Kamose stele

In one of her messages to AEL list, Marianne Luban -
who did appreciate my recording of
The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor -
asked me politely whether I would try to
record some lines of the first Kamose Stele.
Her idea was to reconstruct with a fair approximation
the vocalization of the XVIII dinasty Egyptian through
the Coptic language.
Being a curious cat I could not resist and here it is.

Marianne did the vocal research and I tried to follow her suggestions
as best as I could and I am quite aware that my rendering shows
some inconsistencies. And there are surely some controversial
choices, but that is open to discussion.
Anyway it's clear that this is just a pioneering experiment
and that we cannot garantee accuracy-- only approximation.

We chose the part of the stele which can be considered
its prologue. It's a scene in the Council Chamber with
a young, polemic and hot-tempered Kamose
that scolds his councillors for their calculating compliance
to the foreign invaders and the diplomatic councillors who exhort him
to prudence. I tried to give a slight grotesque and rethorical touch to
the faint-hearted advices of those would be wise politicians.

So for what concerns the "theatrical atmosphere", which is quite
far from the solemnity that some may expect, I am the only
responsible and all possible blames must fall on me.
As for the technical quality of the recording it is kind of
amateurish, since I used a very common PC microphone,
but I think that the result may be considered acceptable.

I include the hieroglyphic text of the recorded part of the stele.
I downloaded it from Serge Rosmorduc's site

http://www.iut.univ-paris8.fr/~rosmord/hieroglyphes/kamose/kamose.pdf

and I wish to thank him for his kind permission to use it.

I did some editing on it. I divided the lines into "three sound-unit sections",
according to my idea of the three-tempoed structure of the Egyptian
language - even though I wouldn't bet on its validity. Just bear with me!
That - and the transliteration (pardon the possible mistakes!) -
may help to follow the recording.
A couple of lines are missing, so I decided to leave them out,
trying not to lose the smoothness of the speech. You can check
comparing the original hieroglyphs and my adapted version.

To have more informations there is a URL

http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/kamose_inscription.htm

which gives the translation of the whole stele as well.

This is the hieroglyph text:
KAMOSE_STELE.jpg
(Click on it to enlarge it.)

And this is the mp3 file:
KAMOSE_STELE.mp3

Hope you have fun!

Lady Marianne Luban's humble servant

Orlando Mezzabotta

P.S. My files are free and you can do with them
whatever you like, provided they are not used
for commercial or lucrative purposes.