or from TlXoucropiim~, though we have not yet found the latter, and mutatis mutandis the same would be true of -U(JLPL~ in IIlXucrLpL~ and T o(UcrLPL~ "The one (masc. or fern.) of Osiris". We believe that these cases are different from vocalizations such as II€'t'ucr[pLo~ "The one given by Osiris" (IVth cent.), 'Y€VUPLO~ "The son of " (VIIIth cent.), 'Y€VIX't'U!lL~ "The son of " (A.D. I92). According to Hess 5 and implicitly Ranke 6 these variants would indicate that the ypsilon was still pronounced more or less as in "book" in Imperial Egypt, but in view of what is known about the phonetic development of this sound such a pronunciation does not seem very likely, though it would have been possible for such early transcriptions as YCIPIC above and, for instance, A'~yU7t't'o~ in Homer, which can be compared with the Middle-babylonian transcription Jjikuptal].. 7 Since in the Imperial period ypsilon had two rather different phonetic correlates, [yJ as in French "tu" with a tendency towards [i:J on the one hand, and [wJ with a tendency towards [v] on the other, it seems more logical to assume that in such names as II€'t'ucr[pLO~ we have a sound mor8

4 UPZ I, nr. I, 7 (SB 51°3). 6 J. J. Hess, Zur Aussprache des Griechischen, I. F. VI (1896), p. 123ss., especially p. 134 n. I. 6 Ranke, op. cit., p. 73-74 and p. 74 n. I. 7 Ranke, op. cit., p. 56.