«Тахиййат»: Сборник статей в честь Н. Н. Дьякова

m 44 n Herman Bell, Muhammad Jalal Hashim may have been misled by the Arabic forms provided by the kātibs since they omitted the Arabic character shadda which would have indicated that the / w / was doubled. However, there is another factor that may have affected Griffith and Hoskins. English speakers tend not to regard doubling as important. The doubling of consonants is significant both for Nubian and Arabic, but is only marginally distinctive in spoken English. In English a consonant may be pronounced doubled at junctures between words (e.g. as double / dd / in ba d d og), but not normally in the midst of individual words (e.g. giddy is pronounced as [gi d i]). The local inhabitants provided no meaning for Kówwa . Names with no re- ported meaning form a baffling category of potential importance. They may be old Nubian names whose original meaning was by-passed and lost as the lan- guage changed through the centuries. They may incorporate personal names which flourished in the pre-Islamic period, but which now are no longer in use. On the other hand, they may be derived from non-Nubian languages. Report- ing on his excavations in Nubia, Jean Leclant (1970, 247) noted the survival of an ancient Egyptian place-name from the 14 th century B.C as follows: ‘<Ad- eye>’, the archaeological site locally called ‘aussi bien Adeye que Sedeinga’. According to Leclant, this name <Adeye> perpetuates the designation given by the ancient Egyptians of the New Kingdom: hwt-Tiy, <the temple of Queen Tiy>. Bell transcribed the name from a modern resident of Sedeinga as Adée Fáar , ‘Old Adée ’ (Fáar being the Nobíin Nubian word for ‘old’). Could Kówwa , like <Adeye>, have been derived from an ancient Egyptian place-name? Karl-Heinz Priese (1976, 323) proposed that it was, as follows: ‘In diesem Zusammenhang wird vorgeschlagen, den Ortsnamen der meroit- ischen Inschrift Kawa 102 [sic for 104] als Qwt / qawata / zu lesen. Dies wäre dann als Vorläufer des modernen Kawa zu erklären als (Pr)-Gm-’tn > /kam-ata/ > /kawata/’. Gm-’tn alone is the town name spelled with the Egyptian hieroglyphic determinative for ‘town’. ( Pr ) represents the word ‘House’ or ‘Temple’. Pr - Gm-’tn refers to the ‘Temple of Gm-’tn ’. Between the ancient Egyptian examples of Gm-’tn and the modern ‘ Kawa ’, Priese pointed to an important Meroitic link which he interpreted as / qawata /. His account of the development of the town name from ancient to modern times seems to have been as follows: Gm-’tn > /kam-ata/ > /kawata/ (Meroitic: /qawata/) > Kawa. Later, Priese seems to have been less convinced of this suggestion. In an article of 1984, whenever he considered an etymology to be convincing, he wrote the derived modern name in bold letters. However, when he mentioned Kawa, it was not in bold letters, (1984, 494). His original suggestion of 1976