Tim

I do not understand your insistence that heaven and paradise are synonyms.
They are partial synonyms only in English but not in Egyptian.  "Pet" means
the sky, *the* heavens, the highest point.  It doesn't mean heaven or
paradise.  Again, paradise as a unified concept did not exist in Egyptian to
my knowledge.  If you have firm knowledge of paradise as a unified concept
much like the western "paradise" please direct me in the right direction.

Gardiner may have been concerned because the sentence apparently lacks an
"iw", the particle that begins all Egyptian sentences.  The hieroglyph for
"pet" begins what remains of the "Instruction".  Several characters (words)
are missing from the beginning.  An "iw" might have been defaced from the
instruction just to the left of "pet".  In this case nothing is amiss and
"pet" means loftiest point.  However, if other characters that were part of
the sentence were defaced then the meaning, significance and sentence part
of "pet" might be changed.

The hieroglyph as reproduced by Pound has another curiosity.  There should
be a stroke, a vertical line, just beside the character of the man.  This
indicates that the intended reading is "man".  The "s" above the man
character is adequate for reading it as "Man" but the hieroglyph is
technically incomplete.   I do not know precisely where Pound got the
hieroglyphs.  I would presume from Boris, however,  Boris did not reproduce
them in "Massime Degli Antichi Egizini".   Boris's original translation was
to Italian, "Il paradiso per un uomo e la sua buona natura," (page 19,
Massime).   Pound presumably translated the Italian to English.  The
original papyri is in St. Petersburg, Russia and I have been as yet unable
to check it for the missing stroke and the "iw".

Word order certainly counts.  Your dismissal is like saying that inflection
really doesn't count in Latin.   Word order determines the subject, the
principal reason for the sentence's existence.  In Boris's translation the
reader's attention is directed towards "Paradise".  In the Egyptian the
reader's attention is directed towards "Good nature".   There is a major
difference in emphasis.  As I said before, Pound was ecstatic about this
discovery of "paradise" by Boris.  Pound probably thought that paradise
meant much the same thing to an Egyptian as it does to modern man.  It
didn't.  The Egyptian did not have the concept.

If you want to continue to insist that the Egyptian "heaven/sky" and English
"paradise" are synonyms and that the word order in a non-inflected language
doesn't count,  so be it.

Rick Seddon
McIntosh, NM