What is this word?

[Alan Bunning]

Here is part of a transcription of an ostracon I am going to add to my collation. Lines 7-8 contain a version of Luke 2:14. What do you make of the words εκιστησ and ανθρ.γιν?

tait.jpg (16.16 KiB) Viewed 2970 times

[Stephen Hughes]

οἱ ἄγγελοι ἐπὶ γῆς χορεύουσιν.

"Angels are dancing upon the earth". That sounds like some some 20th century NT Greek primers.

[cwconrad]

οἱ ἄγγελοι ἐπὶ γῆς χορεύουσιν.

"Angels are dancing upon the earth". That sounds like some some 20th century NT Greek primers.

I think that happened at Wrigley Field in Chicago last night.

[Stephen Hughes]

@Alan Could you post a picture of the shard. The "words" might make more sense then.

[Alan Bunning]

@Alan Could you post a picture of the shard. The "words" might make more sense then.

I don't have access to an image of it. The transcript is all I have in this case.

[Stephen Hughes]

The "words" might make more sense then.

The transcript is all I have in this case.

I can't find an image either. The closest I come is the Trismegistos citation.

I used the inverted commas, because, I don't think Tait intended a reader to take ανθρ.γιν as parts of a single word. The snipit you have posted seems professionally typeset with proportional spacing. To my eye, the space in the line containing the γιν could have contained the ανθρ. too, with a little adjustment during the typesetting. P. M. Head presents this ostracon near the end of his section on ostraca containing New Testament texts (pages 433 - 438), among some other hymns, liturgical and magical texts. By not writing the γιν, he evidently reads ανθρ. and γιν as separate words too:

A hymn to the Virgin Mary contains a quotation from Luke 2:14 in lines 7–8: τοξα εν εκιστη θ[εω γ]ης ειρηνης εν ανθρ.³⁶
_____________________
³⁶Cambridge, UL, Ostraca inv. 118 (vH 832; LDAB 5902). Tait, Greek Ostraca, 171.

[Stephen Hughes]

οἱ ἄγγελοι ἐπὶ γῆς χορεύουσιν.

"Angels are dancing upon the earth". That sounds like some some 20th century NT Greek primers.

I think that happened at Wrigley Field in Chicago last night.

Was it a home team win?

[Stephen Hughes]

τοξα εν εκιστης θεω γης ειρηνης εν ανθρ.

Alan, about τοξα. Does your automatic parsing (lemmatising) routine interpret this τοξα to mean, "Arrows (are flying) torturously to the god (or to the tortured god) of the peaceful earth inside a person."? Dada sixteen centuries too early.

[Alan Bunning]

The "words" might make more sense then.

The transcript is all I have in this case.

I can't find an image either. The closest I come is the Trismegistos citation.

I used the inverted commas, because, I don't think Tait intended a reader to take ανθρ.γιν as parts of a single word. The snipit you have posted seems professionally typeset with proportional spacing. To my eye, the space in the line containing the γιν could have contained the ανθρ. too, with a little adjustment during the typesetting. P. M. Head presents this ostracon near the end of his section on ostraca containing New Testament texts (pages 433 - 438), among some other hymns, liturgical and magical texts. By not writing the γιν, he evidently reads ανθρ. and γιν as separate words too:

A hymn to the Virgin Mary contains a quotation from Luke 2:14 in lines 7–8: τοξα εν εκιστη θ[εω γ]ης ειρηνης εν ανθρ.³⁶
_____________________
³⁶Cambridge, UL, Ostraca inv. 118 (vH 832; LDAB 5902). Tait, Greek Ostraca, 171.

In that case, what would γιν mean?

[Alan Bunning]

τοξα εν εκιστης θεω γης ειρηνης εν ανθρ.

Alan, about τοξα. Does your automatic parsing (lemmatising) routine interpret this τοξα to mean, "Arrows (are flying) torturously to the god (or to the tortured god) of the peaceful earth inside a person."? Dada sixteen centuries too early.

Treating it as a spelling error of δοξα.