PJ 
 
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 THE EISENLOHR COLLECTION IN 
 EGYPTOLOGY AND ASSYRIOLOGY 
 
 PRESENTED TO CORNELI, UNIVERSITY BY 
 
 X902 
 
 ^.,./.A.S..Z.^..3. i^/..^/./.^..d.1L.. 
 
 3947 
 
ON 
 
 PROFESSOR ROSSI'S PUBLICATION OF 
 SOUTH-COPTIC TEXTS. 
 
 -7 
 I 
 
 ROBERT ATKINSON, LL.D. 
 
 A PAPER 
 Read before the KOYAL IKISH ACADEMY, May 8, 1X93; 
 
 and 
 Reprinted from the "PROOBKOiNOfi." 3rd Ser.. Vol. III.. No. 1. 
 
 [Fifty rnipien only reprinted by the Aendemy for the Author."] 
 
 DUBLIN : 
 
 PEINTED AT THE TJNIVEKSITY PKESS, 
 BY PONSONBY AND WELDRICE, 
 
 PRINTBKS TO THE ACADIiMV. 
 
 1893. 
 
A.iU^nifl^ 
 
ini\ 
 
 Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://archive.org/cletails/cu31924026909691 
 
[ 24 ] 
 
 III. 
 
 ON PROPESSOE ROSSI'S PUBLICATION OF SOUTH-COPTIC 
 TEXTS. By ROBERT ATKINSON, LL.D. 
 
 [Read May 8, 1893.] 
 
 It is admitted on all hands that the ancient versions of the LXX 
 are likely to be of great service in the reconstitution of the Greek 
 Biblical text, and therefore the publication of Coptic texts, properly 
 edited, is a most laudable employment, every scrap of new matter 
 being a possible aid. 
 
 But, obviously, if they are to be of real service, the texts must 
 be properly edited, and an accompanying version must have the merit 
 of being correct and faithful. 
 
 Professor Rossi has been, for some time past, engaged in pub- 
 lishing South-Coptic texts from the Egyptian Museum in Turin. 
 The first fasciculus was published in 1883, comprising the Gospel 
 of Nicodemus, and a sermon of Theophilos; and, since that period, 
 Prof. Rossi has exhibited very considerable activity in publishing the 
 succeeding fasciculi. 
 
 His transcriptions are industriously made, v/p to the extent of his 
 knowledge of South- Coptic ; but that knowledge is inadequate, and 
 has involved him in such a mass of errors, that I have thought it 
 desirable to direct the attention of Biblical students who may make 
 use of these texts of Prof. Rossi, to the sort of mistake which they 
 must be prepared to allow for, in any inferences they may be inclined 
 to make therefrom. 
 
 I wiU here give one example to illustrate the lengths to which 
 this sort of error can be carried — an example which will be more 
 instructive than any mere statement to the effect that strange 
 mistakes do occur. The passage is found in the fourth Fasciculus 
 of the first volume of these Texts, at p. [41 )8 11] : 
 
 ebolje kata petsSh Ma, secondo la sentenia di Crista 
 
 mn com Swpolia ehop che non si pud nasconderc una cittd 
 
 eske ehrai eja wtow posta sopra un monte, 
 
 wde meuje whebs ni una lampada 
 
 nsekaaf ha wsi' (sic) nel cuor delta notte. 
 
Atkinson— 0« Prof. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 25 
 
 Now, here the biblical student would naturally be struck with this 
 novel statement : " one cannot hide a city placed on a mountain, nor 
 a lamp in the heart of the night." This must be some unheard-of 
 "reading", of a wholly different text from that usually given, and 
 curiosity would naturally be aroused as to the new "text" thus 
 disclosed. 
 
 Let us then examine this text. The last two lines are not really 
 translated : Prof. Eossi did not understand them at all, so he guessed 
 at an explanation, just as he might have done with the fragment of a 
 sentence in demotic or hieratic characters of a barely legible writing, 
 and containing two or three unknown words. But what are the 
 facts ? He had plainly before him w si , which mean simply and 
 always "a bushel", and he ran these two words into one to make 
 wse, "night", after altering the word as shown by his "(sic)". 
 But even so, nothing was effected in the way of translation. He has 
 apparently rendered ha by "heart"; but ha means "under", and 
 thus we have, as the only conceivable rendering of ha w si , " under 
 a bushel". The previous word nsekaaf can mean nothing but 
 "ut ponant eum", and there remains only one word to correct, viz., 
 meuje , which should have been meujere , "they do not light" ; 
 and thus there emerges our old friend : — " men do not light a lamp 
 that they mayput it under a bushel", the utto tov /jloSwv of Matt. v. 15. 
 
 It was while reading Prof. Rossi's versions, with a view to a study 
 in Homilies, that I was frequently so astounded by "impossibilities", 
 that the conviction forced itself on me that these " versions" are not 
 of the slightest service for comparative purposes, because just where 
 one wants the precise meaning in order to make temporary inferences 
 or hypotheses, the vagueness or incorrectness of the rendering given 
 by Prof. Eossi deprives the investigator of all chance of success, and 
 reduces his Translation to the level of the myriad things that "had 
 better be done otherwise or not done at all." 
 
 I have, therefore, read seven Fasciculi of his Texts, and I do not 
 seek to hide the opinion which the perusal has produced on my mind, 
 that these Texts have been exceedingly unfortunate in finding an 
 editor whose views on Coptic grammar are so undecided, and whose 
 training in translation seems to have been too exclusively from the 
 little understood texts of Old Egyptian. 
 
 I. 
 I will begin with an examination of his edition — text and trans- 
 lation, — of the fragments of the Book of Proverbs. His translation 
 
26 Proceedings of the Eoyal Irish Academy. 
 
 occupies about ten and a-half pages quarto of Vol. II, Pascicnlus 2 
 (1889), and contains about 180 verses or parts of verses, so that it is 
 by no means a large portion of the text of Proverbs. 
 
 I shall here set down about thirty errors, of a character which 
 shows that Prof. Eossi has no proper familiarity with some of the 
 essential rules of Coptic grammar, in reference to nearly every part 
 of speech. The text, unfortunately, is not well preserved, so that he 
 has had to have recourse to conjecture, and conjecture is admittedly 
 a dangerous weapon. What makes the matter moiie unintelligible is, 
 that he had a published text to correct from, if he did not know the 
 proper emendation. And some of his conjectures are about the worst 
 conjectures that could have been made. 
 
 1. To begin at the beginning, the very first verse he has trans- 
 lated incorrectly : 
 
 pestortr de inn pmise Ma U disordine e la contemione 
 
 moose hetf inpecroh camminano colV indigenm. 
 
 This is to ignore the meaning of hetf, which certainly does not 
 mean "with," but "before," "in front of"; cf. Prov. xxiv. 66, 
 woie efsok hetf mpohe mbaampe, " a he-goat stalking before the 
 herd of goats," rpayos i\yov\).evo<i oxkoKIov, LXX. The LXX text 
 in our passage, (xvii. 14), shows of course that this was the meaning 
 intended, TrpoijyctTai §€ t^s evSeias. 
 
 The word is of common occurrence, and is met with in his own 
 " texts," cf. W 27 yS 23 ; 41 y 25, in neither of which is the passage 
 translated literally, so as to exhibit the precise meaning of the phrase. 
 
 2. The very next verse, the second of his text, contains another 
 mistake, for he: edits oonjeoturally, his conjecture being in brackets : 
 
 [w]ii bote lie mpesnau fa due cose abbmninevoli 
 
 iinahrm piiwte al rospetto di Dio. 
 
 Here, as ne is the copula, the suggestion of wn (which means there is) 
 is wrong. But the conjecture is further quite out of the range of 
 possibility by the laws of Coptic construction : for b o t e is the predicate 
 here, the meaning being "both are abominations", a construction 
 which demands henbote ne mpesnau, exactly as in his own text 
 XXX. 14, we have hensefe ne nobhe inpsere ethow, "the teeth of 
 the wicked son are swords", eKyovov kokot' /ia^at'pas tovs dSwras ^X^'- 
 In our passage, the LXX has aKaOapros kol fiSeXvKTos, which the 
 Copt has lumped together into his henbote. But Prof. Eossi's con- 
 jecture is quite out of the question, and is not Coptic at all. 
 
Atkinson— 0« Prof. Rossi's South-Ooptic Texts. 27 
 
 3. The third verse has a mistake of translation: for he renders 
 it "chi eleva alta la sua casa, va in cerca di dolore" ; the Coptic 
 word is wosf , which does not mean dolore, but " ruin", and is used 
 to express the LXX a-wrpi^-^v. The word is of constant occurrence, aa 
 the exact representative of crvvrpi^to, (rvvrpiix-ixa, &c., cf. Job, ix. 17 ; 
 xxix. 17; xxxi. 22; xxxviii. 11, 15; Prov. ix. 24; xx. 30; Eccl. 
 xii. 6; Isai. xiii. 6; xxviii. 12; Ezek, xxvii. 34; xxix. 17; in every 
 one of which it is used to translate this G-reek verb or its derivatives. 
 
 4. In the next chapter, xviii. 8, we come upon a conjecture which 
 exhibits in the most vivid manner the want of grammatical knowledge 
 which shines through his edition of these "texts." It ought not to 
 be such a hidden mystery that the varied forms of the Coptic verb are 
 not to be applied at random. But the laxity of rendering which has 
 been the bane and the reproach of translations from Old Egyptian, 
 where definite knowledge is often not to be had, must not be allowed 
 to penetrate into versions from its descendant, the Coptic language, 
 which in its minute and subtle distinctions, leaves small room for 
 doubt as to its meaning, and no justification whatever for looseness 
 in rendering. 
 
 If there be one certainly ascertained law in Coptic grammar, it is 
 the law that the forms of the verb have a definite use and application. 
 Among these verbs occurs hko with its brother-form hkaeit; the 
 latter expresses a very different idea from the former, for hko means 
 "to be getting hungry", but hkaeit is a sort of participial form, and 
 means "J«m^ hungry". It is plain therefore that hkaeit, which 
 means "being now in a hungry state", ought not to be used in the 
 future ; and as a matter of fact, there is no more categorical imperative 
 in any language than the law which peremptorily forbids its use as 
 a future. Prof. Kossi has broken the rule, and has edited : 
 
 tepsykhe de SScabhSt Vanima del pusilli 
 
 nalik[aeit] sara affamata. 
 
 That is utterly impossible to Coptic structure : he should have con- 
 jectured the other form, hko. 
 
 Here then are four serious errors in his first page of a text which 
 is extant in another edition, and which has the original LXX to keep 
 an editor from rushing off the rails. 
 
 5. Here is another conjecture, xx. 10 : 
 
 wnoc nsi mn whwi pe>o grande e piccolo 
 
 a[nd s]ei pe snte « misure doppie 
 
 henakatharton ue >ono immorali. 
 
28 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 This text naturally causes one to open great eyes of wonder at the 
 ingenuity of wrongness which could stray so far from the lines laid 
 down by the text of the LXX, o-ra^oi/ /teya (cat ixLKpovKai ft-irpa 
 Sio-a-d. For pe could here have no meaning at all; si (sei) which 
 he suggests, is masc, whereas snte, "two" is fern., and it was very 
 unlikely that the Copt would again use it for f^irpa after he had just 
 used it for o-ra^/iov. 
 
 In fact, it is a bad guess, for the words should be auo oipe snte, 
 oipe being tlie regular Coptic word for iiirpov, and further having the 
 advantage of being a noun /««i«»we, — oipe snte, " two measures." 
 
 6. Here again he has edited an impossibility, though it is not 
 possible for me to say whether he has obeyed or disobeyed his 
 papyrus : in either case his text and his translation are both whoUy 
 incorrect and impossible (xxiii. 5) : 
 
 esope eksaiismn ie volgi 
 
 eratk. erof tuo piede verso di lui, 
 
 nncfwunb ebol non apparisea. 
 
 I do not know why he should have thought it right to give such a 
 weakening to the very strong negative future, nnefwonh ebol, 
 used to represent the LXX oiSa/AoC ^avctrai, but the protasis contains 
 a triple monstrosity in the word eratk given by him and translated 
 " thy foot", tuo piede. The badness is quite out of proportion to the 
 difference of meaning : — 
 
 {a) the verb smn is in its short form, the form used when it 
 immediately precedes the noun it governs and with which it forms 
 almost a compound word— a form somewhat analogous to the construct 
 state in Hebrew, and which therefore has been styled the construct 
 form of the verb, though I prefer to call it the proclitic form, — and 
 could not possibly be followed by the preposition e in eratk . 
 
 (i) even so, smn with rat could have no meaning such as he 
 attributed to it. 
 
 (c) rat, meaning "foot", is not Coptic at all: the word is only 
 used in cpd. prepp., and in certain verbal phrases, of which this is 
 not one ; see No. 24. 
 
 The LXX should have kept him straight here, for it has eav 
 cTTio-Tijtrijs TO o-ov o/i/ia Trpos avTov, i.e. the word was eiat-k, "thy 
 glance", and has nothing to do with eratk ! 
 
 7. And as he has a very imperfect notion of the functions of the 
 various forms of the verbal root, so he has an equally unsatisfactory 
 grasp on the ascertained facts as to the cases governed by special 
 
Atkinson— 0» Prof. Bossi's South-Coptio Texts. 2& 
 
 verbs. Of this, the folio-wing conjecture of his will give clear proof, 
 xxiv. 14 : — 
 
 eksantae de se poi la troverai, 
 
 er[e pekhae] anai sara la tua fine huona. 
 
 As the LXX has €av yap evpijs, ta-rai KaXrj fj TeXevrri <tov, he could 
 not very well err, but he most assuredly cannot get his translation 
 legitimately out of his text, for, as it stands, it would mean, " if thou 
 fall", eksan-he, an intransitive verb. It could not possibly be the 
 verb he, "to find", in the text as he has edited it. Then in the 
 apodosis, his ere is wrong, simply because of the previous mistake: 
 he should have given eksanhe eros, "if thou find it, wisdom", 
 and then he would have seen the necessity of having the future nu 
 in his apodosis. 
 
 8. His mistake is of course heightened by the fact that he does 
 not know what case he, "to find," governs, for he has edited, at 
 xxvii. 26, ekehe [n]hieib, for the LXX iva Zo-C o-oi apva ; but the 
 verb he is followed by the directive e, and could not have n in 
 immediate succession to it. 
 
 9. And now we have another conjecture, of the wildest kind, with 
 absolutely nothing to recommend or justify it, xxx. 12 : 
 
 t[efiun<Jb]iii de mpftbbos ma non lava la sua sozzura. 
 
 The preceding half of the verse is absent from the papyrus, and in the 
 begiuning of the latter half is a lacuna, which Prof. Eossi has filled 
 up in the most mechanical and farfetched way, reading tef - mnt j bin, 
 because his papyrus gave him, as he thought, the final letters .... in, 
 and he did not know any other Coptic word ending in these letters than 
 the word mntjbin, rendered, sozztira. "Well, mntjbin is a Coptic 
 word, certainly ; but what word in the LXX original was it intended 
 to represent ? There we have rrjv 8' efoSov avrov ovk airivixj/ev. I do 
 dwell upon his non lava, in the present tense, for the confusion in his 
 tenses is extreme, and mpf as a prefix of past tense has its rights 
 frequently ignored ; but where is the word for mntjbin? 
 
 The fact is, he has misread his papyrus, which obviously has 
 not . ... in [m], but .... iS [ih], for the word he should have 
 edited was of course tef -hie, "his way", as the representative of 
 TYjv e^oSov aiiTOV. 
 
 10. Here follow in the same word two conjectural emendations, 
 both of which are wrong, exhibiting a very serious want of gram- 
 matical knowledge of the most elementary kind ; for he has edited 
 
30 Proceedings of the Royal Insh Academy. 
 
 at XXV. 14, e[t]w[6]rLh ebol, instead of euwonh ebol, and 
 has thereby broken two laws : (a) the definite prefix at - is quite im^ 
 possible here, and {P) the present stem wonh should have been used. 
 
 11. In the next verse he has committed another blunder, which 
 his translation forbids us to explain as a typographical slip : 
 
 ere vrlas Scnon de la lingua molle 
 
 wesf enkees rompe le ossa. 
 
 He renders "le ossa," " the bones," but the LXX has a-vvrpi/Sei oa-ra, 
 without the definite article. This, however, did not deter him, and so 
 he has edited a text which has three bad errors ! 
 
 («) wesf is the proclitic form of the verb, and could not be used 
 before a preposition. 
 
 (i) the preposition could not have been e, as wosf is followed 
 by the oonnexive n, and not the directive e . 
 
 (e) there was no definite article at all. 
 Eead wesf hen-kees, with the indefinite article, and all is proper 
 and a literal version of the LXX. 
 
 12. And he is equally in the dark as to the distinction observed 
 in Coptic with reference to the form of the verb to be used when a 
 suffix pronoun follows it. Thus he conjectures, xxv. 21 : 
 
 ersan pekjaje hko [matmef ] auo efsaneibe mat[sef] 
 
 where both his conjectures are wrong, the only forms permissible here 
 being tmmo, and tso : matmmof, "feed him," matsof, "give 
 him drink." 
 
 13. The following verse exhibits the same want of skill, for he 
 suggests knas[6k] henjbbes nkoht hijn tefape, "thou shalt 
 bring coals of fire on his head"; whether sok be or be not the right 
 word to suggest here for LXX o-wpeu'o-ew, it is certain that it is not 
 the right form of the verb, because it immediately precedes the 
 governed noun, and must therefore appear as (sk) sek . 
 
 14. (xxv. 24) : 
 
 nanw woh i meglio abitare 
 
 hn w[kiihe iiweei] sul canto di un tetto. 
 
 I do not of course deny that knhe is a Coptic word, but the LXX 
 has cTTi ycdvt'as Sw/iaros, and the word for ytovla is kTje, (cf. Prov. 
 vii. 8, 12; xxi. 9 ; though it is also rendered by kooh, Job i. 19; 
 tow, Zeph. i. 16; and konia (ywi'a), Zeoh. xiv. 10); but I do not 
 think it is ever translated by knhe . 
 
Atkinson — On Prof. Eossi's South-Coptic Texts. 31 
 
 This word knlie occurs in a curious passage, Amos viii. 3: 
 auo senaos ebol Eci Emestibs mpfpe [ta] mmelate Sknlie, 
 where the last three words seem a mere gloss, for the LXX has only 
 KoX oKoXv^ei TO. <f>aTvu>fji.aTa tov vaov ; but I do not think that it is 
 found in any other passage of the South-Coptic version. At any rate, 
 kooh Ew^i would certainly have been a better conjecture if the 
 textual usage be adhered to. 
 
 15. A wrong case -government is suggested in his conjecture on 
 XXV. 23, who de Eatsipe s[afnw3cs nhenlas, " una faccia im- 
 pudente irrita le lingue " ; for nwcs is followed by the directive e, 
 cf. Gen. xl. 2, afnwcs epefsiwr snau; Job xxxii. 2, afnwcs 
 e - eio b ; Isai. xii. 1 ; xxviii. 28. He should have given iaf tinwcs , 
 of course. 
 
 16. He suggests a wrong preposition on xxvi. 7, wparanomia 
 [hits] row Snathet, where hitn should be ebolhE, to cor- 
 respond with the LXX Ik o-TO/iaTOS atjipovmv. 
 
 17. Nor does he understand the principle which guides the use of 
 the definite prefix et, for he has suggested, xxv. 28, [Sthe nwpolis 
 et]ere nessobt (ifsor), "like a city whose walls are broken," 
 where etere cannot be used, but only ere, as it is in connexion 
 with an indefinite noun. • 
 
 18. "We now have a proof of his ignorance of the meaning of 
 common Coptic words, for he suggests, xxvii. 7 : — 
 
 sare tepsykhe ettsieu I'anima satolla 
 
 [rhal] epebio ebol disprezza il miele. 
 
 To this suggestion of fhal, there are the following objections: it 
 could not be followed by ebol; it does not govern the directive e ; 
 and it does not mean LXX ifiTraiiet, "loathe", disprezza, for it 
 means " to deceive," cf. Gen. iii. 14, phof pentaffhal mmoi, o o^is 
 
 [Here, too, Ciasca's text is somewhat doubtful, for he edits : sare 
 wpsykhe etsieu jer Estste pebio ebol, {j/vxfi ^v TrXrja-f^ovy o^a-a 
 KrjpioLs i/j-ircuiei, with the following note: "etsieu = etsew; 
 Estste (sic) abundat." But one does not see why either (sic) or 
 dbundat should appear here, for tste is quite correct in form, and 
 tste ebol is the translation of ifnrai^ei. The difficulty lies in 
 etsieu, where the prefix is wrong: either tepsykhe et-t., or 
 with the indefinite wpsykhe es-t., should have been found ; [and 
 in the use of the paraphrase sare . . . j^r Estste ebol, which the 
 Copt evidently used to express the element in e/tiratfei, "the satiated 
 
32 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 soul plays with so as to reject the honeycomb" ;] where too it may 
 be noted that Cia sea's = etsew is also a mistake, for the verb is- 
 tsio, "to satiate," and not tso, "to give to drink," a mistake to 
 which something is added by the (s«c) which he appends in his note 
 to the word epettsieu, "better than <As «a&fo«? man," xxvi. 16.] 
 
 19. As he edits the full form of the verb sometimes in place 
 of the short form, so he performs the counter operation, and gives 
 impossibilities like his text at xxvii. 17 : prome pe saftbs [mpho 
 m] p e f s b e r , av-qp 8c 7rapo$vvei trpocrmirov iraipov. Here tb s is the- 
 proclitic form, and could not be followed by the connexive m, which 
 must be deleted as an unwarrantable intruder. 
 
 [It is remarkable that Ciasca's text on this verse contains two 
 errors of a related kind, for we find there saftom ppenipe, where 
 tom cannot be right, and also saftobs pho, where tobs is also 
 wrong, being the form of the verb used with the suffix pronoun, a& 
 Job vi. 9, maref-tobs. t , TptocraTtu /x£.] 
 
 20. ITor is it easy to see why he has left the text as it stands, 
 xx^di. 21 : 
 
 [t]doki[iiiian] mphat la prova dell' argento 
 
 mil pnwb e deW oro 
 
 .... a WW i [il fuooo']. 
 
