Talk:Graffito of Esmet-Akhom

Esmet-Akhom vs. Nesmeterakhem

The article text seems to mostly use "Nesmeterakhem" to transcribe the name of the man who created the graffito, yet the title uses "Esmet-Akhom". The latter name seems to originate with Francis Llewellyn Griffith's rendition of the name in his catalogue of Demotic graffiti in this region in 1937, while Richard Parkinson favors "Nesmeterakhem". I'm not sure which spelling is more common in the sources, but it seems like the article should use one or the other, rather than using one in the title and the other in the article body.

(Tangent: Apparently there's disagreement among Egyptologists over how the first portion of the name should be read. Other members of the same priestly family have the same consonants at the beginnings of their names, and Dijkstra and Cruz-Uribe transliterate those consonants as ꜥIst-mt and transcribe them as "Smet", presumably corresponding to Griffith's "Esmet". Mark Smith says in Following Osiris, p. 457, that the letters should be rendered Ns-mt. If Parkinson reads those letters the same way Smith does, that would explain why he calls the priest in this inscription "Nesmeterakhem", but for some reason, Smith, who never refers to Esmet-Akhom/Nesmeterakhem by name, still transcribes the other priests' names as "Smet".) A. Parrot (talk) 03:03, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

@A. Parrot: I don't think this is a huge problem since it's immediately made clear that Nesmeterakhem and Esmet-Akhom are the same person. I used Nesmeterakhem consistently since Parkinson uses that name and Parkinson's translation is quoted (did not feel comfortable changing a direct quote). In regards to the article title, Graffito of Esmet-Akhom is the WP:COMMONNAME since I can't find a single use of the term Graffito of Nesmeterakhem anywhere (though I question if "Graffito of Esmet-Akhom" was in widespread use before the creation of this article).

There are actually four different translations: Nesmeterakhem, Esmet-Akhom, Smet-Akhom and Esmet the elder. For a survey of sources used in this article:

• Frankfurter (1998), Brier (2013) and Leal (2014) use Esmet-Akhom, though at least in the case of Leal this is in the context of mentioning the "Graffito of Esmet-Akhom" (in connection to the inscription and not necessarily the writer).
• Parkinson (1999) uses Nesmeterakhem
• Darnell (2004) does not mention the writer's name but transliterates the name of his father to Ns-mtr-Pa-n-ht.w-twt which to me suggests favoring Nesmeterakhem.
• Dijkstra (2008), Cruz-Uribe (2010) and Cruz-Uribe (2016) do not mention the writer by name. Dijkstra & Fokke (2005) leads me to believe that they would actually favor Smet-Akhom, not Esmet-Akhom. As you mention, Smith (2017), despite transliterating Ns-mtr, uses "Smet", which I think places him in this basket as well.
• Ritner (1998) calls him Esmet the elder
• Hoffmann (2012) and Minas-Nerpel (2012) do not mention the name of the writer.

I favor Nesmeterakhem consistently through the article since it's used in the given translation and seems more faithful to "Ns-mtr" than Smet. If we look at sources not used in the article, "Nesmeterakhem" seems to be favored over "Esmet-Akhom" in recent sources: it is used by Babcock (2005), Van De Mieroop (2011) and Nyland (2016), as well as in this 2004 work. To me it thus seems that "Graffito of Esmet-Akhom" is the WP:COMMONNAME of the inscription, but few recent scholars seem to favor "Esmet-Akhom" as the name of the writer, with a larger number actually preferring "Nesmeterakhem". Ichthyovenator (talk) 09:02, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

The problem is that I'm not convinced the inscription has a "common name" for Wikipedia purposes. Do any of these sources actually call the graffito by this name while calling its author Nesmeterakhem? It seems to me that sources that use the phrase "graffito of Esmet-Akhom" do so descriptively, i.e., "the graffito written by Esmet-Akhom". They don't treat it as a proper name independent of the name of the graffito's author. A. Parrot (talk) 15:26, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

