Talk:Tyet

Proposed merge

I oppose the proposed merger with the article on Isis, partly because a passage in The Origins of Osiris and His Cult by J. Gwyn Griffiths assumes that the symbol was not originally connected with her. Additionally, it seems to imply that an early example dates to First Dynasty, centuries before Isis' first solid attestation in the Fifth Dynasty, though his wording is somewhat ambiguous. I'll copy what he says on page 40, with relevant footnotes in parentheses:

An interesting find was made by Zaki Y. Saad (Royal Excavations at Saqqara and Helwan (1941–1945), 27 and Pl. 14b) in a tomb of the First Dynasty at Helwân—two ivory pieces which, in his opinion, form the most ancient example of the djed-pillar, which in turn he describes as "the symbol of the god Osiris'. The djed-pillar, however, is not consistently an Osirian symbol, at least not in its early forms. Only in the New Kingdom does it become unambiguously Osirian. Even so, do these pieces represent djed-pillars? They seem to imitate papyrus-columns, with four papyrus flowers imposed over the other. It may equally be doubted whether the ivory toilet spoon is 'a symbol of the goddess Isis', or again the knot represented on the adjacent box lid. (It is fair to add that some scholars accept Saad's claims… Against this, see Helck, 'Osiris', 481. The Isis-knot, of course, is not originally distinctively Isiac: see H. Schäfer, ZÄS 62 (1927), 108–110.)

The Schäfer source is most relevant here, and I managed to track it down: "Das sogenannte „Blut der Isis" und das Zeichen „Leben“". Only the first page of the paper is publicly accessible, though, so we can't see most of Schäfer's argument without access to ZÄS. A 1927 source isn't ideal in Egyptology, as studies of Egyptian religion have changed greatly since then, but I don't know of any more recent sources that discuss the original meaning of the tyet.

All that detail is rather tangential to the merge discussion, but it shows that the tyet may not have originally been just a symbol of Isis and there are some ambiguities about it that probably deserve some discussion in the article. This article will always be fairly small, but I don't think it's doomed to be a stub forever. Isis, in contrast, is a sprawling subject whose article I just recently expanded, reflecting the reams and reams of scholarly literature. There's no reason to force the content of this small but not tiny article into one that has many other subtopics to discuss. A. Parrot (talk) 01:57, 11 December 2017 (UTC)