 The LXX has SoKt//.tov apyvpita Koi ■)(j>v(rw wvpaicns, but the Coptic for 
 the last word he has not attempted to suggest. Now, the phrase is 
 not unknown elsewhere in the Bible, cf. Zech. xiii. 9 : koI irupuxriiy 
 avTovs (is TTvpovrai to apyvpiov, which the Coptic renders ntapastw 
 nthe mphat esaupastf ; so that it is obvious that the unmeaning 
 .... WW, which he gives as the reading of his papyrus, was a totally 
 
 different set of letters, not OTOTf , but CTTOT, for Ciasca's 
 
 text fits the letters like a glove : pe pastw, a good instance of the 
 infinitival noun with following suffix. 
 
 21. And what is to be said of the following text and translation? 
 xxvii. 27 : 
 
 ps[ere wn]tk hennoc asa 
 je mpekoah 
 
 So runs his conjectural reading, with the following version, "figliuolo, 
 tu hai [da me] parole utili alia tua vita." Now, I want to caU 
 attention to this translation : the LXX has iii, wap' i/xov l^eis pijcret? 
 lo-xupas CIS Trjv ito-qv o-ov, and his Italian version keeps close to that, 
 hut at what cost ? He had to insert da me, and utili had also to be 
 extracted, for there is nothing whatever to represent it in the text 
 
Atkinson — On Prof. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 33 
 
 as he has given it, unless he read nsau, "useful"! Then he 
 thought wntk, "thou hast," would stand -well for the e^ets, ignoring 
 entirely the fact that the irap' e/tov is really the predication. 
 
 The word icrx^pas gives the solution, for "firm, strong", is tek, 
 so that it is a matter of ahsolute certainty that the Copt meant to 
 set forth Trap e/AoS la-)(ypa.'s by using [ai]tk "I have strengthened, 
 confirmed," &c., tk heing the proclitic form, used immediately before 
 the object hennoc nsaje, " many sayings." 
 
 And that is Ciasca's text, aitek, &c., of course. 
 
 22. Before treating of this passage, I may quote a few lines from 
 his Preface, in which he speaks of " the absence in [Peyron's] lexicon 
 of certain roots that do occur iu these texts, as for example that of 
 tsiow with the signification of eongregare, which is quoted with this 
 meaning in Parthey's vocabulary." Now, Parthey certainly has this 
 item, as Prof. Eossi says, but all the same the whole statement is a 
 nullity, for there is no such verb as tsiow, " congrega/re," ia these 
 texts ! Let us examine the passage, xxviii. 8 : 
 
 netna' Hnheke le adtmerd per quelli 
 
 netnatsiow minow che hcmno miaericordia dei poveri. 
 
 The reader will note that he has le adunerd as the translation of the 
 pretended root tsiow, "to gather", but it is all wrong : it is the 
 root tsio, "to satiate", to which reference has been made above, 
 with suffix pronoun, tsio-w, and the translation is, "they who have 
 mercy on the poor are they shall satiate themselves with them", [with 
 riohes, plural, or reading mmos, if it be singular]. 
 
 There is not the shadow of a foundation for this assumed root 
 tsiow, "eongregare", in this verse, save the very poor argument that 
 the LXX has a-vvdyei. aiiTov, which the Coptic reraion paraphrases. 
 
 23. The misgovernment of verbs is again illustrated in his con- 
 jecture, xxviii. 25 : 
 
 petko Hhtef m]ijoeis ehi pone il emr suo nel Signore. 
 
 for ko nht^f is invariably followed by the directive e ; cf. Job vi.20 ; 
 xxi. 24; Prov. iii. 18; Ezek. xxix. 7, 12. 
 
 24. Nor has he any clearer insight into the mysteries of Coptic 
 nominal structure, for he has made the following conjecture, xxix. 5 : 
 
 efnasorf ebol ene[frat mmin] mmof. 
 
 This ludicrous reading is intended as Coptic for LXX irepi/SdWei 
 aM Tois lawov TrocrtV. To dream of editing enefrat ! Why, we 
 
 R.I.A- PEOC, SEB. III., VOL. HI. » 
 
36 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 yaries considerably, and the Coptic version is certainly not a. literal 
 rendering of any text, but tbe text itself should hare been clear. 
 And it is given in Ciasca. 
 
 II. 
 
 It will be seen that the above collection of errors, in fragments 
 of a few chapters of an already published work, is of ominous 
 suggestiveness as to the probabilities of error, where text and trans- 
 lation are to be edited independently. 
 
 I propose now to take up the consideration of these texts in the 
 order of their publication. The first Fasciculus (1883), contained: 
 1, the Gospel of Moodemus, of which a Latin translation from the 
 masterly hand of Peyron was published by Tischendorf in his Evangelia 
 Apocrypha (1876), to which I do not intend to refer; and, 2, an 
 Exegesis of Theophilus, translated by Prof. Eossi himself, " as literally 
 as possible." But, to secure this, another quaUfloation besides the 
 grammatical was desirable, for in writings of this kind, where the 
 writer's mind is filled with reminiscences of Scripture, and where his 
 habitual speech is in fact a mosaic of Biblical texts, it is obvious that 
 the second essential for a good edition is, that the editor should have 
 great familiarity with the words of the Bible. Unfortunately, Prof. 
 Rossi does not possess this qualification either. 
 
 I cannot of course set down everything to be found fault with : 
 I shall confine myself to the mistakes of a significant and character- 
 istic sort. At the very outset, the editor has failed to see, or at least 
 does not set forth, the obvious intention of the preacher to make a 
 sixfold comparison : 
 
 1. the sun has arisen, and the darkness is dispersed; 
 
 2. the king has assumed the crown, his foes are suhdued; 
 
 3. the odour is shed forth, the stench is destroyed ; 
 
 4. the lion has issued forth, the heasts have fled ; 
 
 5. the physician has come, the sick may be healed ; 
 
 6. the delight of creation is manifested, mourners may rejoice. 
 
 30. But the very next paragraph contains an extraordinary mis- 
 translation, which his note only intensifies : [65 p 5] 
 
 wiiolisj ere wrro» njaje nakote cros, nforbes ehwuj 
 tota sare uetnhets terw sope hS wnoc nthmko. 
 
 Nothing can be plainer or more certain than the meaning of this 
 clause : " (as when) a hostile king is surrounding a city and besieging 
 
Atkinson— 0« Frof. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 37 
 
 it, all those who are in it are wont to become greatly afflicted, &o." 
 But he renders the phrase netnhets, by "* euori di tutti i suoi 
 abitanti", adding as a note that the literal translation of this passage 
 would be i vostri ouori di essa. There is no such construction tnown 
 to Coptic grammar as netn-het.s ! That reading is a perfect 
 apocalypse, and the note litts the veil. "What the preacher said was : 
 n-et-nh^ts, "those who are in it". 
 
 31. [66 a 8]: 
 
 nterefnan eiJaje name ntmStrome ters, ete pai pe 
 pdiabolos je afobr ehwn ntoikwmene ters. 
 
 In this passage the editor did not understand afobr, and so he 
 printed a note thereon : "in the group afobr ehwn, I take the root 
 obr, (not known to me from other examples, nor by me found in any 
 lexicon,) according to the drift of the preposition that accompanies it, 
 in the meaning of to enter, penetrare, invadere, &c. The Coptic word 
 which is nearest in form to our root is sbr, amicus, socius, &c., 
 whence we have the verb f sbf , amicus, esse, fieri, &c., but I have 
 not found &c." ; and, accordingly, he concocted a root obr, which 
 he translated to invade. Now, he had just edited on the previous 
 page, nf-orb-es ehwn, with the pronominal form of the verb, 
 orb - s ehwn ; and as we have here the connexive particle n, it 
 might have been expected that a moment's reflection would have 
 given him the solution: the word is not any imaginary obr, still 
 less the poor suggestion of sbf, but is simply an inversion of the 
 letters r and b, viz. af-6rb ehwn, in the absolute form of the 
 verb, "he besieged" ; cf. nai ntauerb-teutn ehwn, Jerem. xxi. 4. 
 
 32. The want of familiarity with the Bible is everywhere pain- 
 fully manifest, but it does not always avenge itself so plainly as in 
 the following : [67 fi 8] 
 
 ncij etswow le mani vanagloriose 
 
 •aftpcusowtn ebol fece essere rette. 
 
 " He made straight the vain-glorious hands ! " That is, he not only 
 did not know that it was withered hands that were healed, but 
 he did not know the Coptic word for " withered," for he has con- 
 founded swow with swsw : 
 
 CgOTflWOT with CIJO-ifCl|OTr 
 
 33. It is natural to infer that he has at times misread the papyrus, 
 for where the letters are faded, it is the grammar often which adds 
 
38 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 the certainty, and says that such and such a letter must be ; now of. 
 
 [68)8 26]: 
 
 nai ce tSrw neueire gmste cose tutte fecero 
 
 mpow naf pe in questo giorno a lui. 
 
 But ho-w could the imperfect tense neueire be rendered by his 
 preterite /«(!«;-o, how could mpo w, " to-day" be used with a preterite, 
 and how could the alsolute Yevb eire appear without its object and the 
 connexive particle ? These are three stumbling-blocks, which should 
 have forced him to see that he should have had mmow, "them", 
 and not mpow, in questo giorno. If his papyrus has the latter, it 
 is simply wrong and impossible, and should have been emended. 
 
 34. And just in the same way, it is obvious that his text is not a 
 faithful representation of the papyrus, where he gives [73 a 18], 
 euneukleros erow, which he has rendered " (si dividono) alia 
 sorte", although it is utterly impossible to Coptic structure ! The 
 text should have had eunejkleros and not euneukleros, for the 
 passage runs as follows : eupos nnefhoite ejow eunejkleros erow, 
 "they part his garments among them, casting lots for them", the 
 root being plainly nej, "to cast". 
 
 His version of [77a 8] " si dividono colla sorte le sue vesti", shows 
 that this text, where there is a lacuna, eune . , . klSros erow, was 
 misunderstood in exactly the same way. 
 
 35. The Greek words with which the Coptic text is interlarded, 
 are often a difficulty to the editor ; cf. [74 a 8] : 
 
 afbol ebol Bnepsjkhowe sciolse le anime 
 
 etopt entamio n'nkake ehiuse nelle teneire. 
 
 Here attention is drawn by his n, which shows that he felt some 
 awkwardness, a sort of indefinable malaise he could not remedy ; but 
 his rendering, "nelle tenebre", proves that he had no inkling of 
 the true state of affairs, viz., "the souls shut up into the chambers of 
 darkness, ntamieion nkake" ! • 
 
 36. The confusion of his mind with reference to verbal forms can 
 scarcely be set forth more clearly than in his edition of the following 
 passage [74 a 14]. His translation runs thus : 
 
 Imperocche guesto e 
 gmllo die promise a noi colla sua bocca di veritd, 
 questa, da eui nessuna meniofna esce in 
 eterno. ' 
 
 Se esaltano me sulla terra, io li trarro tutti 
 a me. 
 
Atkinson — On Prof. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 39 
 
 This of course is to ignore the fact that tMs last sentence «« the 
 
 promise referred to in the previous clause ; but passing that by, his 
 
 esce exhibits a fatal misunderstanding, which his note as usual sets 
 
 into high relief. His text has : 
 
 ^ # 
 
 teftapro mme tai ete mlaau Bcol ei 
 
 ebol nhSts eneb. 
 
 His note says: "the text has here mlaau, a form unused, or 
 perhaps -wrong, for mn laau ". The text is certainly wrong, but so 
 is his note ; utterly wrong, because the verb ei, "to go", is not used 
 in the present tense at all; so that this mnlaau ei, " (non) esce", is 
 an ungrammatical suggestion: it should have been mpe, and not 
 mn, and then the translation would have been "his veracious mouth, 
 out of which no lie ever came" ; or the future negative nne, " will 
 never come". 
 
 37. The following seems hardly intentional, but it is significant : 
 [75y8 22"| wois ebol nnetnaistheterion, which he has trans- 
 lated, "dilatate la vostra selvaggia intelligenza". N'ow, what does 
 he suppose is gained by putting in sehaggia, "savage", and whence 
 is it got ? The Greek word here used, aia-9rp-ripi,ov, has surely no 
 great mystery about it. 
 
 38. At [79 a 2], we have the following : 
 
 pkab terf tilwlai la terra iuita giuUla, 
 
 je a pesnof mpefrro perche il sangue del sua rt 
 
 poht ehrai ejof e sparso m essa. 
 
 afkatharize ansen Purified le piante 
 
 terw te[ntiw6] tutie germoglianti (?), 
 
 ebolje pjoeis ase poiehe il Sigmre e appeso 
 
 ejm pse inpestauros al legno della croce. 
 
 On this passage he gives a note: "here also the text is incorrect, 
 and I feaf I have not thoroughly grasped the author's idea; here, also, 
 we have a instead of e (ansen for ensen,) and the group tentiwo 
 in place of nettiwo ". He most assuredly has not caught the idea, 
 and both his suggestions are wrong and impossible. The word could 
 not be ensen, with the directive e, because katharize does not 
 govern the directive, but the connexive n (cf. Levit. viii. 15 ; xii. 7 ; 
 xiii. 6, 23, &c.), and nettiwo is quite out of the question when 
 enien is impossible. 
 
 He has gone completely astray: the sense is "the earth shouts 
 for joy because the blood of its king has been shed on it, and has 
 
40 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 purified [it] ; the trees haye all blossomed because God has been 
 suspended on the wood of the cross" ; and the text should have been : 
 
 a. Ssen terir tiwo • 
 
 39. The following perversion of the sense seems to be due to the 
 misconception of a word used in a Coptic-Latin lexicon, for otherwise 
 it seems unintelligible [80 )8 5] : 
 
 pestanros pe l<i croce c 
 
 pesmine la ferma eostiimione 
 
 nnejeu etrhdt delle navi vantate 
 
 hnwmntsaie per 
 
 What does that mean ? " The cross is the firm constitution of the 
 ships vaunted for beauty"! Now, fhot means "to sail", and the 
 words meant, " of the ships <Aa< ar« sa«7««y in beauty". But whence 
 came his "vantate" ? Parthey's lexicon has two entries : 
 
 f ho t , navigare. 
 
 fhoot, jactare (navigantem). 
 
 Did Prof. Eossi take the latter entry, and render it "to boast", 
 vantare ? 
 
 40. When his text is wrong, he sometimes even does not see any 
 defect, [81 a 4]: 
 
 pestaaros pe la croce e 
 
 peblol la caligine 
 
 nnentausise dei maledici. 
 
 His note says: "literally, of those who were bitter [in speech]". 
 Now, what on earth could be the meaning of such a sentence — " the 
 cross is the darkness of those who were bitter in speech" ? The cross 
 was their sweetening, not their darkness, and the Coptic word was 
 hloc, not hlol . 
 
 41. In the last page of his translation there are a dozen mis- 
 takes, all of which I cannot set down here. The cross is a terrible 
 stumbling-block to him, for he edits [81 n 21] : 
 
 pestanros pe la croce e 
 
 psobt ettajreu la preparazione salda. 
 
 The meaning is quite wrong : s o b t has nothing to do with 
 Bobte, "to prepare"; it means " {aiij-)waU", being the regular 
 word to express reixos, cf. Num. xiii. 20 ; 1 Eeg. xxv. 16 ; 2 Reg. 
 
Atkinson— Ow Frof. Eossi's South-Coptic Texts. 41 
 
 xi. 24 ; Tobi. xiii. 16 ; Ps. 1. 20 ; Jer. 1. 15 ; Ezek. xxvii. 11 ; whereas 
 Toixos is t - j o , cf . 1 Eeg. xviii. 1 1 ; Job xxxiii. 24 ; Ps. Ixi. 4 ; Isai. 
 lix. 10 ; Ezek. xxiii. 14 ; xl. 13 ; xli. 5 [= <f,payij.6s, Ps. Ixxx. 14; 
 Eccl. x. 8]. What the ■writer said was that "the cross was the 
 fortified, strengthened city-wall". 
 
 42. Here it is the Greek language that mystifies him : 
 
 a pag^g^elos I' 
 
 wonh naf ebol apparve a lui 
 
 afkata tortw naf e lo esattdi 
 
 mpefaitema nella sua domanda. 
 
 And he gives a long note as follows : "I translated the group 
 afkatatorthw naf according to the sense, by he heard him, not 
 knowing any Greek verbal root to which this can be referred, &c." 
 Then he suggests that it should be afkharize kata torthw naf, 
 "he gratified him according to justice", though the Greek verbal 
 root katorthw (/carop^oa)) was appealing to him for acceptance, [a 
 common LXX word, usually rendered by the Coptic sowtn] : "the 
 angel accomplished for him his atTi7/Aa" 
 
 43. The last of his mistakes that I shall refer to in this Exegesis, 
 is not the least curious [83 p 2] : 
 
 Iisoter jo mmos dice il Salvatore 
 
 je pig^enos qmsta nations 
 
 meuesnajf ebol > non puh salvarsi 
 
 eimete hmpeslel che nella preghiera 
 
 mn tnestia e nel digiimo. 
 
 On this we have an electric light flashed by his note: "the literal 
 translation of this passage would be, this nation cannot cast itself save 
 into prayer and fasting" \y\ Here are his own words, questa nazione 
 non pub gettarsi che nella preghiera e nel digiuno. And this in spite 
 of ebol, (cast) "out". The Coptic words can mean nothing but, 
 "this ycvos, they are not wont to be able to cast it out, save by 
 prayer and fasting", toBto to yivoi iv ovSevl Swarat i^eKOetv, et /xij 
 iv Trpocrevxg Koi vrja-Teia, Mk. ix. 29, (Matt. xvii. 21, ovk eKTropeuerai). 
 
 III. 
 
 The second Fasciculus (1884) contains matter referring to the 
 Council of Mcsea, a portion of the life of St. Athanasius, and some 
 fragments. A portion of the matter printed here by Prof. Eossi had 
 
42 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 been published by M. Eevillout (1873), but the edition of the latter 
 scholar was not good enough, according to Prof. Rossi, to make his 
 reprint undesirable : " he would have abstained from reprinting them 
 if he [M. Eevillout] had shown more faithfulness to the original", 
 pref. p. 6. I shall not discuss the relative merits of the two editions, 
 but confine myself to the study of Prof. Eossi's text. 
 
 44. [11^.7]: 
 
 pentaf joos Je Quegli che disse : 
 
 n^ phap eroi, ana anok " giudiea me, ed io 
 
 tinatoobe renderh il contracceanlio^^ , 
 
 ntof pentannej e Quegli in cui ponemmo 
 
 penro'fvs terf erof tutta la nostra solleeitudine. 
 
 He who said, "judge me and I will repay" : that is plainly meant 
 as a quotation ; but whence ? It is not in the Bible, and it is not in 
 the Coptic words, which mean, "throw the judgment on me", "leave 
 judgment to me", exactly as in the latter half of his own text we 
 have, "as we have cast our care on him". Where was the logic of his 
 translation ? The passage is of course the verse quoted at Eom. xii. 19 
 and Hebr. x. 30, e/ioi cKSiKTyo-ts (though Deut. xxxii. 35, has iv rjixipa. 
 ckSikjjo-cus,) our familiar words "vengeance is mine"- 
 
 45. [13 a 9] : His text is given as follows : 
 
 hn wss (p) nwein neannoc 
 hin pkake 
 
 The editor is doubtful of his own text, of which he gives this version : 
 una gran luce sifece in me%%o alle tenehre. Now, this version demon- 
 strates that he bad no idea of the real construction of the passage. 
 He should have edited : 
 
 hn wssne on a sudden 
 
 aunoc iiwaein a great light 
 
 [sa] hni pkake shone in the darkness. 
 
 One would have thought that hn w ssne was common enough 
 not to be a mystery, and that the missing verb sa must have 
 suggested itself to even a beginner. To make the matter plain, I 
 will quote two passages in exemplication : 
 
 Job i. 19, hn wssne aunoc nhateu ei 
 
 Zech. xiv. 7, hm pnau nrwhe fnasa nci woein 
 LXX, Trpos icTrepav eoroi c^us. 
 
Atkinson — On Prof. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 43 
 
 46. The translation of the following passage will be of interest to 
 the student of ecclesiastical history [15, 20] : 
 
 anok de tihomolog^ei To poi confeiso 
 
 Btetrias etwaab la Triade Santa, 
 
 emn porj soop tema alcuna aeparaiiont 
 
 ntmStBvrte della diviniti, 
 
 wte messibe che non genera mutazione, 
 
 wte mespoone non genera divisione, 
 
 wte mestako non produce perdita, $o. 
 
 Now, prohahly the theologian would feel inclined to think he had 
 coine upon a new version of the Athanasian creed in. the expression : 
 "the Holy Trinity, which does not generate change, and does not 
 generate division, and does not produce distinction" ! But it is simply 
 a blunder of the editor, who has taken mes to be a verb in con- 
 struction with sibe, poone and tako, and meaning "to bring 
 forth", in other words a form of mise ; whereas this mes is 
 nothing but the negative aorist prefix I The words messibe, &c. 
 mean, "the Holy Trinity does not change — is not wont to change, 
 &c.", with the full force of this negative ^rissmi consuetudinal. 
 
 47. The next quotation is from a passage which the editor has 
 despaired of, largely on account of the word euajiphoros, which 
 is to him altogether unknown, " affatto ignota" . [16 a 24]: 
 
 netnaratsotm de quelli che non ubbidiranno 
 
 Bsetmhomolog^ei e non la confesseranno, 
 
 enajiphoros (P) mptako si perderanno (?) 
 
 narios con A.rio. 
 
 Obviously, it was a meaning of this kind that was intended to be 
 conveyed, but the editor does not attempt to solve the enigma in the 
 word referred to. Probably the change of a single letter will give 
 the solution : 
 
 eue-ji phoros mptako n-Arios 
 " they will get the opos of the destruction of Arius". 
 
