Atkinson — On Prof. Eossi's Soiifh- Coptic Texts. 25 



^ow, here th.e 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. Rossi 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 may put it under a bushel", the vtto tov (jloSlov of Matt, v. 16. 



It was while reading Prof. Rossi's versions, with a view to a stndy 

 in Homilies, that I was frequently so astounded by "impossibilities", 

 that the conviction forced it$elf 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. Rossi 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 Pasciculi 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 will begin with an examination of liis edition — text and trans- 

 lation, — of the fragments of the Book of Proverbs. His translation 