Yes, as I said I question whether the term "Graffito of Esmet-Akhom" existed before this Wikipedia article was created. All uses of this specific term that I can find online (twitter, reddit, flickr etc.) postdate the Wikipedia article's creation. The only source of the ones mentioned above that explicitly calls it "Graffito of Esmet-Akhom" (capitalized in this way) is Leal (2014), which postdates the creation of this article by seven years. Sources tend to either use the academic designation (Philae 436 of GPH 436), or more commonly a vague description (IIRC stuff like "the late inscriptions at Philae", "the 394 inscriptions", "the inscription at Hadrian's gate", "Esmet-Akhom/Nesmeterakhem's inscription/graffito" etc.). Do you think it would be fine to move this to Graffito of Nesmeterakhem? Ichthyovenator (talk) 16:47, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

I'm really not sure how to handle it. I'd like to ask for the opinion of somebody more knowledgeable about naming conventions and possible OR problems than I am, but I don't know where to look. A. Parrot (talk) 17:47, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

I've asked over at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ancient Egypt so we'll have to see if anyone is interested in weighing in. Ichthyovenator (talk) 23:39, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

These two Google Books searches: [1] and [2], suggest that "Esmet-Akhom" is more common than "Nesmeterakhem". Paul August ☎ 19:26, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Not all of the books that come up for "Esmet-Akhom" qualify as WP:RS though - I see some conspiracy theory books, some fiction books and some children's books. If the name is changed in the text to consistently be Esmet-Akhom, I think we'd still need to use "Nesmeterakhem" in the translation itself since that is a direct quote from Parkinson (1999) which I think would be even more confusing. I could be wrong about that though. Ichthyovenator (talk) 08:56, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

I left a question about the title at Wikipedia talk:Article titles#Where to ask when the common name is difficult to determine, and there Colin M suggested that "WP:NDESC would be the relevant route to follow" if there is no true common name. A. Parrot (talk) 14:13, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

@A. Parrot: If I understand the policy correctly that would be to go with an article title that does not use either translation of the name, right? The article could be titled Philae 436 since that's the academic designation but it's a bit boring. Graffito at Philae or Graffito at Hadrian's Gate at Philae might be problematic since there are several other inscriptions at the site. Perhaps something like Mandulis graffito at Philae or Mandulis inscription at Philae could work? I don't think those could be misinterpreted as referring to anything else. Ichthyovenator (talk) 22:21, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

@A. Parrot: @Ichthyovenator: Regarding the different ways to represent the name of the man who wrote this inscription, Nesmeterakhem is the Egyptological pronunciation of the etymological components of the name and Esmet-Akhom and Smet-Akhom are ad hoc attempts to approximate its pronunciation. It should be noted that there is now a standard for representing Demotic names used in academic literature and databases like Trismegistos and the Demotic Palaeographical Database Project. Namely, the Greek conventions for transcribing Egyptian names are used. Here is an example from the DPDP:

Ns-mtr ꜥꜣ sy n Pꜣ-ꜥẖm pꜣ ḥm-nṯr tp n ꜣs.t rn n mw.ṱ⸗f Tꜣ-šrỉ.t-n-S.t-mḏ (tꜣ-šr.t-ns-mtr) tꜣ šr.t n wꜥb ꜥꜣ n ꜣs.t

Esmētis the Elder, son of Pachoumis, the first prophet of Isis, the name of his mother is Senzmētis, the daughter of a great priest of Isis.

There are no surviving Greek transcriptions of the name ns-mtr-ꜥẖm, but one could be created according to these rules. ns-mtr as an initial or medial element in a name is transcribed as zment, for example ns-mtr-pꜣ-ꜥꜣ = Zmentpōs (Ζμεντπως) and ꜥẖm as a final element is transcribed as achoumis, for example: pꜣ-ꜥẖm = Pachoumis (Παχουμις). So ns-mtr-ꜥẖm would be Zmentachoumis (Ζμεντ+αχουμις). Perhaps Wikipedia should consider adopting standards along these lines for representing Demotic names. Rhemmiel (talk) 06:32, 8 October 2022 (UTC)