 48. The prepositions are a great stumbling-block to the editor, 
 who has not realised how definite is their usage. Thus he edits 
 [18; 13] " (his countenance was full of anger against us, but it did 
 not cause us any anxiety), 
 
 etbe pnoc neow a causa della grande gloria 
 
 Stanei ntetf che in noi ne veniva; 
 
 on account of the great glory tvhieh came into us from thence". The 
 
44 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 text certainly says no such thing; it says, "for the great glory in 
 which we came". The writer did not mean that glory accrued to 
 them from the King's anger, hut that they did not heed his anger, 
 because of God's favour. 
 
 49. On the same page, another preposition has caused him to 
 pervert his original much more seriously [18, 24] : 
 
 enton ce uesbowe dove sono le dottrine 
 
 mn cinsmse 
 
 ed il culto 
 
 iita pekeidt honw etootk che il padre tuo ti ordino 
 
 efnabuk eratf miinwte di prestare a Dio. 
 
 "Where are the doctrines and the service thy father ordered thee 
 to pay to God"? The editor's translation of the last line is utterly 
 wrong ; the word eratf is a cpd. preposition, meaning " at the 
 feet of", and the phrase efnabok eratf mpnwte means, "when 
 he [thy father] was about to appear before God". 
 
 50. [20, 11]: 
 
 etrasptaise io eoffriro 
 
 mn nasbr melos co' miei eompagni pazientemente (?) 
 
 sante pnvrte na' nan Jinche Dio avrd misericordia di not. 
 
 As to the meaning of his pazientemente, and that too followed by a (?), 
 I am quite at a loss. As melos must be a Greek word, the problem 
 here is to determine how the idea of "patiently" can be got out 
 of /leXos ! It is, of course, only nonsense ; the words were 
 
 mn na-sbf -melos, " with my fellow-members". 
 
 This is quite a common use of sbr, "fellow-", followed by a 
 definingnoun, sbfepiskopos , "a feUow-bishop", &c. 
 
 51. In the following passage there is no insight shown, but mere 
 guess-work and helplessness. The bishops are telling how the King 
 had treated them : "he ordered his executioners to bind us hand and 
 foot, and to scuttle the boat under us" [22, 5] : 
 
 dopoche ehhero navigato 
 
 eaurhdt 
 
 epekro molto alto (pel mare) 
 
 ankaaii ebol ci abbandonarono. 
 
 anon de JVbi poi tenevamo 
 
 nere ncij mpenhet le nostre mani 
 
 pors ebol stese ml petto .... 
 
 natsarx de 
 
 nsebel ebol an 
 
Atkinson — On Prof. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 45 
 
 A.S •will be seen, no attempt is here made to translate the last lines ; 
 and ho-w could they hold their hands stretched out on their breast, 
 when they were bound hand and foot ? In any case, the Coptic text 
 says nothing to that efiect, but is of quite different purport : " but as 
 for us, the hands of our heart -were stretched out, but bodiless, so as 
 not to faint". . Their bodily hands were tied, but the hands of their 
 heart were stretched out to God in unwearying supplication. 
 
 The construction of bol ebol -with cij is perfectly correct 
 Coptic, and occurs in Isai. xiii. 7, etbe pai cij nim nabol ebol, 
 LXX 8ia TovTO Tracra x^'P 6/cA.v^^crcTai ; Jer. 1. 15. 
 
 And what was the use of translating in the beginning of the 
 clause aurhot epekro by elbero navigato molto alto {pel mare)"! 
 ■whereas it means "they sailed to the shore". 
 
 52. The -whole of this portion is badly done, and the diflSculties of 
 the text are often slurred over in the translation, and that too without 
 mention. I may quote a few of these omissions [23, 26] : 
 
 nai de ere tpolis ters gueste cose la citta tutta 
 
 jo mmow hoste 
 etres noein hitn 
 tase niniuSese 
 
 ana tespere ntassope dal prodigio fatto 
 
 aunts nabrm prro si porta presso il re. 
 
 That sort of translation is only too common in versions from Old 
 Egyptian, but it is quite intolerable in versions from a language so 
 generally pellucid as is the Coptic. 
 
 The editor gives no ... to show that anything has been omitted, 
 and his version is neither literal nor faithful. The words mean : 
 "these things the whole city shouts so as to make it shake by the 
 multitude of the crowds; and [as to] the miracle that had taken 
 place, they carried it before the Kiag". 
 53. Or take the passage [25, 14] : 
 
 tenw ce ari pabre eron ora, dtmqm, sana noi 
 
 ha nzetema etorj 
 
 mn niogos 
 
 ethm paho mpekhet 
 
 etbe psooce - 
 
 ntausoocu Bbetf 
 
 5ci narianos ^^ay'* ^rrori degli Ariani. 
 
 Here are several lines with not a hint as to their translation, and 
 
46 
 
 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 no indication whatever of anything being omitted ! The omitted 
 lines mean : " in the firm i,r]Triixa.Ta and the Xoyot which are in the 
 treasure of thy heart, on account of the wound the Allans have 
 wounded us with". 
 
 54. And surely an omission like the following should not have 
 occurred! In the confession of Faith made by Athanasius to the 
 King we have a series of propositions, winding up with this general 
 statement : 
 
 eome il piii grande 
 
 di tutti questi capi 
 
 noi confessimno 
 
 i quattro evangelii, 
 
 a mi attingono (lett. levono) 
 
 tutti i Gristimii. 
 
 pnoc Skephalaion 
 
 enai terw 
 
 tnhomolog^ei mmof 
 
 ete peftow Seuag^g^elion ne 
 
 etere nekhreistianos tSrow 
 
 so nhetw 
 
 ano psah paulos 
 
 plas mpetttinvrfe 
 
 mn Sepistolowe 
 
 nkatholikon 
 
 And no notice whatever is taken that the Canon here mentioned 
 in the Coptic includes the words, " and the writer Paul, the tongue 
 of sweet savour, and the Catholic Epistles". 
 
 55. And the paragraph, as given in his version, winds up with 
 the following ridiculous misconception as to the possibilities of Coptic 
 structure [29,12] : 
 
 esope ce o prro 
 nikephalaion ntajjow 
 seswtun iiahrak 
 
 anine epima 
 nnensbr uepiskopos 
 ntaknxorlze mmow 
 
 , <i re, 
 questi capi ehe io dissi, 
 sono retti al tuo cospetto, 
 io dirb : 
 vieni imieme 
 Co' miei compagni vescovi 
 che hai esigliato. 
 
 Now, I call attention to this passage, in which he has edited 
 three words in juxtaposition, every one of which he has completely 
 misunderstood! To begin with, where is the force of such an argu- 
 ment as this: "if these propositions are right in thy sight, I shall 
 say, ' come along with my fellow-bishops whom thou hast exiled' " ? 
 No such thing; eiejow does not mean "I shall say", and does not 
 refer to the word "say" at aU! It means, "well then, do thou 
 send ; eie is a particle introducing the apodosis, and jow is an 
 
Atkinson— 0» Prof. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 47 
 
 imperative, "send thou". Secondly, anine does not mean "come 
 thou", but "bring". And thirdly, epima does not mean "along 
 with", but it means "to this place". So that the three words 
 meant the following: "if these propositions seem right to thee, 
 King, whi/ then, send and bring hither our fellow-bishops whom thou 
 hast exiled". 
 56. [30, 5] : 
 
 tote afkeleae nteunw allora ehiamh tosto 
 
 nci prro nwberetarios il capo de' suoi corrieri 
 
 ScxuseDdynatas pe 
 
 bii tefcom etref bok e lo mando 
 
 takhy Ssa nepiskopos ai veacovi sand. 
 
 His note bears on the untnown exuseudynatos , which he took to 
 be cfoDcrioSwaTos, and then, as he " could not find it in the dic- 
 tionaries", he rendered it " chief". Just so, and he omits altogether 
 the very words which should have shown him what it is ! For the 
 word p e is copula to a clause e-u Sui/aTos pe h5 tefcom, "who 
 is powerful in his might", and the previous word should be nofus, 
 " a swift messenger". 
 
 The next article published in these Texts is the Sentences 
 (•yvu/itat) of the Sacred Synod. I do not propose to go through this 
 publication in detail, as M. Eevillout can very well defend his own 
 work, with which also I am not here concerned. Towards the end. 
 Prof. Eossi's version gets somewhat worse, and exhibits some remark- 
 able handling of Greek words, which calls for notice here. 
 
 57. On page 91 of Prof. Eossi's translation we read the foUowiag 
 sentence: "Lo stolto crede che nessuno lo conoscer^. Egli ignora 
 che trovasi nella vita come ad un oonvito". On looking to see what 
 the text of this curious passage was, the mystery was at once cleared 
 up [60, 12]: nfsown an je fo nonh nthe nw trapetes; i.e. 
 the words ad un eonvito, "at a banquet", are to be got out of 
 nwtrapetes. "Why then, the word trapetes must be supposed 
 to be a deriv. of rpairef a ! It is the word SpairerT^s, "a runaway 
 slave": the fool is like a runaway slave, and God's eye is steadily 
 watchiag him all through life, is the idea in the writer's mind. 
 
48 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 58. An equally curious passage is found in his version and note 
 on the word theodokos, at p. 80 of his translation: "this word, 
 formed from ®eos, God, and from the verb Sexofiai (Ionic 8e(co/j,at), 
 signifies literally, one who receives Ood, title perfectly adapted to 
 Mary the Mother ("la generatrice ") of God. However, owing to 
 the frequent change of t into S in Coptic, somebody might believe 
 that theodokos stands for theotokos (©eoTo/cos, Deipara); but 
 this cannot be so here, because the latter epithet is given to Mary 
 immediately after, in its Coptic form trefjpenwte; and therefore 
 it would be a useless repetition of the same title". 
 
 The argument on the score of " useless repetition" is utterly 
 worthless, for nothing is commoner than just this habit of adding 
 the Coptic meaning to a Greek word used ; but when it is recollected 
 that this passage occurs in a declaration of faith against the Arians, it 
 seems needless to do more than quote his note. 
 
 59. I shall conclude this " Text" with one more example [61, 1]: 
 
 e^e IT na arike Sii propenso 
 
 eptaeke je al povero, perehe 
 
 miif sope nnaet non e felice. 
 
 eie w petnasope Che com sara 
 
 mprmmao ef ka del ricco, che pone 
 
 uwb ejn nwb oro sopra oi'o 
 
 santw rsebe sino a che arrugginisca? 
 
 "Be kindly disposed to the poor, because he is not happy" : so runs 
 Prof. Rossi's version of the above text. 
 
 There is not a particle of sense in it, in reference to the context, 
 and no justification for it from the Coptic words. The words mean: 
 "if there is a charge (a cause of blame) against the poor man, that 
 he has not been merciful", esje wn arike epheke , "in that case, 
 eie, what shall befall the rich &c." If the poor is blameworthy for 
 not having shown mercy, what will befall the rich? The word 
 arike, ahia, /ic/ii/rw, &c., is a common Coptic word ; but instead of 
 this the editor has had recourse, in his helplessness, to the imperative 
 particle a, prefixed in a quite unwarrantable way to the root rike, 
 "to bend", which had to be twisted to mean "be kind to"; and 
 then the word naet, "merciful", had to be rendered "happy", 
 in order to make a suitable maxim : 
 
 " be thou kind to the poor, because he is not happy" (! !). 
 
Atkinson— Ow Frof. Rossi's South- Coptic Texts. 49 
 
 60. Witli the tliird Text in this Fasciculus I do not propose to 
 deal in detail, but shall give one specimen of his text. It occurs in 
 his 6th Fragment [70, 13] : 
 
 seo' gar nblle nci neplanos etmmau nthe etfmwwt 
 mmow nci psatanas. saujihbr (?) gar bos aggelos nte 
 pwoein santfexapta mphet nnibalbSt nete watau mmau 
 inpeabSt efo' none. 
 
 Of the whole of this passage he does not translate a single -word, 
 and the reason plainly is found in his confessed ignorance of saujihbr. 
 There are other mistakes of reading in his text, but that word was 
 the bugbear. 
 
 It is just the inversion of letters, of which we have already had 
 an example above ; just as obr should have been orb, so here 
 hbf should have been hfb, "forma", "shape". Then we have 
 to read not sau, but saf, which his papyrus assuredly has, and 
 and thus we get iafjihrb, "he assumes a form", for it is nothing 
 but the /leraa-x'lij.aTi^eTaL of 2 Cor. xi. 14. 
 
 The version is quite plain: " for blind are those erring ones, like 
 those whom Satan slays [nthe nnet . . .] ; for he is wont to assume 
 a form as an angel of light, till he deceives [reading exapata, of 
 course, E^oiraTa-] the heart of the simple, whose hearts are of stone"- 
 
 IV. 
 
 The third Fasciculus (1885) contains three texts: part of the 
 life of the anchorite Aphoio ; incidents bearing on the story of 
 Eudoxia, especially the vision enjoining on her to seek Christ's 
 tomb; and a portion of a panegyric on John the Baptist. As to 
 the first, M. EevUlout is again the occasion of heart-searchings to 
 Prof. Eossi, for what he deems the unsatisfactory edition of the 
 French Savant: "so numerous are the alterations of the text, that 
 I have felt bound, in the interest of science, to republish it in its 
 integrity, &c.", Pref. p. 3. 
 
 I should never complete my task were I to set down all the errors 
 that deform Prof. Eossi's version; the tenses are translated in the 
 vague way that Egyptologists have familiarized us with : noi non 
 osiamo, for " we have not been able to dare " [8 y 19] ; onde io nefui 
 moUo afflitto, for " so that they were greatly grieved" [9 y 21] ; the 
 omission altogether of the words auo mpe kelaau saje [10 a 25], 
 
 E.I.A. PEOC, SEE. III., VOL. IH. E 
 
50 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 though he reproves M. Eevillout for reading something else, &o. 
 These minor offences must be left unscheduled, though it is not 
 without interest to see how the desire to "better" M. Eevillout's 
 text seems at times to have distracted Prof. Kossi's attention from 
 the consideration of his own ; e. gr. 
 61. [11/3 7]: 
 
 woeik ea pkah 
 
 im pcme chi 
 
 taaof ebol 
 
 ha prodotto 
 
 auo eutoc mmof 
 
 e cotto 
 
 hn whase 
 
 a ttento. 
 
 Here he is careful to say that the words auo eutoc "are wanting 
 in Revillout's transcription", but he is not careful of his own version : 
 " a loaf, which the earth has produced and cooked with effort". The 
 earth had not cooked it, anyhow ; the words are not so vague : they 
 mean, "the earth has brought it forth, and (men) do cook it," eutoc 
 mmof, as plainly as any language could state it. 
 
 62. [14y 16]: 
 
 " As the Saviour said to the apostles", 
 
 etetStn (sic) ketteutn eonvertiUvi 
 
 Stetnrthe nniseresem e fate come i fanciuUi. 
 
 It never apparently occurred to him to look for the words which 
 our Saviour did make use of, and so he rendered "be ye converted, 
 and do as the children", contenting himself with a (sic) after the 
 word tn. But even so, how he extracted an imperative out of the 
 prefix etetn, I cannot imagine. The tn was wrong: it should have 
 been tm, the negative, giving the perfectly regular Coptic word, 
 "if ye be not converted, and become as little children", Matth. 
 xviii. 3. 
 
 63. And now we get an example of another order of error, which 
 divides the words of the text wrongly [17/3 15] : 
 
 ektmbolt efool se t-u non scioffU me 
 
 inpanas dal giuramento, 
 
 Stakmort Shetf con eui mi hai legato, 
 
 tieire mmok io ti faodo 
 
 Ssmso (sic) straniero 
 
 eptoh mterf affatto al movimento 
 
 Snekhristianos dei GHstiani ^c. 
 
 "If thou free me not from the oath with which thou hast bound me, 
 
Atkinson — On Prof. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 51 
 
 I make thee altogether stranger to the movement of the Christians here 
 and hereafter". But mterf does not mean affatto, " entirely ", nor 
 anything else: affatto would be epterf, and even so, it would 
 be out of place. And the word rendered movimento has no right of 
 existence here either, for it is not toh, but tohm ; what the text 
 said was ptohm terf, " the whole convocation of Christians" ! 
 
 Shortly after he omits from his version half a column of con- 
 siderable interest. He translates [19 j8 4]: "no woman dared to 
 present herself to him for matrimony, who had ornaments of gold". 
 
 "Why a woman should be hindered from adorning herself with her 
 finery when she was going to be married does not appear. Had the 
 good bishop no disturbances in his diocese that he should promulgate 
 such an edict ? And besides, what says the Scripture ? Cf. Jerem. 
 ii. 32, me wn wseleet naf pobs mpekosmos etaaf eros. 
 
 The word used is ji, " to take ", and does not refer to marriage, 
 but to taking the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ, as in 
 line 15; and the edict prescribed that the deacons should not allow 
 [)8 29] the women in to the sacrament unless they were modestly 
 attired, " viz. covering their face and hands, their garments not to be 
 of purple of the wool-dyer, or their XP'"/*" resplendent, and themselves 
 XafiTTpov ", all of which Prof. Eossi has left out, though he is careful 
 to blame M. Eevillout for reading Xa/xirpos instead of Xafiirpov ! 
 
 64. In the second Text we come upon the following : The King 
 Diocletian said to him, Brother Constantino, king of justice, pardon 
 me, for thou hast spoken with me many times in secret, saying 
 [23 y 21]: 
 
 sabok ebol nneidolon guardati dagli idoli 
 
 mflaon pn^te e non dot Dio 
 
 Snehhristianos dei Cristiani 
 
 [najanekhe mmok an 
 
 Steihe sabol 
 
 Of what service could it have been to say : " keep thyself from idols, 
 and not from the God of the Christians " ? And what has become of 
 all the rest of the clause ? He has utterly emptied the passage of all 
 meaning; mmon does not mean, "and not"; it means, "if not", 
 el Se fi.rj ; and the passage should have stood thus : 
 
 " keep thyself from idols ; if not, the God of the Christians 
 will not tolerate thee in this way for ever". 
 
 E 2 
 
52 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 65. Here again we have the old ignorance of the right word 
 where his text was obviously faulty. At [34y 10] is a passage 
 which he has rendered: "we ordain that every man should carry 
 the rubbish of his house towards the place of this Nazarene". 
 
 That is mere guessing, for his text, as he has edited and emended 
 it, shows that no light had dawned upon him as to its real construction. 
 Thisishis text[34y 10]: 
 
 rome nim etnanejStS(P) mpefei eb[oIh]S netSji 
 elaau ntopos nsa ptopos mpinaxoraios. 
 
 Here there are three egregious errors; for netnji has no meaning 
 of any kind, ebolhn is quite impossible, and etnanejntn could 
 not even be tortured into a semblance of meaning. It was not ntn, 
 but eitn, "dung", "who shall fling the dung of his house out", 
 ebol; and then the 5 should have been prefixed to the next word : 
 nnetnji, "ye shall not take (it anywhere else than, &c.)", i.e. 
 not 
 
 etnanejntn mpefei ebolhn netnji 
 
 but, _ 
 
 etnancj eitn mpefei ebol, nnetnji, &c. 
 
 66. What can be the reason for his rendering euhek, "shaved", 
 instead of "girt" [36a 16], "eunuchs according to their custom 
 thaved &iiA ready to execute orders" ? Or the sense of conjecturing 
 61m [36 y 13], and translating, "he embraced her" ? There is no 
 such verb as 61m ehwn; it was 61 ehwn, "he brought her in ". 
 And why does he put sie at the word nesiwr [35 y 13] and trans- 
 late "her eunuchs", when the text had, quite rightly, "the eunuchs 
 and the virgins"? And where is the justification for publishing the 
 following translation of the text given at [39 a 20] : 
 
 tenw ce town and now arise 
 
 nteanakborei ne and retire 
 
 ebwn epwtamion into thy chamber 
 
 je afp nau \jl and perfonn] 
 nnwsynaxis thy o-wafeij (eommuniom) 
 
 nto mn nwsbrpartbenos thou and thy fellovo-nrgina. 
 
 Now, here there was very good ground for putting a (?) after the 
 words aff nau, which certainly are not of obvious meaning. But 
 he has slurred over the whole passage thus: "now then arise and 
 go to thy business with thy damsels ", va alle tue faooende colle tue 
 don%elleQ.) 
 
Atkinson— Ow Prof. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 53 
 
 67. In continuation of this passage, he makes another impossible 
 emendation [39 a z] : 
 
 " I shall assemble all the magnates and bid them 
 
 etreas[a]te /(M;on«(?) quelU 
 
 nnetnSu nmme ehe andrcmno con ie." 
 
 What sote may be presumed to mean, I cannot guess, and indeed 
 fmorire was not clear to himself, as he puts his (?) after it. The 
 word that «AoM?<? have been conjectured was sobte, " to prepare " : 
 " I shall bid the magnates prepare those who are going with thee ". 
 
 68. His version of the lines beginning at [42 a 33] runs thus : 
 "oh ye chief among the Jews, ye whose blindness is not measurable, 
 and ye counsel the world to remain blind. And so it was necessary 
 for me to take them away from your guidance, because ye are fools ". 
 
 I do not quite understand what he intended to mean by this 
 " version ", bat it is plain that he thinks it is the true meaning, for 
 he says in his note : "in the rendering of this passage I have adhered 
 rather to the sense [than to the words] ". 
 
 Very well ; we shall see. The passage runs thus : 
 
 d nnoc nniwdai o grandi fra i Giudei 
 
 nai ete mpsrastw I voi, la cut cecitd 
 
 5ci teumntblle ( non e miaurabile, 
 
 alia tetnjisojne e consigliate 
 
 etoikwmene il mondo 
 
 eaas nblle a rimaner cieco. 
 
 ne [p]etcsse gar erpi pe Eppero era necessario a me 
 
 et e nnetns[aa]r 
 
 entw ebolhn tetSape di toglierli dalla vostra guida, 
 
 Je Stetn benatsipe poiche siete degli scempi. 
 
 Here note first the translation of lines 2 and 3 : he took rastw to be 
 a neuter verb, meaning, " to be measurable ". Now rast can be 
 found in the Copt.-Lat. lexicon, with an assigned meaning, eom- 
 mensttrari, whatever that delightful Latin word may mean ; but, how 
 about plural suffix -w? It has nothing to do with "measurable"; 
 it means " suffice them ", being the irregular pronominal form of the 
 verb rose, "to suffice"; so that the statement was, "[ye are] 
 persons whose (own) blindness did not suffice them, but ye are taking 
 counsel against the whole world, to make it blind also". 
 
