Khazar-khum Wrote:
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> Cow patties and road apples, while different
> items, have a similar background.

I never heard the term "road apples" applied to manure before. But the word I was asking about is transparently cognate with shata -- a rough transliteration of the word for filth and dung in Syriac, Aramaic, and a number of other semitic lanaguages.

So, I suspect that's also what the Egyptian word meant. Moreover, I suspect that it's cognate with, if not ancestral, to the consonantally and semantically identical word in Indo-European (IE) languages, despite the fact that people who adhere to the IE theory would claim that the resemblance is nothing but a coincidence.

I seriously doubt that!

Bill