Thursday, April 17, 2014

The Identity of Batson D Sealing

Wouldn't an Egyptian cataloging clerk at Tulane, a man who was so skilled at ancient Egyptian that he was accepted by the prestigious university to teach a course on ancient Egyptian writing, who happened to work at Brown-Tilton Memorial Library for forty years (1966 - 2006) - the very library which housed all the documents for the New Orleans Academy of Sciences, itself the organization which appears to have created Depuydt's document - be the most likely suspect to have sent the 1875 article along with a low quality translation to Oxford University in 1990?  Was the issue really that he forged the text or was it instead that the editorial staff at Discussions in Egyptology or was it that he wasn't sure he had translated the Demotic correctly - i.e. wasn't sure he had the 'chops' to perform at a university level? 

The other question is - where is the document now?  The entire collection is missing from the Tulane library.  We are told in the early twentieth century that a wealth of material from the New Orleans Academy at Tulane.  An associate has gone through the 8 boxes at the library - it's mostly garbage i.e. notes and other scribbles.  All the journals have disappeared.  We get a sense of this from the various recent historians who have written on the Academy in the period.  Nothing remains.  But our sources from the beginning of the twentieth century tells us the exact opposite.  What happened to all the material that once was at Tulane?  Could it be that the library staff was careless or worse ...


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