 So much for the persons addressed. Now for the substance of the 
 address. Eudoxia had summoned the high priests, in order to extract 
 
54 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 information from them as to the position of Christ's tomb ; but 
 Prof. Rossi could not guess even the drift of her speech, because of 
 the lacuna in h . . . e: it was hooke, " to shave, scrape". Then 
 ape meant simply " head ", not " guidance ". And now the omitted 
 line assumes an intelligible appearance : "it would have been fitting 
 for me to scrape your skins, to bring them [the hairs] out of your 
 head, because ye are shameless" ; cf. No. 114. 
 
 Prof. Eossi says that the papyrus is here " so damaged that he 
 cannot guarantee the faithfulness of the transcription"; but it is 
 still clear enough even in his text to exhibit with tolerable certainty 
 the drift of Eudoxia's address, which obviously is not expressed in 
 the words : " t< was necessary for me to take them away from your 
 
 In the third Tdxt the vagueness or absence of translation is just as 
 frequently felt. Here e. gr. in a single page of translation are five 
 objections which cannot be set aside lightly : — 
 
 69. He speaks of John the Baptist as appearing at the Second 
 Coming of Christ, " as a forerunner [un foriere~\ sanctifying thy way"; 
 now as the text has [63 a 27] : 
 
 nthe Swmitator eftbbo ntebie^ 
 
 one would have expected a note showing whence he obtained foriere 
 as a rendering for mitator ? It seems much more likely to be the 
 Latin metator, Tertullian's " metator initii et finis". 
 
 But passing this, which is of minor consequence, what are we 
 to say of a translation like the following : "He will be clad in 
 vestments and stoles which the angels will adorn with great joy" ? 
 There is not a word about the angels adorning the stoles in the Coptic 
 text [63)S23]: fcoole tenw nndyma mn nestole mS naggelos 
 efstolize hn wnoc Erase, "he is clad now with the ivSv/iora 
 and the o-roXoi of the angels, while he is adorning himself with great 
 joy". His text has no meaning as it stands, for the mn before 
 naggelos is impossible : delete the m and prefix the 5, nnaggelos, 
 "of the angels"; and then efstolize has its due force, "Ae is 
 dressing", not " they will adorn". 
 
 Or, what is gained by rendering, " the souls of sinners made 
 reluctant by the pains inflicted to reassume their bodies", [63 y 9] 
 where the text says : euanaspa mmow hn nkolasis etaau ehwn 
 eneusoma, "which are dragged [dj/oern-au] with tortures [xoXao-ts] 
 to put them into their bodies". 
 
Atkinson — On Prof. Eossi's South-Coptic Texts. bb 
 
 His version on p. 105 is very unsatisfactory, but I cannot go 
 through the whole. He seems to have no " feeling " for the 
 exigencies of the sense, and often divides the sentences quite at 
 random. Thus he gives : 
 
 " "We did not yesterday pass in silence the honour of the greatest 
 prophet and martyr John the Baptist. But the birthday of a perse- 
 cutor or rather of an executioner, know ye my dear brethren, that a 
 little bitter damages a perfect honey. But this bitter &c." What 
 could have induced him to construct that second sentence ? " "We 
 were not silent about the honouring of John, but about the birthday 
 of Herod. Te know that a little bitter &c., but this bitter &c.". 
 Then, in the next clause, he runs two sentences into one (after 
 Kar6p6u>im., per gli atti suoi di virtH nel modo col quale &o.), which are 
 not thus closely connected in the text. 
 
 The whole of the text in 66 y 13-26 is passed over without any 
 attempt at version or explanation ; and even where the translation is 
 resumed, the reader could not guess from it the drift of the text. 
 Thus he gives : Questi parteoipa del nuovo, e pa/rteeipa dell' antico, 
 where the Coptic has [67 a 16] aftahe tkaine, aftahe tpalaia, 
 where the point is the conjunction of the Old and JVew Testaments, 
 Kaivri and TraXaia, in the prophecy concerning John the Baptist, 
 Malachi iii. 1 and Matth. xi. 10 iSou iyi> airoa-TiXXta tov ayycXov 
 
 JU.OU &c. 
 
 70. Then compare text and translation here [64 a z] : 
 
 ere wnoc nklauthmos sard un grande 
 
 efos goop abondante picmto, 
 
 mi>e won sope Stef he ne cesserd 
 
 jintaa sor ebol Jinohe non sia divelto 
 
 nSsnte ntoikwmene dalle fondamenta il mondo. 
 
 One wonders at the ingenuity of the perversion : sinners indulging 
 in a vast weeping, " which will not cease till the world has been tojn 
 'from the foundations" ! Was it to cease then ? 
 
 The Coptic writer was not so instructed, and his text says nothing 
 of the sort: mpe is not future, \>\A past; jintau does not mean 
 "<»7Z", but "since"; and won ntefhe has a very definite meaning, 
 " anything of the kind ", so that what the writer said was : "a vast 
 '' weeping, the like of which was never from the time that the 
 foundations of the earth were laid." The verb sor ebol means to 
 "stretch out"; cf. Num. ii. 34 neusor ebol pe nteihe, "they 
 in this way", ovtio jropeve^aXov ; Job xxxviii. 5 nim 
 
56 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 
 
 pentafsf whoseb ejof, "■w'ho stretched &\mB-w^on it", ohrayaymv 
 a-TraprCov; Prov. xxix. 5 efnasorf enefwerete mmin mmof, "he 
 spreads it (the net) for his own feet", TrepijSoWet avro ; 2 Eeg. vi. 19 
 Sie/j.epio-e ; Ps. xxvi. 3 iraparafiyTat &c. 
 
 His mistake arose from his titter misconception of the function 
 of the 5 after ehol, — the mystery of the connexive particle after the 
 absolute ioTm. sor. 
 
 71. Probably the Professors of natural history •wUl be interested 
 in the following piece of information furnished by the translation of 
 the text at [71 a z], in speaking of the camel, viz. : 
 
 fsatb nteftrophe sceglie il suo nutrimmio 
 
 nthe nStbnowe terw come tutti gli animali 
 
 etwaab puri. 
 
 "The camel selects its nourishment like all pure animals"! Here 
 the Terb is satb, which I suppose the editor to have taken to be a 
 form of sotp, "to choose": what form, I cannot imagine. But as 
 there is a verb satbe, "to chew the end," it does not need to be 
 argued that this was what the Copt intended, cf . Lev. xi. 3 ; Deut. 
 xiv. 6. 
 
 72. The whole of this page, 107, is very badly done. There are, 
 indeed, a few lacunae in the papyrus, but the translation is much worse 
 than the state of the original justifies or makes pardonable. He begins 
 the next clause thus [71j8 8] : Ze privazioni adunque, che il profeta 
 Giovanni si impose, furono fatte per fimore dell' appoggio dei demoni, 
 che distrugge la puritd. In order to get this he has to read: nfoce 
 wn nta I. ta . . . u hioof, rendered "the privations which he im- 
 posed upon himself". But the text says nothing whatever of foce, 
 "privations'', for 1°, foce does not mean "privations", and 2°, it is 
 not foce ! The writer was talking of John's camel-hair garments, 
 and the nfo was the dependent genitive on the hbso of the preceding 
 lacuna, "a garment of hair", the ce being a particle (-- 8jJ, cti, 
 ToCvw &c.), which immediately follows; so that the words meant, 
 " the teV garments which John ^M^ o» Am», taau hioof. 
 
 73. The next words are quite wrong also, for the text has ausope 
 euhote mpestereoma nndaimon, cannot mean " they were made 
 through fear of the support of the demons", but "they lecame a terror 
 of the u-Tcpeiofia of the demons ". And the words following in the 
 
Atkinson— 0» Frof. Eossi's South- Coptic Texts. 57 
 
 next line do not mean " he was purified in his holy flesh ", but " they 
 (the garments) were purified by his holy flesh ". And directly after, 
 the words meusont ehtes do not mean " nor is respect paid to it " 
 (such a garment), nh si inchina ad essa. I am quite at a loss to read 
 this back into the text, for sont means "to weave", and hte-s 
 means " its tip ", and I shall leave the explanation of that riddle 
 to the author ! 
 
 74. And just after, we get the words [y 8] meuf sa' uhets hn 
 wmntlampros translated by ne si sente compassione di essa nello 
 splendore. Utterly wide of the mark ; and how obtained ? It is 
 hardly credible, but Prof. Eossi must absolutely have taken the 
 word to be sanhtef, "compassionate", and so renders, " one does 
 not feel compassion for it ", for the camel's-hair garment (!). And 
 that by an inconceivable congeries of impossibilities. First, sanhtef, 
 is the adjective, whereas the verb is senhtef , cf. Ps. Ixxvi. 10, 
 xxxvi. 21, iv. 1 ; Prov. xxi., 26 ; Jerem. xiii. 14 ; Mic. vii. 19 ; but 
 this is a small matter. For how could it be = sanhets ? how 
 could it be het ? or -s ? or sa' n with the comma ? or rsa' n, with 
 the auxiliary r ? And what sense is extracted from it, with all these 
 infractions of Coptic structure? 
 
 The words should have been meufsa nhets, "they do not 
 celebrate festivities in it," in such a dress. 
 
 75. The succeeding lines are, if possible, worse, and the conjectures 
 void of insight into the meaning or knowledge of the language. Tt is 
 impossible to correct everything ; I should require a book. The last 
 line of the column ends with this conjecture: peprophetes etwaab 
 [aau]eid6s ebol je, &o. But the editor, though he makes the 
 conjecture aau, has no idea of its meaning, for he does not translate 
 it. The words should have been Daueid 6s, and mean, "the holy 
 prophet David cried out", the quotation (which the editor knows 
 nothing of) being Ps. xxxiv. 13. 
 
 76. The page following [72 y] is omitted in the translation, with 
 a note stating that the text is obscure, and " a literal translation of 
 it does not appear to be possible" &c. But the very words of hi& 
 note show that he had not grasped the conditions of the problem, for 
 he speaks of " the words of St. Peter, who said : arm yourselves with 
 the thought of death ", and then his note ends with this quotation : 
 hook mmotn hm pimeeue, ending with a fuU stop! But his 
 own text [73 a 7] had the real words, which are of course the correct 
 and literal version of 1 Pet. iv. 1, all of which he has ignored in hi& 
 version. 
 
58 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 77. The construction of adjectives is just as little understood, for 
 he gives [73 P 1] : 
 
 nag^gelos mpnwte gli angeli di Dio, 
 
 benatmw ne[t]e luer che non sono mortali, si legano 
 
 nhenmajh Satt»ko con cingoli incorruttibili. 
 
 The emendation shows that his construction of the clause is quite 
 faulty: henatmw is the predicative form before the copula ne, 
 which is assuredly not to be emended into nete , but the final e is 
 for semer, " they are bound". To edit nete mer is to make the 
 sentence incapable of being analysed. 
 
 78. It is quite a misapprehension to speak of the locusts eaten by 
 John the Baptist in these terms, "nor are fhejmore tender than&esh.", 
 for the words are [74 a 23] nwtrypheron an pe nte tsarx, 
 i.e., "nor are they a rpvcftepov of the flesh" : eating locusts is not a 
 gratification of bodily lust of eating. But indeed the whole passage, 
 with its "application" of the meaning of the wild honey &c.j is a 
 failure, which will have to be re-edited and properly translated. The 
 concluding paragraph, p. 108, 16, * mari tutti si commossero, le lingue 
 tutte parlarono contro &c., is unsatisfactory, and the last section, 
 "they bowed down their heads, like the beasts, because i'kej fea/red 
 Herod", is yet worse, for that is not the construction of fhote, 
 " to fear", and " King Herod" belongs to the next clause ! 
 
 79. The following passage he has omitted with as being 
 
 too difficult [797 17]: 
 
 taas epgazopbylaklon iiiibeke je ere wna tahok 
 mn wrpmeene nwoeig uim mpmto ebol mpnwte 3 tipw (P) 
 nnsomnt mparis[. . .]n mpekhwmise nnetrcrob [. . . .]ere 
 ivtaeio sdpe nak. 
 
 The (?) after tipw is the usual confession of ignorance of Coptic 
 structure, and has brought about the omission of any translation of 
 the whole passage. Yet it ought not to have been such an unsur- 
 mountable object to an Egyptologist, for it is simply the Coptic form 
 of the fraction to express " the one-third" ! 
 
 p-wn nsomnt, ^^ the third". 
 
 [The fact is that the abs. won is rarely used in the Bible, where 
 it is generally found in the construct form wn, though wne is used 
 too; cf. Lev. xiv. 21 wne met = "one-tenth"; Lev. xxvii. 15 
 pwen(!) tiw, "one-fifth"; Lev. xxvii. 19 p-wen ntiw ; Ezek. 
 
Atkinson— Ow Prof. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 59 
 
 V. 2 w5 Sftow, " one-f ourtli " ; Zect. xiii. 8 p-wne somnt , 
 (2 Eeg. xviii. 2), but pwE nsomSt, Zech. xiii. 9.] Then the trans- 
 lation would be as foUows : 
 
 " give the one-third of the apurrov of thy birthday 
 to those who are in need, so that ( j e ) there shall be 
 an honour to thee." 
 
 Even the logic one fancies would have forced on his notice the 
 translation that was to be sought for in the words ! Tet he stops 
 short just at the point where the passage becomes interesting : — 
 
 " The King said to her : ' ask me what thou wilt, and I shall 
 give it to thee, even to the half of my kingdom'. Oh foolish Herod, 
 wilt thou covenant to give the half of thy kingdom to a dancing girl ? 
 Give it to the treasury of the poor, and mercy and remembrance shall 
 attend thee ever from God ; [why, even] give the third of thy birthday 
 banquet to the needy, and it shall be to thee an honour!" 
 
 Everywhere the rhetorical contrasts suggesting the meaning, every- 
 where the words of the writer as plain as a language of pellucid 
 structure can make them ; but Prof. Eossi has neither understood the 
 words, nor felt the contrasts, but has let fall over the passage the 
 asterisk-dotted Veil of Isis. 
 
 The fourth Fasciculus (1886) contains two Texts, the life of 
 St. Hilarion, and the martyrdom of St. Ignatius ; th.e former a Coptic 
 version of St. Jerome's "Vita S. Hilarionis ", but, as Peyron says, 
 " a graeca versioue Sophronii". The Coptic text has an excellent 
 clue to its reconstruction in the Latin Vita, so that there was not 
 needed much ingenuity in ascertaining the meaning. But the editor's 
 knowledge of the vocabulary of Coptic is here too exhibited in an un- 
 favourable light. I have not thought it worth while to go minutely 
 through the text, but there cannot be any doubt that much is wrong, 
 even with all helps, and that the Latin is really the source of portions 
 of the translation which the Coptic text does not warrant. 
 
 What makes the matter worse is that Prof. Eossi announces in his 
 Preface his intention to exhibit to the reader of his translation the 
 differences of the Coptic and the Latin original, by printing in italics the 
 parts he has supplied from the Latin Life. But in reality that is not 
 properly done, nor anything like it ; for the version, p. 83 foot, has a 
 long passage in italics, which is largely found in the Coptic text 
 
60 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 [26 y], and the first page of his version, p. 77, gives at least a dozen 
 phrases or clauses which are not in the Coptic text. 
 
 80. The very first lines of this Coptic text are given wrongly,, 
 and without note or (?), and the translation is neither from the Latin 
 nor the Coptic : 
 
 " ecco un demone in forma d'uomo saltargli sul dorso, e 
 percuotendo &c." 
 
 I do not know whence he has this ' demon in human shape', for the 
 Latin has : insiliit dorso ejus festinus gladiator, and the Coptic text, 
 which is quite unintelligible as he has given it, reads thus : 
 
 afoinkf ehrai he leapt [ecco saliarglil 
 ejii tefjise on his hack [sul dorso']. 
 n.ei w.niiikhos 
 
 "WTiat is to be made of the last line ? It is clear that the Editor had 
 no notion whatever, but there is no warning given of difB.culty either 
 in text or translation. The Coptic was probably 
 
 nthe nw -'rjvi:o\os 
 
 "like a driver, he leapt on his back, dug his heels into his flanks, 
 and struck his head." 
 
 81. On the same page [7y foot], his text gave him a word iof , 
 concerning which he has composed a note as follows: "the words 
 tcowne de ethioof mpfsofs eneh (&c.) are the literal transla- 
 tion of St. Jerome's saccumque semel fuerat iudutus, nunquam 
 lavans (&c.)"; a note leading to his observation: "as an instance 
 of words with a new meaning I note specially the root sof , which 
 in the dictionaries of Peyron and others is rendered destruere, desolare, 
 and in our text evidently means lavare". 
 
 But that is reducing the Coptic text to the position of a mere 
 word-for-word rendering, which it is not. And if it comes to 
 dictionaries, we find mutare also given as the meaning of sof, and 
 that meaning is quite close enough here: "he did not change his 
 sackcloth"; so that the "new meaning" asserted is certainly not 
 proved by this quotation. 
 
 82. At [9 a 18], the translation exhibits the same vagueness, for 
 there is no attempt to interpret coj nf sahpf , though it is evidently 
 the Copt's explanation of Jerome's sorbitiunculae ; of. Ezek. xxxiv. 3 
 eis perote atetnsahpf, iSoii to yd.\a KaTiarOere . 
 
Atkinson — On Prof. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 61 
 
 83. Neither will the following text and translation bear analysis 
 [9 a 25] :— 
 
 tai ce te the ( questo fu Vordme di vita 
 
 ntaQek [tt]axiB e[bal ( che egli segui 
 
 { 
 
 pef]bi[os si 
 
 The last line is not translated, and as he has emended it, is untrans- 
 lateable, for most assuredly it does not mean, " the order of life which 
 he followed": pefbios is not dependent on taxis, and si has no 
 meaning at all ! 
 
 84. And what objection does he find in the phrase seos an, 
 [12 a 32], that he should append hereto his query? Did he doubt 
 that OS was the ^re«e»< stem of asai , "to become numerous", and 
 that seos an means " they are not numerous " ? 
 
 85. And here also [17 y 4] he has misconceived the original and 
 slurred over the difficulties of his own text : 
 
 tote petmmau mentre quegli 
 
 afos ebol gridava 
 
 af ork c soongimrava, 
 
 mpefmakh 
 
 afhiwe epkah hattendo la terra 
 
 ntefape col capo. 
 
 But mpefmakh means "his neck" and may not be omitted, so 
 that it is evident that his scongiurava cannot stand : the word was 
 rike, "to lend", and not ork "to swear". The Latin original 
 plainly says : " cumque iUe ejularet, et reflexa cervice terram vertice 
 tangeret". And whence does he get his "clamore veniente da 
 /wwyj ", as a version of neu ebol, [18 a 2]? 
 
 86. Again, [22^ 12]: 
 
 esjnwte chiamando 
 
 mpran mps^resSm il name del giovanetto, 
 
 eswdrp ebol 
 
 mpnoc nwds 
 
 mS pme mpsere sem 
 
 Stafei ehwn ehe venisss a lei. 
 
 The last line cannot be thus translated; it means "which has 
 entered". The omitted words explain it clearly: "uttering the 
 great desire and the love of the youth which had entered her 
 [heart]". The Latin might have been suggestive : magnitude quippe 
 amoris se in furorem verterat. 
 
62 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 87. On tlie next page we have a most comical perversion of the 
 original, set down without any note of douht or hesitancy. The 
 version is given thus: "said the demon, why should I enter into 
 him, who is already possessed hy another demon of the love called 
 Poligamo" ? 
 
 So Prof. Eossi : "the love called Polygamous ". 
 What is his text ? 
 
 (kedaimon) ete pme pe eumwte erof 
 je goleg^amos (sic). 
 
 "another demon, viz. Love, whom they call golegamos". The 
 last word is not intelligible as it stands, of course, so Prof. Eossi has 
 emended it, into TroA-wya/ios. The writers on Folk-lore might add to 
 their stock of vocables the name of a new demon. Polygamous, then ? 
 But, — there is the Latin original to be reckoned with ; and it has : 
 
 ut quid entrarem in eum, qui habebat 
 coLLEGAM MEUM amoris daemonem ? 
 
 so that the mysterious golegamos, was no doubt a Copticised 
 collega meus, and therewith the Polygamous demon is exorcised ! 
 
 88. And why has he left the text so, at [25 y foot], ntehieiabe 
 mme, seeing that it is plainly intended to mean, "the Lamb of 
 Truth ", being said of our Lord, te - hiaeibe. 
 
 89. An. entire column of his text, [26y 20] to [27a 30], is simply 
 paraphrased from the Latin, and the translation printed in italics, as 
 if the Coptic text were wanting ! 
 
 90. At [28 7 4] is another half -column of Coptic text which is 
 slurred over with serious omissions. The whole point of the passage 
 was the omitted reference to pswntowe [287 18] "the morning- 
 star", Zucifer, Venus, whom they worshipped, and the translation 
 given fails to convey the slightest idea of either mpe saein sope 
 nteihe [7I2], orof aslampeue ebol epehwo! 
 
 91. Again, he has given quite a wrong turn to the text at 
 [30 ^ foot] : 
 
 nefmoste nmmonakfaos deteatmia % monad, 
 
 etroeis che avevano soUeeitudine 
 
 enetsoop nau ( per le cose che 
 
 \ potevano loro aocadere. 
 
 But that is not the meaning : ' ' who were anxious concerning the evils 
 which might befal them", is certainly not the idea of the Coptic text, 
 
Atkinson — On Prof. Eossi's South-Coptic Texts. 63 
 
 "wliich means, "who were anxious about the property they had" , to 
 represent the Latin : in f uturum reservarent sua. 
 
 92. Nor is it possible to extract his translation out of the text 
 given at [32 y 3] : se non fosse questa eosa inutile, io verrei con te, 
 where the Copt writes: nereweu gar hm phob pe auo esje 
 neinaei nmme pe. 
 
 93. Again, at [34 y 29] the text says, " (he came to a little city 
 called) Aphroditon, that is to say FetpSh" ; but Prof. Eosei has left 
 out this native name, which is the Coptic abridgment of the Egyptian 
 name^fl neh tep ahe, p-etpeh, which the Arabs read atfih, cf. "Piankhi- 
 Meriamen" (p. 5, note '^, De Kouge). 
 
