Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/109

 study, as far as I am aware, has not yet been made, but if made by any other person it must necessarily lead to the same result.

The old Egyptian word nutar had already in the popular pronunciation suffered from phonetic decay, and lost its final consonant as early as the nineteenth dynasty, as we see by the inscriptions in the royal tombs at Bibān-el-molūk, and it appears in Coptic under the forms nuti, nute. It is remarkable that the translators of the Bible into Coptic, who generally abstained from the use of old Egyptian words connected with religion, and used Greek words instead, nevertheless adopted this one as expressive of their notion of God.

There is another word, nutra, very frequently used either as verb or adjective, which is closely allied to nutar. The sense of "renovation" was first attached to it by M. E. de Rougé, on the strength of its final sign, which he considered as a determinative of signification. But this conjecture, which has been very generally accepted, is really without any solid foundation; the sign in question is here expressive of nothing more than the sound tra, and it will be found to all