jꜥ tw jmj mw ḥr ḏbꜥw.k jḫ wšb.k wšd.t(w).k mdw.k n nswt jb.k m-ꜥ.k wšb.k nn njtjt
Wash yourself, put water on your fingers, so you might answer when you are addressed, speak to the king with your mind in your possession, and answer without stammering.
c.1391–1353 BCE, reign of Amenhotep III, Statue E of Amenhotep son of Hapu (Cairo CG 583 + 835), line 7:
s[ḏ]m jb pw ḏꜥr.f zḥ ḫppwt mj ntj jb ḫft.s gm ṯz tj sw m gm-wš nb sꜣrt mḥ-jb jty
He is one who listens to the mind[4] when he investigates the counsel of strange things no less than that with which the mind accords, one who finds the expression when it is found blank, a possessor of wisdom, the confidant of the sovereign, […]
One who is averted of face against feeding the heart (i.e. one who doesn’t indulge himself), the harsh man has to be more kindly to him than his (own) mother.[5]
Then, (as for) His Majesty, his mood fell into a bad state over this. Then Djedi said, Now what is this mood, O sovereign (life, prosperity, health!), my lord?
Archaic or greatly restricted in usage by Middle Egyptian. The perfect has mostly taken over the functions of the perfective, and the subjunctive and periphrastic prospective have mostly replaced the prospective.
Declines using third-person suffix pronouns instead of adjectival endings: masculine .f/.fj, feminine .s/.sj, dual .sn/.snj, plural .sn.
Archaic or greatly restricted in usage by Middle Egyptian. The perfect has mostly taken over the functions of the perfective, and the subjunctive and periphrastic prospective have mostly replaced the prospective.
Declines using third-person suffix pronouns instead of adjectival endings: masculine .f/.fj, feminine .s/.sj, dual .sn/.snj, plural .sn.
“jb (lemma ID 23290)”, “jb (lemma ID 23370)”, “jb (lemma ID 23340)”, and “jb (lemma ID 23360)”, in Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae[1], Corpus issue 18, Web app version 2.1.5, Tonio Sebastian Richter & Daniel A. Werning by order of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and Hans-Werner Fischer-Elfert & Peter Dils by order of the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, 2004–26 July 2023
^ The text is damaged here, and the correct reading is unclear. Besides sḏm jb, an interpretation as skm jb has also been suggested by Coulon, with the proposed meaning of ‘one with an accomplished or perfected mind’ (‘quelqu’un à l’esprit accompli’).
^ The beginning of this passage, encompassing the glyphs
, seems corrupt and has been emended in various ways. Gardiner takes it as an otherwise unattested word *ḫtr(“to be powerless”) and the entire passage as ḫtr.n ḥr r dfꜣ jb(“the face is powerless(?) over against one stolid(?)”). Allen restores it as ḫrtwr, as given here, based on the determinatives (with the assumption that the scribe forgot a
). Lichtheim, following Feder, reads ḫrr(“gentle/meek”) and considers dfꜣ-jb to mean something like ‘timidity, slowness’, reading the whole as ‘He who is gentle, even timid…’.