 94. So again [35 a 5], his text has: afmisthw nse ncamwl 
 nse hbes ete ndromas ne, but the version only says, "he hired 
 100 dromedaries". Now one would have liked to know what he got 
 out of the Coptic words, " camwl nse hbes, that is to say, Spo/*as"? 
 I do not think the words nse hbes bear a meaning: at least I do 
 not know any; it is not impossible that the papyrus has nsetbes, 
 " camels of head-binding ", " haltered camels ". In any case, this 
 word should not have been slurred over without notice. 
 
 95. Or, compare the text and translation at [36 a 10], in describ- 
 ing the caves in the rock into which Father Antony was wont to 
 retire to avoid the crowds of visitors : 
 
 eausetsotw erano scmate nella roceia 
 
 eankotw an e non si entrava 
 
 eimetei en vo mmate che per una sola porta. 
 
 " caves cut out in the rock, and into which one entered only by one 
 door". How many doors does one usually enter a place by, might 
 reasonably be asked ; but I want to know, where is the one door in 
 the Coptic? Did Prof. Kossi take the en before ro to be Iv ?? 
 But if language can say things clearly, it is the statement made, that 
 "they did not build them except the doors only"! There is no 
 non si entrava, and the word en ro must be e-nro, "the doors". 
 
 The Latin states distinctly : verum hse in vivo excises saxo, ostia 
 tantum addita habebant. 
 
 The next text is that of the martyrdom of St. Ignatius. Now, as 
 according to Prof. Eossi, p. 94, note('), "with the exception of this 
 
 (our Coptic text), all the other texts have been published in 
 
 [Lightfoot's] Apostolic Fathers", it is natural to add, as he does, that 
 his publication "will serve to fill up the gap left by that illustrious 
 scholar". Certainly, if it had been well done ; but it is not. For he 
 
64 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 has gone wrong in many passages in this small text, in spite of 
 having the Greek text to guide him ! Not only so ; but though 
 Lightfoot's text has the Biblical quotations in a different type of 
 Greek, so as to show that they are quotations. Prof. Eossi has ignored 
 that also, and made the wildest attempts at translation. 
 
 96. What could be plainer than the Coptic [53 y 7] : ko nsok 
 nteignome, "forsake this yviofitj" , which he has rendered, "obey 
 my order", in spite of the Coptic text and the Greek text /tei-a- 
 TiSe/AEVOs Trji yvwitijs toijtijs ? 
 
 97. And just below, he translates thus : " it is not fitting in order 
 to oltain favours, to hurt the soul", though his text is [53 y 17]: 
 nwpetesse an pe eti henkharis eunablaptei nwpsykhe, 
 i.e., "it is not fitting to give favours which will hurt the soul", 
 corresponding fairly with the Greek, y^dpira^ Set irape;^€iv rots fuj 
 
 P\a7TT0V(Tai {j/V)(TJV. 
 
 98. Even in the omissions, where one might have felt inclined to 
 •overlook a few slips as the result of mere inadvertence, he contrives 
 to deprive himself of all "benefit of clergy", by some unlucky note 
 or comment in his text, e. gr. [54 a 6] : 
 
 Zens pai) qitesto Giove, 
 
 etksEue erof di cui tu parli, 
 
 ntiiown an je io non eonoseo 
 
 WW (sic) mmlne pe — 
 
 Here, it it had not been for that dreadful (sic), one might have 
 forgiven the omission ; but the {sic) shows that he had no idea of the 
 text, which is absolutely correct, for the first w is the indef. art, 
 and the second w is the interrogative a^'., so that w.m-mine 
 means "of what kind", «'.«., w w.m-mine, " (I do not know) that 
 he is a person of what kind", " this Jove, I know not what manner 
 of being he is" : a quite normal and familiar construction. 
 99. The translation continues thus : 
 
 " ed il regno del mondo non desidero ; imperocehe qual 
 utile avrei ? Se io cercassi I' utile in questo mondo, 
 perderei la mia anima", "If I sought the useful in this 
 world, I should lose my soul". 
 
 I need not point out that such is not the thought expressed in the 
 Bible ; but neither is it possible to extract it from the Coptic, which 
 has simply, "if I should gain the whole world", eisantiheu 
 mpkosmos t^rf [54 o 16]. 
 
Atkinson — On Prof. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 65 
 
 100. And Hs last clause is wrong also [54 a 19], "for he has con- 
 jectured Hta[tak]e ntapsykhe, •which is utterly impossihle, as 
 take is the proclitic form : the word was, of course, tiose, "to 
 lose, be mulcted in", and has nothing to say to tako , " to destroy". 
 
 101. As on a previous passage, we find the word hooke wrongly 
 rendered, at [67 (3 27] : 
 
 booke nnefspirovre cingetegli i fiamchi 
 
 bn beneieib mpenipe di cingoli di ferro. 
 
 But what could be the appropriateness of such an order as this : 
 '■^ gird his flanks with girdles of iron, and cast salt on his wounds"? 
 The words mean : " scrape his sides with hoofs [hooks] of iron &c.", 
 answering to the Greek, tois owf i rets xXeupas avrov Kara^ai/aTE. 
 
 102. At [58 a 5] we have a passage concerning which we are left 
 in complete darkness. Here Prof. Rossi has simply "borrowed" the 
 Greek in his translation : " (are we to sacrifice) to the infernal Pluto" ? 
 The Greek text, xdovita UXo-irwi, is here calmly inserted, without 
 any indication in the version that the Coptic words were, to Mm, an 
 unknown quantity: nna ton euspet (?) [epjes^t m[pk]ah. 
 That is the state in which he has left his text, though he had the 
 Greek to give him the clue : he has simply set forth the letters with 
 an appended (?). The exact shape of his printed text is as follows, 
 with the correction : 
 
 . una e n Ai 
 
 ton euspet (p) Savevs 
 
 [ep]eset m p-et-hipeset m 
 
 [pk]ah p&ah. 
 
 i.e. the text was : 
 
 ^ n-a'iSwvev's p-ethipeset mpkah, 
 " or to Aidoneus [Pluto] who is under the earth = x&ovioi. 
 
 Of this identity, Prof. Eossi had not the remotest idea ! 
 
 103. Again, he translates at [58^ 28] : 
 
 nsnaanekbe an eteb non eonfonderd mat 
 
 tme mn pcol Ici veritd eolla menzogna. 
 
 Just so ; because the Greek has ov o-vyKpivei rrj dh^Oeiq, to i/'eSSos. 
 But his mai, "never" [cf. 66a 2], shows that he did not under- 
 stand it: he read eneh, "for ever", whereas it is e-teh, "to 
 mix", in the proclitic form : " it will not tolerate (di'cxe"') to mix 
 the truth with the lie". 
 
 E.I.A. PEOC, SER. III., VOL. III. ' 
 
66 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 104. The Greek text in fact occasionally telps him to go astray, 
 so that I am inclined to think that his use of Lightfoot's name is no 
 guarantee that he thought it worth while to keep by his side the 
 learned prelate's book. The following will illustrate this [60 18 4] : 
 
 anon de aatinomos nan a noi i fatta Ugge 
 
 etmka neipharmag^os di non prendere farmaci 
 
 eonh per la vita 
 
 e refmwte o da ineantatori, o Ije. 
 
 One C£in fancy the horror of Bp. Lightfoot at reading such a trans- 
 lation: "it is made a law to us not to take medicines for {our) life 
 either from incantators or from diviners" ! The text says nothing 
 of the sort ; it says : " not to allow ^ajo/uaKoi to live", exactly as the 
 Greek has : 
 
 fiixlv 8e viVOiJ,oder7]Tai <j>ap fi.aKOv<s [irj iav ^rjv. 
 
 Did Prof. Bossi think <l>apiJuiK6i was the same as iftdp/uiKov ? 
 
 105. The editor continues with his ignorance of Coptic verb- 
 government, just as in the first Fasciculus. At [61 y 4] we have : 
 
 nfnafhSu laau an a nulla riesce, 
 
 eimetei etreube erof ma cade per avere 
 
 efmise mn pnwte combattuto contra Bio. 
 
 It is the old blunder of rendering he, "to fall", whereas it is he "to 
 find", and the words mean : "he will gain nothing except to let 
 them (folk) find him [= to be found] fighting with God ", ovhev irXcov 
 avTia vvap^ei r] to aeo/iap^oi/ civat . 
 
 106. At [62 a 25] is an omission: "heresy is a fantasy, a heart 
 which errs, paying worship to its own thoughts", 
 
 nwhob an ad una cosa che non 
 
 efmpsa nt[a]ei[of ] i degna d!essere onorata, 
 
 Stbe nthairesis come I'eresia 
 
 nswtm[. . . .]ras 
 
 nnepikvrrioB degli epicurei. 
 
 Here he has put the negative wrong in the first line : "to its own 
 thoughts alone, not to a thing worthy &c." ; and in the second clause 
 he has entirely omitted the fourth line, which was adjectival to 
 "heresy", viz. swtmros " worthy to shut its mouth "," the heresy 
 whose mouth should be shut". 
 
Atkinson— Ow Pw/. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 67 
 
 107. The quotations from the Bihle are even here a difficulty to 
 the editor; e.gr. at [66/3 21] are two quotations, given in spaced 
 letters by Lightfoot, is Se'pptv i^eretvev, and ois Kafidpav iTrr/^tv, 
 which are literally rendered by the Copt : 
 
 (af )porgs ebol 5the nwhbo disteee a guisa di un lenzmlo ; 
 
 aftajros 5the awkepe [sic). e lo rese fermo eome un mho. 
 
 That is, he translates hbo by lemuolo, "sheet", and kepe by cuho, 
 " cube ". He then gives a note stating that his text is " the exact 
 translation of the Greek text <us kv/Sov yjSpaa-ev", because he took 
 the Coptic kepe to be the Greek word KuySos. Thus both his words 
 are wrong, for kepe means camera, and hbo is certainly not " sheet", 
 but "tabernacle", o-KTJvr] (cf. Isai. 1. 8), just as the North Coptic 
 text here has aftajros 'mphreti 'nw skene. 
 
 108. And finally we have an old error at [71 y z], -where his text 
 reads, naosem Enetherion, rendered si sarebbe data alU flere, 
 while really the Coptic is a literal version of the Greek /leXAet 
 6r]pLoimxetv, " is about to _fiffht with wild beasts ", for it should be 
 naose mn netherion. 
 
 VI. 
 
 "We have now come to the fifth and last Fasciculus of the first 
 volume (1887), comprising Fragments of the Council of Nicsea, of the 
 Life of St. Athanasius, &c. 
 
 Now, in this Text, Prof. Eossi had the advantage of seeing his own 
 original, as transcribed by M. Eevillout, and printed along with the 
 Borgia text of the Vatican, as well as the Greek text of the Didascalia 
 ecexviii. Patrum pseudepigrapha, published by P. Batiftol, and which 
 Prof. Eossi says he used "in the interpretation of the incorrect and 
 obscure passages of the MS." But all the same, the version he has 
 given is certainly not what it should be, and the helps afforded by 
 the previous labourers have not been utilised to the full extent, as 
 may be seen from the following examples. 
 109. [11 o 24] : 
 
 senasine gov Ssa teientole ntootir nnentausope 
 enjose Shet nhets, 
 ** Imperocche questo precetto e seguito anche da guelli ehe sianno 
 in grado elevato." 
 
 But how is this to be got out of the Coptic ? Let us examine the 
 Greek : fijnj^iJo-eTai yap rj Toiavrr] ivToXr] irapa rSiv mepr)(j>aveacTd.VTU>v 
 
 F 2 
 
68 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 
 
 airrfiv. That is not a very intelligible sentence ; but it certainly does 
 not give anything like Prof. Eossi's version : " this precept is fol- 
 lowed by those who stand in high degree " ! This, indeed, is no 
 version of the Coptic, for the word ntootw is the Greek irapa, "at 
 the hands of", as the words senasine nsa are the equivalent of 
 i,7]Tr)drj(TiTai ; besides, the word josenhet means "elevated in 
 heart", "arrogant"; and so the Coptic really means: "this com- 
 mandment shall be required at the hands of those who have become 
 high-minded in it "- 
 
 The Vatican text simply says: "this commandment shall be 
 required at thy hand", ntootk. 
 
 110. The Vatican text he has at times simply translated, when 
 his own text was unmanageable. Thus, at [11 y 26] : 
 
 auo netkslel e pregherai 
 
 nmmau an. eon essi 
 
 esope wH[c]om 
 
 khoris hairetikos ad eccessiom perb degli eretici. 
 
 Here his translation is from M. Eevillout's text, ngslel nmmau satn 
 nhairetikos ; it certainly does not correspond with his own, which 
 must mean: "(thou shalt be at peace with every one) and not 
 [merely] with those thou art praying with, if there is strength, 
 ■}(iapii a heretic". 
 111. [12a7]: 
 
 auo ngji Stootf mpekephalaion. Ersan 
 won sope ii[a]k, mprrkrof &c. 
 
 This he translates : [if a man borrows from thee], " do not take back 
 from him aught but the capital. If that happens to thee, do not act 
 deceitfully before the Lord". 
 
 Now, I do not deny that the words ersan won sope nak, 
 might mean: "if that happens to thee", but it is plain that there 
 would be no relevancy in this rendering ; for where is the " deceit", 
 it a man should simply take back his capital without claiming interest 
 on it? But further, the text says nothing of " aught hut the capital", 
 as he renders it : the words simply mean : " thou shalt take at his 
 hand the capital", and the next words state the condition on which 
 he may ask even that, viz., "if there is aught [of capital] to him". 
 It is clear that nak is wrong, and should be naf , as indeed it is 
 written in the Vatican text. In M. Eevillout's Turin text, there is 
 only (n . . .) which Prof. Eossi has made out to be n[a]k , but it 
 
Atkinson— Ow Prof. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 69 
 
 is -wrong, in any case. And what has the Greek ? Sos xai \al3e irap 
 avTov TO KE<^aXaiov, Koi fiovov orav txQ- 
 
 112. Political economists would have strange conclusions to deduce 
 as to the action of this Council of Nicsea, if they took the authority 
 of Prof. Eossi's translation [12 a 15] : "if thou hast money or grain, 
 and one asks it of thee for usury [to pay thee interest], sell it at a Ugh 
 price, and seek also to have it at a low price at a fitting time, in order 
 that thou mayest profit more largely". 
 
 Surely, even the editor might have seen that this was an impossible 
 counsel to have been given hy the prelates at any time, especially 
 when they had just declared that men are not to exact usury, nor to 
 ask back anything of a loan but the principal ! 
 
 The extraordinary thing is that he is careful to tell us that 
 M. EeviUout has omitted certain letters as illegible, which are to 
 be found ia Prof. Eossi's text, just at this exact passage ; while he 
 did not see that his own text is utterly wrong, and contains a senti- 
 ment diametrically opposite to the whole teaching of the Chiirch, at 
 any period ! How did he even think of the imperative here ? 
 
 eSope wn Iiomnt [so]ap nak e [e]bra, ate wa was cji 
 ntootk emese, ng^ti ebol nwnoc ntimS, ng^sine hoof 
 nsa jitw nwkwi StimS ephow, je ekcji nwhwo. 
 
 *'M. Eevillout reads: emese E . . . . ng ebol". 
 
 So runs his note ; was there no other difficulty ? M. Eevillout 
 had edited two texts, and the other text suggests an explanation, viz. 
 after the first m^se, "usury", by inserting the words: mepos 
 ngtmwos eji mese, after which second m^se, both texts proceed 
 with the remaining clause. The text as it stands reads: "if thou 
 hast &o., and one ask to get it from thee on interest, and if thou sell 
 at a high price &c", corresponding to the Greek eoi' yap ex3S • • • • 
 KoX . . . hia TO fj-r] Xafn^dveiv (re tokov, Triokys TiiMim-iputi iva dyopcunjs 
 tuwvms ev ^v6(rTov~\ Kaipa k.t.A. 
 
 113. [12^26]: 
 
 mprhiwe erome «« percuotere Puomo 
 
 epterf eimetei afatto, se non 
 
 eakwi «« P'oo 
 
 etbe wsbo P«>° istruzione. 
 
 But e-u-kwi certainly does not mean, "a little"; it is the 
 directive case after hiwe, "to smite", of w-kwi meaning "a child": 
 
70 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 " do not strike a person at all save a child for instruction", /x^ Tvim 
 S.v0pu)irov £1 it,r] jxovov iraiSlov trov /iiKpov tt/oos iraiSetav. The Vatican 
 text has w-kwi 5tak, iraiSlov a-ov. 
 
 114. Again, he corrects M. Eevillout, at the same time that he 
 translates M. Eevillout's text, and not his own, at [13 a 25] : 
 
 mprheke tekmort non tosare la tua barba, 
 
 wde mpr sobs mvariarla (eon colore). 
 
 His note says that M. Eevillout "reads mprsobe": thereupon, 
 Prof. Eossi translates this same sobe, which does mean "to alter", 
 instead of rendering his own word sobs, which does not mean 
 " alter", but, " do not shme it" ! 
 
 Compare the following passage, Ezek. xxix. 18: ape nim 
 nahooke, auo nahbe nim senasobw: "every head will 
 be scraped, and every shoulder stall be shaved". 
 
 Here are the identical words coupled : TrSo-a Ke<j>aXri <t>aXaKpa,, koI 
 irSs Z/jiOi /iaSuv, with two words of similar import, <j)a\aKpa, and 
 fiaSwv, denoting the baldness resulting from the radere and tondert 
 expressed by the two Coptic words, sb-j6 and hk-jo being in use 
 for that purpose. 
 
 And what has the Greek here ? /tiJSe TrcpiKovpCovs ■)(pu>p.(.vo<i ! 
 
 115. [14 y 12]: I do not see any reason for his omission of the 
 clause: sope eknkotk hipeset esope ekmotn, "let thy bed be 
 on the ground when thou art well [lit. 'be sleeping below']",. 
 ;^a/ici;mv dike iav y's iytijs. 
 
 But, while omitting the whole precept, he is careful to extract 
 the mote out of M. Eevillout's eye by noting that the latter reads- 
 esope ekmotn [which is right] instead of the esopekmotS of 
 the papyrus. 
 
 116. So at [15/? 2], he chides M. Eevillout for editing mntatbei 
 (sic), the sic being that of M. Eevillout ; and what has he himself 
 given ? 
 
 ebol an hn henmese non coll' usura, 
 
 e hn wmntatbes coll' omicidio, 
 
 e hn wprag^matia col traffico. 
 
 ^His version, therefore, "homicide," makes it clear that he accepts 
 mnt-atbes; but how does that come to mean "homicide"? That 
 would be hatbes , not atbes , and still less with the abstract prefix, 
 mnt - atbes ! If the papyrus gives mnt - atbes really, the papyrus 
 is wrong: the word intended is certainly mnt-atsei, as in the 
 
Atkinson— Ow Trof. Rossi's South- Coptic Texts. 71 
 
 "Vatican text, which of course was the cause of the legitimate {sic) of 
 M. Eevillout. The Greek is fiTj airb tokwv rj irXeove^ias irpay/taTUV 
 [i.e., ^ irpayfiaTtCa?, Hyvernat apud Batifiol] ; the irXcovt^ta was 
 the " insatiableness', mntatsei, of the Coptic text. Something is 
 omitted, of course, and none of the text is satisfactory just here : the 
 next clause has distaze [T.], but tiose [V.], while the Greek text 
 has not got it at all. 
 
 117. [15 yS 14]: 
 
 eksanjpo nak Swsose « possiedi un campo 
 
 ekeanakborei cedih, 
 
 nffanakhorei aa se non lo cedi, 
 
 alia eksobe ma inganni, 
 
 ere henkowe sobe nsok altri ingannano te. 
 
 This is no version of the Coptic, for the verb avaxmpfiv does not 
 mean to cede, but to retreat (from the world into a monastery) ; and 
 the drift of the passage is this : "if thou art acquiring a field, then, 
 while pretending to retreat, thou art not really doing so, but mocking, 
 and so others will mock at thee." Cf. the Greek lav x<»piov (cr^crj;, 
 [Iv fJ.ovao'TrjpLiaJ ava)(<j>pZv oiiK dvc^wpijcras, dXX' ifiirai^eii koL iiXTrai^rj, 
 from which it is clear that the Coptic should be ek - (and not eke -) 
 anakhorei , as it is in the Vatican text. 
 
 118. Nor is it a good version of the Coptic text when Prof. Kossi 
 edits as follows, [15 y 1] : 
 
 esope wn kwi »e altri 
 
 calow erok ti tommenda, 
 
 sope ektbbbieu nt umile. 
 
 I call attention to this passage, because it exhibits precisely the 
 defect of the procedure : Prof. Rossi's version is dependent on the 
 word found at the time in the dictionary. 
 
 Consider the above : "if another person commend thee, be humble"; 
 such a translation must mislead readers into the idea that approbation 
 was meant, which is not the case. The word calow is unsatis- 
 factorily treated in the dictionaries: it is either, (a) the present 
 participial form of coeile, "to be a sojourner", cf. Ps. xxxviii. 13, 
 where ei-cal6w is coupled with rm-5-coile, irop£7ri8i7/ios ; or 
 (J), as here, the verb calo, "to commit, entrust", with 3 pi. safSx 
 - w. The text means : "if j/ounff persons entrust themselves to thee" ; 
 the Greek has vewre/Dous iav exV^ '^V' a-eavrov. And if he yet doubts 
 the meaning, he may compare Tobi. iv. 20, speaking of the ten talents 
 which " I deposited with G.", ntaicalow e-G., a ira.pe0ip.riv. 
 
