There are several images of the Msktt solar rook from the New Kingdom era. The bow of such a boat is equipped with a net, at the bottom of which is an image of a frog. Until now, Egyptologists have not been able to agree on the semantics of amphibians in this context. In this article, the author, studying temple and tomb images and texts, as well as a number of vignettes from the Book of the Dead, attempts to interpret the semantics of the frog image, focusing on the meaning of certain elements of the scenes that researchers previously did not pay due attention to, in particular, the purpose of the network itself, located on the nose of the Msktt boat.
Keywords: Ancient Egypt, New Kingdom, frog, Msktt boat, solar barge, net, whm ' nh "repetition of life", rebirth, red and turquoise beads woven into the net.
The problem of the semantics of the image of a frog under the Msktt boat (a barge on which the sun moves away in the evening, floats at night and reappears in the early morning) has been controversial among Egyptologists for many years. There are two points of view expressed in the literature on this issue. Some scientists (for example, German Egyptologist Hermann Grapov) believed that the frog in such scenes does not carry a sacred load and is a designation of its habitat. G. Grapov noted that on the barge from the tomb of Ramesses VI, the frog and the"plant" 1 were used only to show that the bottom of the boat was shown, and the plant seemed to hang down from its bow. In his opinion, the frog in this case has no sacred significance [Grapow, 1956, p. 27]. Elizabeth Thomas, in turn, believed that the frog moved to the otherworldly Nile. Accordingly, the latter acquires some components of the terrestrial Nile and ordinary terrestrial marshes, again without any sacred component (Thomas, 1959, p. 45).
According to another point of view, the image of a frog on the prow of a divine barge is a symbol of whm 'nh, i.e. "repetition of life". This was the opinion of A. Pia ...
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