Bull cakes
Chris,

Thanks very much for the thought provoking reference, as it inspired me to research the issues in question in greater detail. As a result, I want to point that although Breasted states that the “bull cakes” were “doubtless also made in the shape indicated by the name,” that is an assumption that can indeed be doubted, as I do, for a number reasons.

First, Breasted interpreted D53 (the phallus emitting fluid) in the word for bull cakes as a glyph that simply served to confirm that the reclining bull is indeed a bull. However, Vygus shows that D53 can be interpreted as a highly polysemous ideograph that referred to feces, seeding, fertilization, growing things, mounds, and things that sicken. For instance, he shows D53 as a determinative in:

(1) fgn (I9- W11 - D53) —‘defecation, intestinal emptying, and shit’;
(2) wsst (Z7 - 034 - N37 - X1 - D53) — ‘feces’;
(3) nrw (N35 - D36 - Z7 - X1 - D53 - Y1) — ‘impregnate’ (i.e, fertilize)
(4) styt” ‘seeding, fertilization’;
(5) “bnwt” (D52 - X1 - 27 - X1 - D53 - Z2) — seed;
(6) bnwt (D58 - N35 - W24 - G43 - X1 - D53 - Z2) ‘tumor’ (i.e, a mound);
(7) bnd (D58 - N35 - D46 - D53) —‘sicken’ (i,e, disgust)

When syncretized, these meanings suggest to me that the prototypal referent of D53 was a disgusting mound that the Egyptians associated with fertilizing seeds, which supports my assertion that D53 in sha-t originally identified the cakes in question as a cow patties.

In fact, as Carl Buck points out in his “Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in The Principal Indo-European Languages,” a number of words for cow manure in Indo-European languages were derived from words for cows ( e.g. Slavic“govno” cow manure <“guovs” ‘cow ’). So, it is even possible that E1 (the bull) and E100B (the reclining bull) alone, but particularly when combined with D52 or D53, were designed to identify cattle as animals that fertilized fields, rather than animals that impregnated females.

Second, in addition to projecting that the cakes in question were the type of cakes that people eat, Breasted anthropomorphized the obelisks, evidently based on his assumption that they were monumentalized forms of a person or a personified deity.

However, Egyptian deities had botanical embodiments, as well as human embodiments, and the Egyptians offered things to those plants. So, the cakes in question could very well have been the fertilizer we call “plant food,” rather than the type of cakes that people eat.

A skeptic might object to this interpretation by arguing that it would have made no sense for the Egyptians to offer fertilizer to an obelisk. But the same objection is even more true about interpreting the cakes as the kind of cakes that people eat, because the Egyptians must have placed those cakes at the obelisks’ feet, and plants use their roots to absorb their nutrients.

In contrast, people must use their hands and mouths to eat, and obelisks don’t have hands or mouths. So, interpreting the obelisks as monumentalized plants actually makes more sense than interpreting them as monumentalized forms of a personified deity.

Getting back to the practice of denigrating the value of Budge’s dictionary, and the widespread belief that many of his interpretations are wrong, I’ll point out that on page 730 of Vol. II, Budge interprets one variant of the root “sha” of sha-t ‘bull cakes” as ‘barren ground’ (i.e., dirt), another variant as a ‘sand offering’, and still another variant as ‘the bed of Osiris”.

I’m not sure whether Budge’s detractors have taken these interpretations seriously or not, but a relatively literal minded person may think that they are merely two more of Budge’s fanciful musings. After all, why would anyone have offered dirt or sand to a deity or considered it the bed of Osiris?

The validity and importance of these interpretations can, however, be appreciated if one considers that (1) the Egyptians considered Osiris the spirit that dwelled in grain, as well as in the Byblian tree in which his coffin supposedly landed; (2) “bed” can refer to a plant’s bed, as well as a person’s bed, (3) the Egyptians “embedded” and tended seeds in planters shaped like Osiris, evidently by watering and fertilizing them, and (4) Isis was said to have planted Osiris’s body parts all over Egypt. So, Budge’s interpretations of sha’s variants as references to dirt and ‘the bed of Osiris’ agree fully with my interpretation of “sha-t” as the fertilizer we call a cow patty, and obelisks as monumentalized plants.

Third, I’ll point out that even though a literal minded person might also assume that shat ‘knife, slaughter, wound, cut, etc’ has nothing whatsoever to do with shat ‘cow manure’, a number of words for excrement in Indo-European languages were derived from words that referred to cutting and separating. For instance, “excrement” was derived from L “cernere” ‘to separate’ hence ‘cut, split apart.. So, the derivation of “shat” ‘excrement’ and “shat” ‘cut’ from the same root perfectly parallels the derivation of excrement from cernere ‘to cut.’

Fourth, I'll point out that the relationship between cakes, cocks and excrement that the Egyptians were apparently using when they called cow manure cakes, and they used a cock to associate those cakes with fertilization and males are the very same ones that exist in the relationship between (1) the Old Norse ancestor “kaka” of English “cake,” (2) the Icelandic word “kuka” ‘to defecate’ that yielded English “cukken” to defecate, (3) Latin cacare, to defecate, and (2) OE. cocc, coc, and kok ‘male.’

Consequently, it appears that the association between cow manure, cakes, and cocks that the Egyptians depicted hieroglyphically also exist in Indo-European languages because the associations exist in a figurative layer of the human mind where words are attached to images.

Bill