72 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 119. And it is not easy to see why he has lavished the asterisks of 
 silence over much of the following text; e.gr. he puts not a syllable 
 of this, at[16y8 12]: 
 
 "for not alone shall sinners render account to God, but he who 
 shall consent with them ; even though they do not sin [themselves, 
 but they rejoice in others when they are sinning] ", the parts in 
 brackets being supplied from the Borgia text. Just afterwards, all 
 this is left out by Prof. Eossi : " [it befits] the priest of God to become 
 sober, so as not to make naught of his primogeniture for the sake of 
 eating and drinking." Not a word of this in his version, but there is 
 a note to the effect that M. Eevillout reads mntsrpmise instead of 
 mntlfpmmise, "primogeniture"; [as a matter of absolute correct- 
 ness M. EeviUout's spelling is the proper one, with the proclitic sfp, 
 but both forms are found, cf . Gen. Ixviii. 14 ; Num. iii. 2 ; xxxiii. 4, 
 where the incorrect Bamise follows, but Levit. xxvii. 26 has the 
 normal sfpmise]. 
 
 120. One does not see why M. Hybernat has the note "ypaCs] 
 omitt. Copt", because the Coptic text has hllo, [16a 16]; and 
 where does Prof. Eossi get his following preti ? 
 
 What can be the meaning of rendering the mutilated word 
 [17a 19], which his text gives as syn .... dion, by "reunion", 
 " assembly" ? This was simply taking the text of M. Eevillout, who 
 suggests syn[edri]on, but Prof. Eossi was surely debarred from 
 such a translation by his own reading. 
 
 The next piece of text, of the Life of St. Athanasius is too frag- 
 mentary to be worth discussion here, but the following text of the 
 Martyrdom of Joore contains one of the most startling mistakes ever 
 made by an editor. 
 
 121. The short story is in the easiest style of Coptic, but never- 
 theless I have to register such a monstrosity as the following [27 a 2] : 
 
 nim r ntk ehe fai tu ? 
 
 There is no conceivable explanation for such a translation, save an 
 almost unpardonable ignorance of the very elements of Coptic gram- 
 mar: nim f ntk, "what doest thou"? The curiosity is that the 
 three words might be equated : 
 
 nim = interrogative pronoun, 
 f = do(est), 
 
 ntk = thou. 
 
 And yet, though the Coptic words do separately mean the English 
 
Atkinson— Ow Prof. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 73 
 
 words, it is beyond all question or doubt, tbat together tbey do not 
 mean, " what doest thou " ! 
 
 First, nim could not be aceusative ; 
 
 Secondly, r is the proclitic form ; 
 
 Thirdly, 5tk is the copula form. 
 
 And that such a version could be imagined and printed in Turin, in 
 the splendid museum of Egyptian lore, in the haunts of Peyron, and 
 by a Professor of Egyptology ! 
 
 "What doest thou", would be expressed in Coptic by ekf w 
 ntok , but here the words are : 
 
 nim rntk, " what is thy name " ? 
 
 As this form rnt-k, "thy name", seems such a terrible stumbling- 
 block, I shall exhibit here a couple of examples of the use of the 
 word. 
 
 The very phrase occurs in Gen. xxxii. 27 nim rntk, tl to ovofid 
 o-oi; eo-TtV ; Prov. xxi. 24 ploimos rant-f, Xoi/ibi KuXeirai, " pest is 
 his name"; though the commoner form before the suffix is rin, cf. 
 Isai. xvii. 19 atfd Prof. Eossi's own text, I"i 67 y 5, 68 a 12 &c. 
 
 . So, even his e chi sei, " and who art thou", is not a right rendering 
 for ntk VT-yr, "thou art a what", "what is thy trade"? Nor 
 does ti rieorderd le tue rapine, express [27^8 11] tinaeine ejok 
 nnekmntlestes, but "I will Iring upon thee [the punishment of] 
 thy robberies." And again [27 7 14] his translation of auo etbe 
 pikehob on je shime, "as for this other thing called 'woman' &c.", 
 is very poorly rendered by per ultra parte &c. And again [27 y 20] 
 his version, io conserverd &c., destroys the force of the Coptic eihareh, 
 which knits this clause to the preceding, "inasmuch as I am 
 keeping my body &c." And perhaps we might have had a note on 
 hermetarion [28/3 16]; or there might have been some indication 
 of the language from which comes the word kasis [28 ^ z], though 
 there is a considerable note on the word, which it explains as "an 
 instrument of torture in form of a metal cap or helmet which was 
 placed red hot on the head of those condemned to martyrdom" &c. 
 But if the Latin cassis had been mentioned, we should have perhaps 
 not needed the note. 
 
 122. "Why should Prof. Eossi have conjured up such a dreadful 
 form as af [ne]u erof [29y 19], which he evidently deems to be a 
 possible South-Goptio mode of expressing, "he came to him"!! It 
 should have been ai-nau erof, "he saw him". 
 
74 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 123. I tave had occasion to call attention to the distinction be- 
 tween JTorth- and South-Coptic ; here is one more example of thfr 
 result of its neglect. At [29 y z] he edits the following : 
 
 wmag^os ncal tin falso mago, 
 
 adding in a note that it means un mago hugia/rdo, " a lying m^ician ". 
 But, in South Coptic, the word for " falsehood" is col, not cal; and 
 he has entirely ignored the next word, which is mutilated at the end, 
 viz., ho[...J. Here there arises a difficulty; it was not simply 
 wmagos cal, concerning which he has put an utterly futile note,, 
 even if it had been correct, hut it was wmagos ncal ho..., which 
 must be emended: it was not even cal at all, but cap-hof, "a 
 serpent-catcher", "snake-charmer" (!) 
 
 The rest of the story, which is unfinished, is much mutilated, but 
 even what is given, is unsatisfactory in many places. 
 
 124. The following Text treats of the Martyrdom of Ama Heraei. 
 It is only a fragment, and there are many lacunae, which make its 
 reproduction difficult enough, even without any additional errors of 
 conjecture. At [36/3 27] is a quotation from Jerem.'x. 11, which he 
 emends: mpwtam[io] tpe instead of tamie tpe or tamio ntpe^ 
 he has then ignored the connexion of the clauses, and rendered tako^ 
 by " dispersi (dalla terra)", which it does not mean, but "let the 
 gods also have not created heaven and earth perish". 
 
 125. I do not see how he contrives to extract his translation from 
 the words of the text he has edited at [37 a 14] : 
 
 wlcw[i Hty]khe ( non e abhattuta la staiua 
 
 katalye ( delta Fortuna ? 
 
 I suppose him to have imagined kwi, "little", "a little one of 
 fortune" (tw^'?), but how he got the non e, I do not see. In other 
 words, his rvxri is an invention, which has nothing to recommend it ; 
 his " statue" has no existence at all ; and the negative interrogative is 
 nowhere. 
 
 If he had conjectured apx;^ instead of TV)(ri, he would have had 
 better chance of a tolerable phrase, and then perhaps ovkovv might not 
 have appeared too difficult to conjecture. Surely, when the Governor 
 bade her sacrifice to the great gods, Zeus and Apollo, it was more 
 natural for her to retort in words involving the use of xaTaXvciv apx^v, 
 than to say, "is not the statue of Fortune thrown down " ? 
 
Atkinson— 0« Prof. 'Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 75- 
 
 126. ■When real difficulties begin, the editor has very little help 
 to give, but often slides over by a translation -vrhioh is of no service ; 
 e. gr. [37 yS 15] : " the Governor said to her", 
 
 aianekhe mmo io ti voglio riaparmiare ; 
 
 tone nto boote non eondannarti 
 
 mpr tiso' esost da te stessa ! 
 
 There is not a word of this in the text: "I wish to spare thee; d» 
 not condemn thyself of thyself" ; the meaning of the words is wholly 
 different ! 
 
 They mean: '^ I have home with thee very much (tone), hut thou 
 (hoote) hast not spared to insult me" (e-sost); mpf should be- 
 mpe, for mpf is impossible in this passage. 
 
 And with this particularly bad specimen, I shall leave this Fasci- 
 culus, as the remaining fragments are too scrappy to make it worth 
 while spending time in their elucidation here. 
 
 VII. 
 
 We now come to the Second Volume, of which the first Fasci- 
 culus was published in 1888, containing fragments of a Discourse by 
 St. Athanasius on the Virgin Mary, and of John, Archbishop of Con- 
 stantinople, on the envy shown by the priests and Pharisees towards 
 our Lord, together with other fragments. 
 
 127. The text is very broken, and I shall not find fault with the 
 arrangement of the leaves, but the translation of what is given leaves 
 much to be desired. How does he intend the words : the ntaunojn 
 nmto hn thalassa, [6a 1] to be construed? Certainly he cannot 
 get nei gorghi del mare out of nmto hn th . Why does he persist 
 in printing the non-existent word sw for "to know"? e. gr. [6 a 9] 
 mpei sw nhowt eneh instead of the proper proclitic form swn 
 howt; cf. [;8 21]. Or, how can the words " who is he whom /have 
 seen ?" and " she said &c.," be obtained from the text given [10^ 1] 
 nim pentafnau, and af joos ! But these are minor objections, 
 over which I must pass. 
 
 128. But this is not a small error [27^ 13] : 
 
 rome gii itomini 
 
 hen erow je loro vicini, dieendo, 
 
 ere etebol bn nim <j' onde sono ? 
 
 Here it is plain that he takes nim to be = what place; but it is not 
 
76 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 so clear how even so he finds his verb, "whence are they"? But 
 what is the context ? Joseph had seen Mary become pregnant, but he 
 never asked her, after all the travelling and the being in company with 
 BO many men near them, "hy whom art thou pregnant""! That was 
 the question, as the Coptic text plainly expresses it : er' eet ebolhn 
 nim, " thou art pregnant out of whom" ? "What sense was there in 
 asking, ^^ where are they" ? 
 
 129. The prepositions form the usual stumbling block : ef. 
 [33^8 24]: 
 
 assdpe ntere aecadde che 
 
 pag^l^elos bdk Vangelo venisse 
 
 ebolhitootw a loro 
 
 enere nsoos saje edipastori ditsero. 
 
 Why, the text could not make it plainer that it means : " it happened, 
 when the angel went away from them, the shepherds said &c." 
 
 130. The following is given at [34 y foot]: "this is my beloved 
 son, who fulfils my will". Now the text has : penta pa-wos sope ehrai 
 €J6f, which is the South Coptic version of Matth.xvii. 5 ev (S eiSoKijo-a. 
 
 131. In the same column, at 35^ 2 and P 19, we have the word 
 physi, viz. 4>\ia-e.i, which he has omitted in both cases; and not 
 only so, but he has disconnected the clauses at /8 18, though they 
 form a quotation from Gal. iv. 8. 
 
 132. Here is an iustance of his want of familiarity with Coptic 
 modes of expression [37 /8 1] : 
 
 aucu hirow stettero alle loro parte. 
 
 This rendering, "they stood at their doors", does not convey anything 
 like the real meaning of the words, which denote: "they sat down 
 and besieged the city". To make this obvious, it will suffice to quote 
 two examples : 2 Eeg. xi. 1 auo auco hirn hrabath, koI SicKadurai' 
 cTTi 'PafidO; Habak. I. 10 nfnj ten erow, nfco hirow, koI jSoXeT 
 ;(S/ia Kal Kpari^crfi avTov, 
 
 133. Of course the ignorance of the quotation often avenges itself 
 immediately. Here is a striking example [41/8 1] : 
 
 ntetndth enetnwerete Vhiie i vostri piedi 
 
 mpsobte mpeuag^gelion alia preparaiione del Vangelo ; 
 
 Stntihdon noi ci vestiamo 
 
 mpetbyrou nel vestibolo (Bvpav) 
 
 ntpistis della feie, 
 
 mn tsefe mpepneuma e la spada dello Spirito. 
 
Atkinson— 0« Prof. Bossi's South-Coptic Texts. 77 
 
 Here the sequence of the tenses is quite ignored, so that no real notion 
 IS given of the march of the Coptic phrase. But the passage is further 
 curiously misrendered, for the word he has taken to be Sypwy^ was of 
 course ^vpcoV, " shield", the scutum fidei of Ephes. vi. 15. It wUl he 
 seen, too, that he has rendered &th wrongly by "unite", whereas it 
 IS simply the Coptic for the iTroSrio-d^euoi, of the original Then he 
 would have seen that his text in the beginning of this fragment was not 
 ho pha .... pnwte , but the t^v ■n-avoirXiav tov Oeov of verse 13. 
 
 134. Just as little did he perceive that in the next column 
 [41 y 2] we have another quotation, for in rendering the words of 
 his text: ensbtot eji mpekba mmntatsotm nim by siamo 
 pronti a riparare ogni disuUidienza, he evidently had not before him 
 the original, 2 Cor. x. 6 eV crot>a, l^ovres iKhiK7,<Ta., Tvaaav ^apaKoi^y, 
 where e/cSi/c^o-at is exactly the Coptic jikba , " to take vengeance". 
 
 135. Nay, even when he has found out the quotation, he cannot 
 always use it, and goes wrong in spite of it ! Compare his treatment 
 of the following [42 a 22] : 
 
 " Paul criethout in every place and at aU times", 
 
 marStaho eratw Uviamo 
 nacij etbel ebol fe mani libere 
 
 mS mpat etke ed i piedi . . 
 
 Stetntamie henbiowe fate strode 
 
 euswton diritte 
 
 SnetSwerete coi vostri piedi. 
 
 Here he gives in a note the place whence this is taken, viz. St. Paul 
 to the Hebrews, xii. 13 ; and yet what has he done with the know- 
 ledge ? He has rendered etbel ebol by "free hands", for the 
 Greek irapeiixevas ; he has wholly omitted etke, "enfeebled"-, 
 and he talks of "making roads straight with your feet" (!) There 
 could be no meaning in "free hands", one would have thought, but 
 perhaps the original was after all instructive ; cf. his text and ren- 
 dering of another passage shortly after [47 y 5] : 
 
 ere nefpat bel ebol i suoi piedi tono molli, 
 
 ere ncfcij ke le sue mani sono languide. 
 
 where the identical words occur, and are rendered by him molli and 
 languide respectively ; yet here, where he had the Greek to guide 
 him, he has gone astray. 
 
 ' So it is often found written ; cf. 2 Eeg. i. 21 ; Cant. iii. 4 ; Isai. xxi. 5, oi 
 Maspero's text in Miss. Arch. Ff., vol. vi. 
 
78 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 136. Here is a fragment which he has not even made an attempt 
 to translate, but slurs it over with the ready asterisks [42 y 8] : when 
 .a man gets drunk, 
 
 eneine mpefrpmeene hia memory is irought 
 
 etmSte to the half, 
 
 enwdbm mpsaje and his words 
 
 ntn neuereo contradict each other, 
 
 bos ere phob so that the thing 
 
 o iispere erow is a wonder to people, 
 
 easobe nsow and the {words) are laughed at. 
 
 Of all this passage there is not a word, and the reason of this 
 omission is not far to seek ; because, after groping about in un- 
 certainty with one or two similar places, he finally translates as 
 follows, apparently in despair [43 a 26] : " when he speaks against 
 one, then he exalts himself . . .", though the words : saf omkf 
 ehrai plainly denote the inarticulate utterance of a drunkard, " he is 
 wont to swallow it down, when he utters a word " &c. And then he 
 continues, in equal uncertainty [43 /3 1] : 
 137. 
 
 liann pran g^ar si porta il noim 
 
 nrome nim di tutti gli uomini 
 
 etmete bitm ptibe in mezzo {?) dell' ehrieti 
 
 bn mmanso nelle taverne 
 
 eusaje nsa parlando contra 
 
 netsotp eroir gli eletti. 
 
 It is almost incredible that this sort of work should have been pro- 
 duced ; but there it stands : "for the name of all men is brought Luto 
 the midst of intoxication in the taverns, speaking against the elect " ! 
 
 The passage really means : " for they bring the name of every 
 man to the half, owing to intoxication, in the taverns, while they 
 speak against those who are letter than themselves ". 
 
 138. I have already stated that Prof. Eossi has no definite idea of 
 the function of the tense-regents ; the wildest confusion often reigns 
 in his rendering of these particles. On the same column we have 
 this specimen [43 jS 15] : 
 
 mn benrows ntc pbios c le cure della vita 
 
 Etc pebow etmmau di quel giorno 
 
 ei ^5 tents vennero su di voi 
 
 ntbe nwpas a guisa di un laccio. 
 
 atetSsatm on, Je Vditemi ancora. 
 
Atkinson— Om Prof. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 79 
 
 Here Prof. Eossi sliows that he believes that the words Ete pbios 
 5te pehow mean " of the life of that day" ! The last nte is the 
 regent of the present subjunctive, and the clauses should be dis- 
 connected : " [drunkenness] and cares of this life, so that that day 
 come upon you like a snare ", the passage being a " contaminatio " 
 of two verses, Luke xxi. 34, 35. Then he renders the perfect regent, 
 atetnsotm by an imperative ; why, I cannot conjecture. 
 
 139. The paragraph at [45 a 1] conveys no idea of the real meaning, 
 and the latter half of it is signalised by the old error of confoujidbig 
 ti with ji, for his translation runs : "they are ashamed of the poor 
 and of those who go to the church to celebrate the festival ", though 
 the Coptic text says: "they cast shame on, they dishonour, the poor 
 and those that pass by, pretending that ' going to the roiroi of the 
 martyrs, we are [going to] celebrate their festival ' " : 
 
 eutisipe nnb^ke arrossiscono dei poveri 
 
 mn netparage e di quelli che vanno 
 
 eucSIoice je 
 
 •ubek 
 
 entopos Smmartyros alia chiesa [note] 
 
 eneire mipeusa per celebrare lafeata. 
 
 Prof. Eossi has mistranslated tisipe; omitted or mistranslated 
 -irapayi ; dropped out without mention the next words ; added a 
 note that the words he has rendered "the Church" mean "the 
 places of the martyrs", which only makes more apparent his own 
 mistake; translated en-eire as if an infinitive (!), and finally ignored 
 the poss. pron. peu in the last word: six bad mistakes, for which 
 I can see no reasonable excuse. 
 
 140. And, as if for the sole purpose of demonstrating his 
 ignorance of tisipe, he commits the same fault again in this very 
 column [45 a 27], although his attention was called to the absurdity 
 of the passage, and he puts his (?). In this case it was a quotation, 
 too, from 1 Cor. xi. 22, where the original has KoTato-xwcTe. 
 
 141. On this very page he edits [45 y 10] : 
 
 tai rthel questa e la maniera, 
 
 esare ndaimon rjoeis eon mi i demoni domimno 
 
 enettahe sopra colui ehe eatturano. 
 
 Now this is an utterly impossible rendering, so bad that I cannot 
 speak too strongly about it : 
 
 evet-tahe " "" '"*" "'*'"" ^^ capture" ! 
 
 Where is there any hint of ''they" 1 and how could the procUtic 
 
80 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 form of the verb, tahe, be conceivably used here ? The word means : 
 "on him who is intoxicated", e-pettahe. 
 
 142. So at [46 a 14], he has completely missed the point of the 
 
 etrefpoht Sodoma e {Gomorra) le ridusse 
 
 ebolhn vrmhaau in una tomba. 
 
 Here Prof. Eossi evidently thinks that the words refer to the destruc- 
 tion of Sodom and Gomorrha : " he reduced them into a tomb ". 
 That is one of the most curious blunders ever committed ; there is 
 nothing about reduced, nor them, nor into, nor a tomi / The Coptic 
 writer was referring to Lot, and the melancholy circumstances- 
 connected with his intoxication, and the words literally mean: " to 
 make him eK;^€£iv [cf. Lev. xiv. 41 ; Ps. Ixxviii. 3, 10] in a cave"- 
 I need not write a commentary on this ; but assuredly the contrast 
 between Prof. Eossi's text and his translation of this passage is^ to 
 say the least of it, noteworthy ! 
 
 143. The same page exhibits another example [46 y foot] : 
 
 ntbe nwsen al modo di im alien, 
 
 eautocf che piantato 
 
 esauti mow erof in un terreno inaffiato 
 
 nfauxane tai[a cresoe rigoglioso ; 
 
 n]te the cost e 
 
 Sepithymia dei desideri ^c. 
 
 The text says : " like a tree which men have planted and watered 
 that it may grow, such is the way of desire ". In place of this. 
 Prof. Eossi introduces a terreno, which is not to be found, and 
 apparently renders taio = "rigoglioso" "(grows) vigorowly " \ I 
 fear there is no doubt that he read it so, for he has distinctly 
 tai[o H]te the , i.e. he made taio an adverb, joining the o to 
 tai; he conjectured n before the te, whereas tai is the demon- 
 strative, and te is the copula! But if he i4(? mean tai "this", his 
 text is still unintelligible : why not have edited o n , iraXiv ? He 
 had previously conjectured [45 y 7] tai the, with no copula; could 
 he here have meant tai o nte the, with two copulas ? 
 
 And the last three lines of his fragment he did not venture to 
 touch at all : 
 
 esje mmon, ei Si fiii, 
 
 •otm tatikneue mmos listen, that I may show it ; 
 
 for the mysterious tikneue is, of course, hiiKviuv. 
 
Atkinson— Ow Prof. Rossi's South-Coptio Texts. 81 
 
 144. At [47 a 7] we have another perversion in the translation : 
 "for drunkards speak of a multitude of things", saying, "what and 
 what thing shall we do ? But when they abandon themselves to intoxi- 
 cation, they do not remember the oaths" &c. The text says: "but 
 when they recover from their drunkenness"! 
 
 eusanlo de hm ptihe 
 
 145. He seems to have no idea of the source whence the writer 
 has derived his denunciation of the harlot city [49 a 13], which is 
 Ezekiel's parable, xxiv. 4 seqq. And he renders the words [a 22], 
 " I will descend upon it" : 
 
 tinatalos ehrai io scendero su di lei. 
 
 But how could talo mean "descend", and how it could have a pro- 
 nominal suffix fern., it is impossible even to conjecture. In reality, 
 the words mean "I will offer it [the city] up (as a sacrifice)"; cf. 
 Gen. viii. 20, aftalow ehrai nholokautoma, dv^i/eyKti' ek oXoKapTrutcnv. 
 
 146. In fact, nearly every page of this Fasciculus contains some 
 astonishing mistake ; so that I do not see how the translation could 
 be made tolerable without reprinting it. It is the grammatical 
 foundation that is wanting ; the editor is moving in the unsteady 
 grooves of hieratic guess-work ; the tenses, the moods, the prepo- 
 sitions, the regents, the verbal forms, oust each other in sportive 
 wantonness, till the translation sometimes presents the appearance 
 of a game of bUndman's bufi. 
 
