Albounout "Frankincense" and Alsounalph "Oxtongue": Phoenician-Punic Botanical Terms with Prothetic Vowels from an Egyptian Papyrus and a Byzantine Codex

Abstract

The Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden, usually dated to the third century c.E. on paleographic grounds, contains a Semitic loanword that appears to have been overlooked by Semitists. In V/6, the word appears in Demotic alphabetic characters as xxx; in XXIX/17, 24, it appears in an alphabetic cipher substituting for an Old Coptic ^ (albounout)'• The meaning of the word in Egyptian in reasonably clear. The occurrence in Demotic characters (V/6) is written with the same pellet determinative as bl "myrrh" in the previous line (V/5)2. The substance to which it refers is put on a brazier (XXIX/17), presumably functioning as an incense burner. (from Introduction).