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© Copyright 2002, Jim Loy
Above is my drawing of an inscription showing Usertsen (Sesostris or Senusert) III making an offering to the god Mont (Montu). It is a lintel in the Louvre. You can see quite a few common words, although reading the entire inscription may be difficult. Notice that some of the text is from right to left, while other parts are left to right.
Let's try to translate this inscription. Let's begin with the short column just to the left of the winged solar disk. This reads left to right, and relates to the person below it who faces left. Bhdt is the town of Edfu in Upper Egypt. I hear that the winged disk is related to this town. Below that is "good god" followed by "lord of the two lands Kha-kau-ra, given life." "Kha" is shown as the semicircle, which is simplified somewhat from the sign N28 in Gardiner's Sign List. Ra is similarly simplified. Looking up Kha-kau-ra in a List of Kings shows that he is Sesostris (Usertsen) III. The mirror image of that sentence is repeated to the right.
To the left of that first sentence are three short columns followed by the long column on the far left. These read right to left, and relate to the god facing right, below. The first column says "djd-mdw" meaning "say" or "said", then "di" is "give", then "nnk" means "belongs to me." The second column says "said life, dominion every (or lord?)." The upper left corner of the inscription says "Mont (Montu)" the name of the god shown below. Going down the leftmost column, we have "lord Wast (Thebes) given life-he every (or lord?) enduring dominion every (or lord?) healthy every (lord?) like Ra forever." All of that is mirrored on the far right of the inscription. As you can see, I have not attempted to translate that into idiomatic English. It takes some further guesswork to do that.
To the right of Mont, we have a column which is not mirrored on the right: "Said give, belongs to me, health every (lord?) happy (long heart) every (lord?) like Ra." Its near mirror image on the right says, "Said give belongs to me, life, dominion every (lord) enduring every (lord?) like Ra." As you can see, I am having trouble telling "lord" from "every." "Every" is an adjective, which follows its noun. So most of these may mean "every."
We are left with four columns around the two pictures of the king. I will try to translate them later.