 At [50 y 19] is an instance : 
 
 sare tcpsyltlie Vanima e 
 
 taeio' 5te psoma hoof I'onore del corpo stesso 
 s*vsw 55 
 
 Now, here we see that the aorist regent sare has no verb, for he has 
 rendered taeio as a noun ; he has made nte the sign of possession, 
 whereas it is the regent of the subjunctive ; and he has omitted 
 swsw m . . . altogether. 
 
 Translate : "the soul is wont to be honoured, so that the body also 
 boasts" (swsw mmof , as Prov. xx. 9). 
 
 147. At [51 /8 20], he again mis-translates the regent of the 
 suhj. nte, in his translation, sulValtare del sacerdote, and thus 
 leaves the verb testo-n ebol without any regent at all, and even 
 so, makes it plural, ci gettino (!) The words are, and plainly : 
 
 ate pweeb teston ebol, '' so that the priest reject us" . 
 
 E.I.A. PKOC, SEE. III., VOL. III. •* 
 
82 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 148. This is immediately followed, by this statement, which Prof. 
 Rossi puts into the words of the original he has edited : " never is 
 the dew produced for us without our finding coolness"- This is a 
 perversion caused by the ignorance of a Greek and of several Coptic 
 words in his text [51 ^8 foot] : (" let us flee from the fire, whilst it 
 is the time of dew"). 
 
 mepote Ste tiote non mai h 
 
 wo ntootn si produce a noi 
 
 ntntmhe senza ehe noi troviamo 
 
 ekbo refrigerio. 
 
 Let this version be examined, and we find /jt-rjiroTe translated "never"; 
 nte used for present indie. ; wo rendered " is produced " ; ntootn, 
 "tons*'; and Etntm, " senza che noi"; and. all Jive are impossible, 
 even according to the structure of the clause ! The words mean : 
 " lest that the dew fail from us so that we may not find coolness " 
 
 He does not realize the meaning of the prepositions : they are 
 translated by him as if they were Old Egyptian clouded over by the 
 "darkness" of a Mosaic plague. And wo does not mean "to be 
 produced" — ^he is confounding it with ti-w6, "to blossom": wo 
 means "to cease"! To the end that he may realize this meaning, 
 
 1 append here a few instances of its occurrence : 1 Reg. is. 7 ; 
 
 2 Reg. ii. 26; vi. 18; xiii. 36; xvii. 23; Job. xv. 22; xxxviii. 1; 
 Isai. xxxii. 10 ; Tobi. xiv. 1 ; Eool. i. 10; iv. 2; Amos. viii. 5. 
 
 149. And not only does he give a totally wrong meaning to a 
 common Coptic word, but he will not allow a good Coptic root to 
 stand as his text has it, because he does not happen to know it! 
 Thus he translates [52^8 10]: "he shall take off his garments, and 
 shall wash himself with water "; adding as a note : " I have considered 
 the root som as a wrong form, or a variant of son , removere &c." 
 Why, this root som is just the very root which means to wash 
 clothes ! ! of. Lev. xi. 25, 28, 40 ; xiii. 6, 34 ; xiv. 8, 9 ; xv. 27 ; 
 xvi. 26, 28 ; being in fact the word invariably used for TrXwetv in 
 Leviticus, the word rohe being found only in Exod. xix. 10. 
 
 The next Text is a fragment of a Sermon by John, Archbishop of 
 Constantinople, on Envy. But the procedure of the editor remains 
 unaltered and unimproved. He has constructed a new Coptic word 
 nearly at the beginning, in the note, where he says : "I consider here 
 the root khte ... as the corresponding Coptic form of the Greek 
 ct>66vo's ". The thing is an utter impossibility : there is no such root, 
 and never was, in any Coptic dialect ! The word assuredly conveyed 
 
Atkinson— Ow Prof. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 83 
 
 quite a difEerent idea, pek-liae(?), but the text can hardly be 
 emended, as it breaks off directly after. Only, the Coptic Dictionary 
 is not to have additions of this sort made to it : jxr] ya/oiro. 
 
 150. The confusion in the prepositions continues, thus [55 y 13] : 
 " ship, laden with every evil ! For -what evil wilt thou seek, that 
 thou dost not find in it" ■ here he has separated two clauses, which 
 are to be joined, and he has utterly spoilt the construction by rendering 
 erof , " in it". The words mean : " o ship, what evU wilt thou [the 
 ship] seek, so that thou dost not find it, (and not find it)". 
 
 151. Here is another absurdity [56 a foot] : 
 
 wnte peijoi Aa questa nave 
 
 benhaucal mpenipe dneore di ferro. 
 
 alia anwot Iiwe Ma furono piu prestanti (?) 
 
 heueift mpe XS dei chiodi di Crista. 
 
 The last clause is a complete mystery : " this ship has anchors of 
 iron. But they were more excellent than the nails of Christ." What 
 form must the Coptic language assume to make itself clear ? The 
 text edited by Prof. Rossi is as bad as bad can be, and the translation 
 quite corresponds. His text has indeed all the letters, but he could 
 not sort them! The words mean,: "this ship has anchors of iron, 
 hut they melted them down into nails for Christ", 
 
 not, auwot bwe heneift, 
 
 but, an-wotb-w e-teii-eift 
 
 162. The text continues: "the ship had a mast, but the devil 
 sawed it (for the cross)", and then it adds [56^ 14] : 
 
 a niwdai ale erof salirono \julla nave] i giudei 
 
 auroht ehwn hn tpetra I'aggravarono con pietre 
 
 auoms e la immersero 
 
 hitn tmntatnahte neW incredulitd. 
 
 "The Jews ascended the ship, overloaded it with stones, and sunk 
 it in incredulity" ! 
 
 Nothing of the kind : " they were dashed against the rock and were 
 drowned, owing to their unbelief". It is impossible to translate the 
 Coptic words in any other way than as I have rendered them. Prof. 
 Eossi has no feeling whatever for the passive construction of the verbs, 
 any more than for the sphere of meaning of the prepositions. 
 
 153. At other times, the memories of hieroglyphic pronominal 
 suflixes are too strong for the editor, and he forthwith breaks away 
 
84 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 from all the restraints of Coptic grammar ; of this we have a good 
 example at [61 y foot] : " why were ye Pharisees not grieved at 
 Manasses", 
 
 hmpnau 
 
 iitaftreuweise' fece ehe si allontmassero 
 
 nesaias dal proftta Isaia. 
 
 One naturally asks what so great cause of grief was it, that 
 Manasses should have caused them to be removed to a distance from 
 Isaiah? And then one asks, whence comes this translation? In 
 this wise : wei , " to remove to a distance", and - se , a suffix pron. 
 of third plural. Now, I know quite well that besides the normal 
 Coptic suffix -w, we have both - sw, (cf. ani-sw, Gen. viii. 17), 
 and at times -se (though I have met it only after tennow, and 
 jow, "to send", cf. Isai. xxvii. 8 ; Jer. xiv. 14, 16 ; xxxiii. 5 ; xliv. 
 4 ; Matth. xx. 2 ; xxi. 3) ; but it would be a mere waste of time to 
 search for instances of its use after wei, in this clalise, because — it 
 is not wei at all! It is the verb weise, "to saw asunder"; the 
 deed of Manasses was that he had caused Isaiah to be sawn asunder, 
 for which statement Prof. Eossi may consult the Rabbinical legend 
 given in Lagarde's Frophetae Chald., p. xxxiii. 
 
 154. The verb lo is again misunderstood at 627 1 : 
 easlo avendo lasciato 
 esswo che si esioeasse 
 5ci tpeg^e mpesnof la fonte del sangue. 
 
 From this it appears that he took swo in the meaning "to be 
 dried up", esiccare, and the verb, lo to mean "sAe Aa(?Z«/iS" ! In 
 reality the words mean : "the fountain of blood had ceased flowing ". 
 The verb lo , followed by a present participle, means to cease doing, 
 here to cease flowing [cf . I Eeg. ix. 5 ; xxviii. 20 ; xxx. 4 ; Jonah 
 
 155. I can form no idea of the source of his translation of the 
 word he has invented at [63^ 17], when he edits : 6 teita[h]s 
 etmeh nata[xia] mn peinomos etmeh mparanomia, rendering 
 " oh ! questa nazione plena di disordine, e questa legge plena di 
 iniquity". Who does not see that the words were 
 
 rafts filled with aTo^ia, and 
 vo/jt.o's TTapavo/xCa. 
 
 There is no mention of any nation, nor could his emendation tabs 
 mean anything else than " anointing " ! 
 
Atkinson— On Prof. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 85 
 
 156. Here it is the personal pronoun which has led him astray, 
 but this would have been impossible if he had known the proper 
 case-government of the verb nau, "to see". The sentence reads 
 [64 P foot] : 
 
 atetnanekbe avete tollerato 
 
 nan loro 
 
 eneipethow quesli mali. 
 
 There is no meaning in his version: "ye have tolerated to ihem 
 [mthem?] these evils". The words mean: "ye have endured to 
 look upon these evils ", for nau governs the directive e. 
 
 157. So in the next column he has : avete pensato pensieri varii del 
 vostro operare opere anehe diverse, where he has taken the Coptic nega- 
 tive perfect regent 2 pi. mpetn for the genitive of poss. adj. pron. 
 2 pi. ! The words mean: "ye have thought different thoughts, hut ye 
 have not done different deeds " : atetnmeeue ehenmeeue eusobe, 
 mpetnf henhbeue on eusoobe [64y4]. 
 
 158. The three fragments following are badly mutilated and their 
 restoration by emendation is not easy, but at least the emendations 
 attempted should be possible ones, and that is not the case in the 
 following [65 all]: 
 
 a ne[up]lag'khnan de essendo .... 
 
 nm[nia]an delle madri 
 
 s[tor]tr hitm .... conturhato dal . 
 
 Now, it is obvious that in the first line, it was a Greek word that 
 had to be dealt with, so that the problem was to read [. . .] Tr\a.y)(yov, 
 but his text and translation both show that he could not compass 
 the right word, ne-cnrX.ayxyov, "the bowels, the hearts, of the mothers 
 were troubled, &c." 
 
 And what a grammatical inaccuracy to suggest the long 6 in 
 itortr ! 
 
 159. His tentative translation of the previous portion is certainly 
 wrong, because the Coptic text he has given, will not bear it : It 
 hanno respinti con violenza chiamando (?) le lacrime dei pastori (?) cJie 
 sono i loro padri &c. Here respinti is certainly not a translation for 
 ntaujoolw, and chiamando is probably the " other side of the medal" 
 in the confusion of toh with tohm (cf. No. 63), and one does 
 not see why the (?) is put to the word pastori. The meaning of the 
 section, as it stands, is something like this : " [tears] of children, as 
 when the wine [emris] of the young palm-trees [bah?], which had 
 
86 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 been violently vintaged, was mixed with tie tears of the husbandmen, 
 who were their fathers. And while the eyes of the fathers were 
 blinded by tears, the hearts of the mothers were torn with grief &c." 
 But so much depends on the correctness of the readings of the 
 legible portion, that the passage is too uncertain. 
 
 160. Concerning his treatment of the next fragment, I have to 
 make the same remark : his conjectural emendation of the words 
 [64 a foot] : 
 
 [hi]tia pa[p]s[iii] 5Hrni[eiowc] 
 
 has nothing to recommend it ; for his translation, ' ' like fountains of 
 water flowing from the source of tears", is literally, according to his 
 emendation, "flowing by the lentil of the tears", because arsin 
 means <l>aK6^, "pulse, lentils". Did Prof. Eossi take lente =1° lentils, 
 2° lens (eye-glass), to be the normal progression of meaning from 
 which arsin , in Coptic, would come to mean "the ball of the eye "? 
 
 161. And how does he get "bosom" out of the word kons 
 [65y 15], which must mean "slaughter", for "bosom" is quite 
 different, viz. kwn, never written kon, — not to speak of the inex- 
 plicable affix of 3 sg. fem. 
 
 162. But indeed the task becomes drearier, as I go in in these 
 fragments : the editor is naturally helpless when the real difficulties 
 begin, for he misses the most obvious portions. Thus he translates 
 [66 ;8 6] : "I wished to fake away the organ of my tongue from 
 silence." Why, if that meant anything, it should mean, that he 
 wished to speak, whereas the text says : "I wanted to hold the organ 
 of my tongue by [hitn] keeping silence" ; i.e. he wished to he silent ; 
 but their conduct would have made the very stones cry out. 
 
 163. I^or is Prof. Bossi to be kept from erring, by what one 
 might consider the irresistible force of analogy : even a simile fails to 
 produce its natural effects. The Coptic writer, at [67 /8], uses an 
 obvious comparison, viz. " fire is quenched by water, but even the 
 abundant fountains of instruction could not prevail to quench envy". 
 But how has he rendered it? "The abundant fountains of doctrine 
 cannot be destroyed hy envy" ! Yet the writer had been dwelling on 
 this _;?»•« of envy just previously. The very next paragraph carries on 
 the rhetorical antithesis : " iron gives up its rust through the [action 
 of the] hone, but the heart of the Pharisees did not give up the 
 blackness of" [its envious feelings] &c. But I do not want it to be 
 thought that his translation is merely a matter of misunderstood com- 
 parison ; the Coptic words cannot be rendered as he has given them : 
 
Atkinson— On Prof. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 87 
 
 to render mpw-es-cmcom e-6sm m-pe- ^^oros as he has done 
 is wholly to disregard Coptic structure. 
 
 164. In the next column, he has not seen that it is a quotation 
 from Jerem. xiii. 23 ; from which accordingly his lacunae may be 
 easily filled up. 
 
 165. Even when it is a familiar quotation from the New Testa- 
 ment, he fails to catch it, or convey the meaning. Thus he gives 
 [68 y 1] : " as St. John said, ' it is not needful that one should testify 
 for man. Because does he know what is in man?'" But there is no 
 sign of interrogation in the Coptic, which is a literal version of John 
 ii. 25^" for he knew what (is) in man," ntof gar nefsown je w 
 pethm prome . 
 
 166. A very instructive example may now be given, of the amount 
 of critical acumen he has exhibited ia handling this Coptic text, which 
 is so interlarded with Greek words. Thus he has edited [69 j8 foot] : 
 
 pma etfShetf dal luogo in mi e 
 
 nci pephthonos mn Vinvidia c 
 
 tmesikia 
 
 etai te 
 
 tmntrefmestpethow 
 
 sare peXS we ebolmmof Crista si allontana. 
 
 He has made no attempt whatever to solve the diflElculty here, but 
 has given it up in despair. There cannot be the slightest doubt of 
 the solution, but it may be well to show the materials that lay ready 
 to his hand, to guide him to the solution, if such had not instan- 
 taneously presented itself to him. 
 
 It was evident that mesikia was some Greek word, and the form 
 of the following words is the normal form by which the Copts define a 
 Greek term when employing it, [ete tai te] a form of words exactly 
 equivalent to our viz. The problem therefore resolved itself simply 
 into the determination of the uncouth word 
 
 tmStrefmestpethow. 
 
 I need not dwell on its loveliness to the eye of the body, but to 
 the mind's eye it presented no great embarrassment : t- is the fern, art., 
 mnt denotes the abstract state (as in righteousw«s«), ref means " a 
 person (who)", and pethow means " evil" ; so the whole problem is 
 the determination of the last element mest . Here then the investi- 
 gation begins. Now mest might seem to be the proclitic form of the 
 verb moste , " to hate" ; but, as our word is used in conjunction with 
 
88 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 " enTy," it cannot mean "the state of one who hates evil". The 
 lexicon gives a form refmespethow, "maleflous," which is much 
 more to the purpose, as from it we should get an abstract term, 
 meaning " maleflcentia" ; but it would not bring us to the understand- 
 ing of the Greek word which was the puzzle to Prof. Kossi. 
 
 Now, this very word does occur in the Coptic Bible, Prov. 
 xxi. 24, where Ciasca has a note, disqiialifying it, "prefmeste 
 pro prefmeeue" ; but this disqualification must be taken ofl, as our 
 text shows that it is the right Coptic word. And what is the word in 
 LXX. Prov. xxi. 24 ? /iviyo-tKaKci. Just so : the word in our text 
 
 was r T Ti Ti • 
 
 mLnJesiLkaJkia, /jLvrjo-tKaKia. 
 
 The two passages show that mest- was used in Coptic to represent 
 the Greek yni/ijcrt-, " to remember," and that it has nothing to do with 
 either moste, "to hate", or mise, " to generate'. 
 
 And with this specimen, I pass on to the Frammenti Diversi in 
 the second part of this Fasciculus. So far the Second Volume of 
 Prof. Rossi's texts has shown itself to be worse than the First Volume : 
 the remaining fragments carry on the demonstration. 
 
 167. Thus, I should have liked to see a very different rendering 
 of [71 a 6] : 
 
 henkehte lomU 
 
 eumeh enanww pieni di venustd. 
 
 for " to be filled Mij^A", is meh 5, and not meh e; nanww is not 
 a substantive, but a verb with plural affix, and the indefinite e pre- 
 fixed, to make it participial, so that the two last words are eu-meh, 
 "full", and e-nanw-w, "beautiful'. His translation exhibits 
 entire ignorance of the mechanism of the verbal system ; just as on the 
 same column [a 17] his rendering "come un artista poteva cosi farlo", 
 shows that he had no notion of the function of ene, which he evidently 
 took to be the imperfect regent, {come) poteva, as if it had been e-nere ! 
 
 168. Here is a passage in which the noun is the principal cause of 
 stumbling [72 p 3] : 
 
 .... emS 
 
 . . . mmanseleet la veste (?) nuziale 
 
 to hiuok che i in te. 
 
 ntc rof La sua porta 
 
 torn nteunw e tosto chiusa, 
 
 nfti mmof etootw e sard daio 
 
 nnbasaoisterion ai tormenti. 
 
Atkinson — On Prof. Rossi's South- Coptic Texts. 89 
 
 There is no reasoa why the (?) should appear after veste, because 
 it is obviously to the "garment of the -wedding-festival" that reference 
 is made; but why should the first word emn have been omitted? 
 Then the next clause : " His door is quickly shut" is not a translation 
 of the Coptic words at all, because ro means "mouth" (not "door", 
 which is ro) , and the verb torn does not mean "to shut a door", 
 (which is itam) , but " to shut the mouth". One would have thought 
 that the expression tm ro was common enough in Coptic, but it is old 
 Egyptian just as well. And it is a quotation also, being simply the 
 Coptic of 6 8' i<f>i,[jiM6r) of Matth. xxii. 12, with which may be com- 
 pared the version Prof. Rossi has liere printed: "the nuptial garment 
 vrhich is in thee. His door is soon shut, and he will be given &c." (!) 
 
 169. In fact, the quotations are often the worst treated passages ; 
 of. the following instances. 
 
 The text begins, " the Parhoimiastes says," but the editor has 
 made no attempt to find out what the writer of the Proverbs did say, 
 and edits [73 a 6] : 
 
 jo mmos dice : 
 
 efcnarike Jinnsorp cereando querela sin da prineipio. 
 
 je enentak .... .... 
 
 e[t]slecl6c pe 
 
 But the word slecloc is not so very common a word as to have 
 made a search for it in the Proverbs an impossibility : it is found at 
 ii. 20, a comparison with which will be instructive to the editor. 
 
 170. Just below [a 20], he renders: "those who abandon the 
 right and chosen ways for the oblique ways . . .", though his text has 
 the word nau , which should certainly have given him pause : his 
 text must be altered into eu-s6tp nau, "choosing for themselves 
 the crooked ways" ; this also is a quotation, Prov. ii. 13. 
 
 171. And a little further on, [y 2] he renders oltre lejroii, 
 showing that he did not comprehend his text khoris si nl^irof , 
 "false measures" ; cf. the use in Prov. xx. 23, where we have ii snau 
 and mase nkrof mentioned. 
 
 172. I shall finish my criticism on this Fasciculus with an exami- 
 nation of five passages in the last two pages of his text. 
 
 («) At foot of [75 ;8], his translation runs thus : 
 
 "... little children, he is angry and smites them. Some do not 
 die (?) ; the Spirit of God departs from them, and gives them into the 
 hands of evil spirits that they may torment them, saying: if my spirit 
 dwells in . . ." 
 
90 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 Such, rendering conveys no meaning ; it is of course pure nonsense. 
 And it is bad grammar, besides; for tbe text henkoTve eutmmw, 
 can by no possibility be twisted into his version, '■'■some do not die". 
 The negative tm is never so used ; it is the negative of the infinitive \ 
 it may be used after the conditional ei-, or the subjunctive nte , but 
 most certainly not with the present indicative ! Nor could mw 
 be so used. If the text is really so in the papyrus, it must mean, 
 eu-tmmo-w, " some feed themselves, live luxuriously, and so God 
 withdraws himself from them." 
 
 173. And what sense is to be found in the words at the end of the 
 clause, "«/ my spirit dwells in . . ." There can be little doubt that 
 the Coptic writer was using a quotation from Gen. vi. 4, ov /xi] koto- 
 /tetvj; TO TTvev/xa iv rots avOparroi^ tovtol% ets rov aluiva, so that either 
 his ene must be read nne , '^ shall not (remain)", or else the use is 
 that of Gen. xiv. 23, je ene tmaji wlaau ebolhn nete nwk ne, which 
 is practically a strong negative : " I swear to God, if I will take," " I 
 will not take." 
 
 174. The connexion with this verse is established by the next few 
 lines which he renders : "their days wre a hundred and twenty years", 
 which is quite wrong, for the words are : ere neuhow sope, "may 
 their days become" . There is not in the whole of Coptic literature a 
 single instance of sope used, as he has taken it, as a simple present 
 tense: it is impossible. The phrase is optative, as frequently, and 
 represents the ia-ovrat of Gen. vi. 4. 
 
 175. And he gives at [76 a 2] : 
 
 wii hoine alcuni 
 
 eujuk mS ueusere si voiano (?) coi loro figli 
 
 hu mmow etkons alk aoque micidiali(?) 
 
 I do not know what meaning he intended to be conveyed by his 
 suggested si vofano (?), but it is quite immaterial, for his text is 
 wrong : it should be divided differently, not 
 
 eujok mn, but eujokm 5, 
 for what the writer said was: "they bathe them, their sons", and 
 most assuredly not "they empty themselves with their sons", or 
 anything of the kind. 
 
 176. The paragraph finishes with another misunderstanding, for 
 he translates euwocp nneskeuos nblje by: distruggono . . . di 
 fango; but the words evidently mean "the vessels of potsherd", 
 
 "the earthen vessels", with reference to o-wTpt/3^'tr«Tai and the 
 o-Kcuos otTTpaKwov of Levit. vi. 28 ; xi. 23 &c. 
 
Atkinson — On Prof. Rossi's Smith-Coptic Texts. 91 
 
 And now I take Tip the Second Fasciculus of toI. ii. (1889), alter 
 the text of the Proverbs, already criticised. The remaining portions 
 are " fragments " of versions of three Homilies by St. John 
 Chrysostom, extant and published in Greek, so that here also the 
 editor had every possible advantage for his text that could be derived 
 from a knowledge of what the Coptic translator must have intended 
 to say. What Prof. Eossi, however, represents him as having said 
 is often a very different thing. Thus there are in the first page of 
 his text half a dozen errors, from which the Greek original ought to 
 have preserved him. 
 
 177. "What was the use of printing etfhob in the first line 
 with a note, saying: "literally, working", when the original made 
 it plain that the word was etf hot " sailing" ? 
 
 178. Why render sibt, by "valley", when the original had 
 Povvoi, which is regularly so rendered? Cf. Ps. Ixiv. 13, Ixxvii. 58 ; 
 Prov. viii. 25 ; Isai. x. 32 ; xl. 4. 
 
 179. At [20 /8 14] he renders : " for God knows that the nature 
 of men who love good is to aspire to the chosen things of all times", 
 which is not what the Greek means : t^v ^vo-tv tS>v a.v6pu>Tr(ov 
 <j>LX6Ka\ov Kol . . . icj>iiij.ivrjv. But in order to get his version, he 
 had to emend his text, which now stands thus: 
 
 efsown gar Bci pnwte [iitephysis] afipome [et]mai 
 petnanw[f. etjepithymei cn[etso]tp Swoeis niin. 
 [etbe pai] afko ebrai 5[uen]eiote nuegraphe 
 [nthe njheiikosmion &c. 
 
 Here his translation degli uomini amanti il hem makes of [et] 
 maipetnanwf an adjective agreeing vrith nrome, "the men"; 
 but that is impossible in Coptic : the adj. is attached by the con- 
 nexive n (nrome mmaip. &c.); and if et- were to be employed 
 as the def. ptcple., then the verb in its proclitic form mere would 
 have been indispensable before petnanwf, so that the conjecture of 
 et- is utterly wrong, as it is also in the next word. 
 
 180. Nor is his version of the remainder correct: "he placed as 
 an ornament in the Scriptures the struggles of our fathers &c." ; for 
 this would absolutely make the only representative of the struggles to 
 be the Coptic adverb ehrai ! His version is made from the Greek 
 Tois tGv ■Ko.ripo.v 3,e\ovs. The Coptic says quite differently: "hv 
 hath deposited with our fathers the Scriptures as Ko^ia " ; it was 
 the Scriptures that were the KoV,.ta, not the contests of our fathers, 
 if his Coptic text is rightly transcribed. 
 
92 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 181. And assuredly, the flowery rhetoric of the original is not to be 
 handled with so little appreciation as is shown in the version of the 
 passage describing the physical beauty of the youthful Joseph, 
 [21 yS 21] : "the hairs of his beard begia to grow on his cheeks like 
 budding roses, shadowing Ms rosy countenance" . There is nothing about 
 "Am rosy countenance" in the Coptic, because the word rendered "rosy" 
 agrees with the word " hairs", tt.op<l>ri is not merely " countenance", 
 and the last words have been omitted altogether. The words are : 
 
 euhubs ntefmorphe covering his fiop^ii 
 
 eutresros and being ruddy 
 
 nsa pisa mn pai on this side and on that 
 
 182. And if ever an editor erred in spite o/ light, it surely was on 
 the occasion, when he invented the following misconception, [22 a 19]: 
 " he who shall not have been made free by his own sentiments, not 
 with a multitude of papers or writings shall he be able to effect, that 
 he who is blade should he white". There is no force of logic in that; 
 nor is there the slightest resemblance to the original, tovtov iwpioi 
 )(a.pTai Kol fjiiXava ypd/j-ixaTa iXevdepZaai ov SvvavraL ; and it is utterly 
 impossible to derive it from the Coptic : 
 
 mu benase ukhartes not multitudes of x'^f^i)^ 
 
 e iishal ef kem or of black writing 
 
 nastref wbas will avail to make him become white. 
 
 The point to the Copt was that " llach letters would not give a man 
 the whiteness (of freedom)". 
 
 183. Often enough, the version is so turned that the general sense, 
 which the context made certain, is given correctly enough, but where 
 the text is so edited that a competent scholar at once sees that there 
 is a "hiatus valde deflendus " in the editor's knowledge. Here is a 
 case, [23/3 21], rendered : 
 
 " See the nobility of this athlete. What a struggle was hisV But, 
 the text is edited as follows : 
 
 je n[e V¥'] uwer mise iimuiaf, 
 
 from which it is clear that he took jo to be = " what ", and that he 
 read w nwer = qualis. There is no escape from that, for he has put 
 his accent over the word (oC) in his emendation ; and even so, he 
 could not construe the words, for wer could not be followed by mise 
 without the connexive. The Coptic text was really ne wn wer 
 mise nmmaf , i.e. " how many fought with him" . 
 
Atkinson— Ow Prof. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 93 
 
 184. The wrongword is conjectured at [24 a 17], where he gives : 
 hm plogis[mos etb]be, lenAenng con raffionamenti pudicM. There 
 is no such -word as etbbe , and even the form intended, viz. et - tbbe , 
 would be no more tolerable, because tbbe is still only the proclitic 
 form : he would have had to alter his papyrus, and read et-tbbeu. 
 But there is no need ; the Greek has t<3 <7(u<^povt Xoyia-fiiS, and for that 
 logis[mos nsa]be were the proper words, sabe being the normal 
 adjective for ^povt/^os, and so the rendering pudichi is quite out of 
 place here. 
 
 185. But this wrong rendering of Greek words is much better- 
 exemplified in the next passage [25 a 22] : 
 
 mnnsa nai p[mw] 
 
 allora 
 
 petnasope nak 
 
 chi ti dard 
 
 ntimoria 
 
 ajuto ? 
 
 JEere he took Ti/Awpta to mean "help", (which of course it does 
 sometimes mean, just as crw<l>p(Dv does mean sometimes " chaste",) and 
 as he could not extract sense with this meaning, he simply rendered 
 at haphazard : " then, who will give thee help ?" Tet he had himself 
 conjectured p[mw] , for the Greek has 6a.vaTo%; and even so, he did 
 not see that the Coptic words mean : " after that death will be to thee 
 as punishment" , " thy punishment will certainly be death", by which 
 words the Copt has rendered the dTrapatVryTos Odvaro's of the original, 
 " a punishment not to be averted by prayers". 
 
 186. And this ignorance of Greek words extends to other passages 
 also, where the mistake seems as nearly wilful as one can well imagine ;. 
 cf. this [26 a 10] : 
 
 mnnsa wkwi gar imperocchc dopo ireve tempo 
 
 naktln Snatropos i raggi immutaUli 
 
 nadioke mmof h 
 
 Let us see the context: (the cloud obscures the sun's rays for a 
 time only, so slavery cannot obscure my soul's nobility altogether), 
 "for after a short time the immutable rays will accompany if'-, what 
 meaning is therein? He has divided wrongly, and read arpoTros, 
 though " immutalle rays" is not an excellent combination; and he has 
 rendered Si<iK£iy " to accompany'. But the Coptic means : "the rays 
 of my character (rpoTroi) will chase it away", representing the original 
 h,h T^s cjKr^-os T^v Tp6^o>v i^ov Siaxveijcr^Tai. There is absolutely no 
 excuse left here. 
 
94 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 187. Even tie commonest Greek word or phrase is at times a 
 stumbling-block ; e. gr. at [27 yS 2] : 
 
 teo' g^ar natsown tu, non sei nascosta 
 
 mpbal ralpnwte alP occhio di Dio, 
 
 ete mefobs ehe nulla ignora. 
 
 Here lie lias erred in every line, for the words mean: "thou art 
 ignorant of the eye of God (that it is one) which is not wont to sleep'; 
 for obs is 'to sleep', but Prof. Rossi has confounded it with the 
 reflexive use obs - f e , "to forget oneself over, to overlook, neglect" 
 &c., [cf. 1 Eeg. xxiii. 9; Job vi. 4; xi. 11 ; xxxi. 19; Ps. ix. 22; 
 liv. 2; Ixxvii. 59; Eccl. xii. 14; Isai. Iviii. 7; Zech. i. 12; and for 
 obs, "to sleep", cf. Job iii. 11 ; Ps. iii. 5 ; Ixxvii. 5 ; Ixxvii. 65 ; 
 Eccl. V. 11 ; Jerem. xiv. 9]. And if he did not know the Coptic word, 
 there was the Greek with its ayi/oets and its a.KOLfi.r]Tov 6^dakiJ,6v ! 
 
 Then his rendering of swsw mmow ejn by " to be jealous of " 
 [27/3 10], is hardly equal to the Kanp^w^ueVois of the original; the 
 Coptic means "to loast of". In the succeeding lines, he seems to 
 have no notion, — at least he has given no note of any kind, that the 
 Coptic is wrong, for the phrase : wn wer naggelos nau eron, is 
 repeated instead of the second clause referring to the fudpTvai of the 
 text. 
 
 188. The last sentence in the Homily is ludicrously misunder- 
 stood, in the teeth of both Greek and Coptic : "but since it is good 
 to let you go away thirsty for the word of instruction, lest ye become 
 (over-)full so that ye vomit the things ye have heard, therefore we 
 shall put ofE the story of Susanna to another day". The Greek text 
 has Kal /Jtrj Toiis Kopi(r6ivTa<s koX a iSi^avTO iKTTTvarai, of which the 
 Coptic, as translated above, is a pretty exact equivalent [29 p z]. 
 And how has Prof. Eossi rendered it ? 
 
 mepote ntetn sei acciocche non vi saziate 
 
 Stetn ka ebol di andar ruminando 
 
 nnentatnsotinw le cose che avete udito. 
 
 i.e. " that ye may not be satiated with going ruminating the things ye 
 have heard" (!!) 
 
 The Homily on Susanna follows, in a very fragmentary condition. 
 The translation exhibits the same deficiencies. 
 
 189. It begins by a wrong emendation [30 a 18]: ntn6[sk] 
 peteron an, "per non ritardar {a, ■pagaxe) ilnostro deiito'. But osk 
 was not the word here : it was " to fail in", and not " to delay", that 
 the writer intended to express, viz. ojn. He renders the Trapana- 
 
Atkinson — On Prof. Rossi's South- Coptic Texts. 95 
 
 AowTES of the Greek, by "we content ourselves -with" [30/3 9]; 
 translates wrongly : nasope gar an ensaat [/3 13] by "«/ it shall 
 happen to us to be deficient", whereas the Coptic says, "we shall not 
 become deficient", oiSiv i\X.eiij/oiJ.iv ; thins off the words takha ro 
 [/3 22] into "now", ora, wtereas they mean "perhaps even" ; edits 
 ji tsabo [31 j8 16] for " to teacb"; gives si volsero, for the hn wjer 
 of the text [32 a 2], (o/;iju.a) araKTov, and winds up the paragraph by 
 rendering: "there came from the depth of the sea a storm, which 
 overwhelmed me", whereas it is [32 a 21] : " I came into the depths 
 &c.", aiei enetsek nthalassa, cf. Ps. Ixviii. 3. 
 
 190. The next paragraph contains two perversions of the text 
 [32/8 11]: 
 
 sausek. tepsykhe V miima resta 
 
 eulito[]nt]iii attenehrata 
 
 mn wtilie col gusto, 
 
 " If the throat gives itself up to tasting a multitude of victuals and 
 abundant wine, the soul remains dm'kened with the taste". But the 
 words mean, "the soul is draffged into cloudiness and intoxication". 
 There is no mention of "the taste", tipe ; and the construction 
 of mn by "with the taste", is quite impermissible. The Coptic 
 htomtm, "darkness" is a thinning-o£E of the Greek expression: 
 irpos it-iQ-qv kol koltol'; ttjv i/f^x^v KaTa<j>6fip€i. (Perhaps the papyrus 
 has not hto . . . m but hmhm, "licentiousness".) 
 
 191. And a few lines below [32/8 20] : 
 
 wpartlienos «»« mrgine 
 
 eauparadidw mmos che si e data 
 
 ebolbitn neshmhal »« l>aHa <fe' suoi servi. 
 
 But the text says nothing about the virgin " Jiaving given herself into 
 the power of hex servants " ; it says : " who has heen hetrayed ly her 
 servants ". Prof. Kossi seems to have the dimmest possible notion 
 of the meaning of the prepositions, hitn being his especial plague. 
 There are hundreds of mistakes in these texts, arising from the 
 confusion of the Coptic prepositions. 
 
 192. In the very next column he has rendered it wrongly, and 
 put his text wrong also [33 a 15] : 
 
 nai cnSoop '"'»«'"■''. "*« ^™'"' 
 
 hits prfikli nelfuoco 
 
 ntcnepithymia *» ^"^ oo^cupieenza. 
 
 But hits does not mean "in"; it means "by", " by means of "; 
 
96 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 and therefore Ms version, "who were in the fire", hesides being 
 a very weak representation of the Greek <^\oyi Kaiofievo^, is positively 
 incorrect : the words, if they were correct, would mean : ' ' who 
 exist ly means o/the fire ". I do not believe the text had soop, but 
 iobh, "burnt", "dried up". 
 
 193. Here again is an emendation with nothing to recommend it 
 [33 a 5] : 
 
 kata [nj]e mpsopbos seeondo il detto del saggio. 
 
 I am embarrassed here to see how he intended to construe his con- 
 jecture ! Was it Kara followed by 5 ? was it nje, plural of je, 
 " a word" ? It is utterly impossible, anyhow, to Coptic structure, 
 and should have been kata [psa]je. 
 
 194. And I am just as little able to accept his emendation on the 
 next column [33 /3 3] : 
 
 tote ausmnt allora staiilirono 
 
 [mn] neaereu insieme 
 
 cjok ebol di mandare ad efetto 
 
 [tepjraxis V opera. 
 
 The translation reads well enough, but the text will not bear it : his 
 emended text has no meaning at all ! 
 
 For, smnt can mean nothing, by itself ; it must have an object, 
 and that object must be a pronominal suffix. The word was not 
 smnt; it should be smn [tootw mnj, i.e. "they joined hands 
 with one another", "they covenanted" ; cf. 4 Reg. xv. 19. 
 
 195. The same column [33 b foot] gives another example of mis- 
 conception as to the prepositions, for he has edited 
 
 wshime esmise a woman fighting 
 
 [n]m nhowt snau with males twain. 
 
 Here two questions arise at once : 
 
 (fl) What on earth is nm, which he has conjectured? Ac- 
 cording to Prof. Eossi, it is a preposition nm , "with" : in JVbrth- 
 Coptic, yes ! but this is /Sow^A-Coptic, which knows no such word. 
 
 (i) And what is the n before howt snau ? The sign of a 
 plural, and with snau ! 
 
 There was no need for emendation: the text should be esmise 
 mn howt snau. 
 
 196. It does not seem easy to see why Prof. Eossi should so often 
 go out of his way, to misrepresent the text in his translation, by 
 
Atkinson — On Prof. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 97 
 
 paragraphing the clauses wrongly ; e. gr. he gives this version of 
 [34^ 2] : " It was a great and joyous spectacle, great hy those who 
 were in the contest, joyous by the virtue of a weak woman who had 
 power to struggle against these powerful men, who had mutually prepared 
 ■each other for the struggle. 
 
 The heavens opened, the angels &c." 
 
 Then he gives a note, quoting the Greek : As ovv eToi/^os yeyovev 
 ri irdXri, ijvoixdria-av ot oipavot &o. Why, that is exactly what the 
 Coptic says, which paragraphs the clause ia just the same way : 
 " when these had prepared themselves to fight with each other, the 
 heavens opened &c." It was not of the mutual preparation of the 
 two old reprobates that the text was speaking, but of the two com- 
 batants, viz. Susanna on the one side, and her accusers on the other ! 
 Prof. Eossi's translation is utterly impossible with his text, which 
 reads, ntere nai de sbtotw emise mn neuereu. 
 
 197. At [33 a foot] he leaves a word omitted, as being unable to 
 conjecture it, and edits : 
 
 wde petnaboetbei eros ne aleuno che le portasse aiuto 
 Ssa laau ii[. . . .] 
 
 It should have been ; "Hsalaau nsa, " on any side whatever"; of. 
 Job xix. 7, mmn hap nsa laau nsa, oiSa/ioC /cpi/ta. 
 
 198. And here is another confession of ignorance [36 «. 17], 
 where he suggests: af[j]61c nnse ejof ; his translation being: 
 "already the wood was placed upon the altar"- But, as is seen, 
 there was a letter missing in the text, where the word was . . . 61c. 
 Now, there are only three verbs known to the Coptic language, 
 which would /ZZ up the gap, viz. hole, pole and sole; well 
 Prof. Eossi has selected not one of these, but has invented a new 
 verb, jolc. Surely, pole distriluere was more likely. 
 
 199. In fact, wherever a conjecture almost forces itself upon one, 
 Prof. Eossi will shut his eyes to it, and select something impossible. 
 Here is a striking example [36 ^ foot] : 
 
 and eishefete ed ecco 
 
 tinamw mpeirla. ... »" mtrra per questa caltmnia. 
 
 That is absolutely his version, " behold, I shall die by this calumny " ! 
 Attd how did he obtain it ? 
 
 The word la does mean " calumny ", but it never is used with r : 
 the proper verb would be hi, "tofing calumny", hi-la, not f -la, 
 " to do calumny " ; and even then, it would not be a noun. 
 
 R.I.A. PBGC, SEE. ni., VOL. HI. ^ 
 
98 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 Tet his text showed a gap,- which should he supplied, thus : 
 mpei rla[auj, i.e. "I have not done anything", corresponding 
 exactly to the Greek koI tSow, eya> diroOvrjarKto, fii]^h> xpafao-a. The 
 most curious part of the matter is, that Prof. Rossi has translated 
 the last words, but has placed them in italics to show that they are 
 not in the Coptic text ! 
 
 The remainder of the Fasciculus is taken up with Fragments of 
 a Sermon on Christ's birthday. The condition of the papyrus is 
 lamentable, but Prof. Rossi has printed no doubt the largest portion 
 of what is at all legible. Still, the same remarks are to be made as on 
 the previous portions ; but my space and time are limited. 
 
 200. At [497 11] he edits: 
 
 kote e[j]dn volgeievi a noi, 
 
 pcjaf nci pepaaI[ino]cIos disse il psalmista, 
 
 ntetnholc eras unitevi a Lei. 
 
 The Psalmist said no such thing as this : " turn to us" ; for the 
 double reason that the Coptic text, as the editor has emended it, would 
 not mean that, and next, because the original words are to be found at 
 Ps. xlvii. 12, Kxi/cXmo-are "Siiiav, koX TrepiXd/SeTe dvT-qv, showing of course 
 that his text should have been: kote e-sion, and was not the 
 impossible kote ejon of his conjecture. 
 
 Nor can there be any reason for omitting an attempt at least to 
 translate the words on [50 fi foot] : " they bring a musician, that he 
 may sing by his art", 
 
 nte won nini that every one 
 
 wohm nsof may repeat after him 
 
 the words of the birth-day song, which immediately follow. 
 
 His note, p. 104 (1), states that he has " limited himself to 
 the translation of those phrases only, about which there can be no 
 doubt". But I am afraid that is too optimistically said, for there 
 is much more than "doubt" of the accuracy of such a rendering 
 as I'angelo eletto ad annunsiare la gioia, for the text [52 j3 14] 
 esotp paggelos &c. It is quite impossible to make esotp into an 
 adjective (past ptcple) in agreement with the angel. The text has a 
 totally different construction, for it is preceded by ntaf ei , "who 
 hath come", which the editor has omitted altogether. 
 
 Nor do I think that he has hit the mark, on [53 o] foot, where 
 he renders : " the Lord God is his old name. Do not cause that 
 they delay to lean on the stafi &c.", for his text should stop 
 
Atkinson— 0« Prof. Rossi's South-Coptic Texts. 99 
 
 at pef-ran, "His name", and the following -word niello, is 
 not adjectival to pef-ran, " Hs old name", but it is voc. pi.: 
 "ye aged, do not be remiss &c."; and then the next words flow 
 on with a suitable meaning referring to the hoariness of their 
 intelligence, which of course was quite unintelligible to the editor, 
 and has occasioned his (?) after perfetti ; for his translation runs 
 thus: 
 
 il Signore Iddio e il suo name vecehio. Non fare che 
 tardino ad appoggiarsi sul bastone della loro oonsolazwne, 
 per/etti (?) nella canizie della loro prudenza. 
 
 Phrases, about which there can be no doubt ? 
 
 Here I shall conclude my examination of the texts. The remainder 
 of this Fasciculus is too fragmentary to make it worth while to dis-. 
 cover by divination what the papyri may really contain in addition to 
 the parts which Prof. Eossi has deciphered. It is past doubt, how- 
 ever, that the whole of these texts as published so far will have to be 
 gone over again by competent scholars, before science can be satisfied 
 that the papyri have yielded all they are capable of giving. 
 
 It was my fate, twenty years' ago, to show that knowledge of 
 the modem form of a language was not a sufficient qualification for 
 undertaking the task of editing texts in the older form of the 
 language : the converse is now my lot, to show that a knowledge of 
 the ancient form, of itseK, will not suffice to enable an editor to 
 handle the later form of the same speech. It cannot be permitted 
 that even a Professor of Egyptology should, with impunity, play 
 " hieroglyphics" with the Coptic language. 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PJ 2023.A87O5 
 
 On Professor Rossi's publication of Sout 
 
 3 1924 026 909 691