Talk:Dʿmt/Archive 1

Name Change
This article's name doesn't even show on my computer, which has pretty extensive support for many languages. The second letter shows up as a box. It is probably the same with most people, so I thought this should be changed so it is more easily viewable.--Fox Mccloud 15:13, 29 July 2006 (UTC)


 * Really? Hmmm...I guess we could go with a spiritus asper, then. &mdash; ዮም  |  (Yom)  |  Talk  • contribs • Ethiopia 20:36, 11 August 2006 (UTC)


 * This article has redirects that use the forward quote ( ' ) & the backquote ( ` ). I'd prefer one of these over the current ( ? ) that I see. Which one should we standardize on for readability reasons? -- llywrch 21:50, 26 August 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm going to go with the spiritus asper, I think. It should be readable to all, and it makes it obvious that it's representing an ayin and not aleph. The forward quote is ambiguous but more often represents aleph, while the backquote can be used to represent ayin, but isn't often used. &mdash; ዮም  |  (Yom)  |  Talk  • contribs • Ethiopia 22:43, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Belew Kelew & DMT
Were the Kingdom of Belew Kelew and Dmt in any way related? Curious about available texts on the topic. --Merhawie 00:05, 20 December 2006 (UTC)


 * What's Belew Kelew? Are you referring to the "Belew" Beja rulers during the Zagwe dynasty (or the Beja kingdoms in the Sudan and N. Eritrea)?


 * Nvm, apparently "Belew Kelew" is another word for Metera/Matara. Yes, they are related. Matara was an important pre-Aksumite (i.e. D`mt) site. Matara wasn't a kingdom, though, just an important city within the wider realm of D`mt. &mdash; ዮም  |  (Yom)  |  Talk  • contribs • Ethiopia 00:14, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

IPA pronunciation
This article could use the IPA pronunciation. Chris 21:42, 13 August 2007 (UTC)
 * There is no pronounciation, really, since it's a transcription of an abjad. Hence, the IPA would be a string of unpronouncable consonants (without the vowels). The letters individually represent /d/, /ʕ/, /m/, and /t/, however, which should be relatively clear. &mdash; ዮም  |  (Yom)  |  Talk  • contribs • Ethiopia 04:29, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Moved text
The below text is moved here from the article, which is more appropriately a criticism than content. -- llywrch (talk) 16:09, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Dr Nadia Durrani states that the names of the queens and their contemporaries are not mentioned in her book. It would be of enormous interest to obtain the correct source of this information. Emails to Dr Nobert Nebes, Dr Ricardo Eichmann, Dr Bernard Leeman and others currently involved in excavations and research on the D'mt kingdom and Queen's Yodit's Damot realm (perhaps D'mt) at Adi Kaweh, Wukro, throw no light on the origin of this information. Dr Leeman confirms that Adi Kaweh Church possesses three incense burners, two of which bear the names the Kings and Mukarribs of D'mt listed above. These were discovered in the late 1960's at nearby Wukro 1 archaeological site - Yodit's alleged grave and the site of present German excavations - and below Wukro 2 site. The third burner was later found in the village itself. Wikipedia seems to be the sole source for the queens' names. (written by )

I reiterate: Nadia Durrani keeps stating this information is not from her book. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 110.175.67.230 (talk) 03:49, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

Reference
Ntsukunyane Mphanya seems to have a problem with the use of the reference by Nadia Durranio. This reference is currently used in three places in the article: twice in the text and once to provide a source for information in the table. More specifically Ntsukunyane Mphanya seems to have a problem with the source being used as a reference for the column labled Queen. If that is the case then I would suggest removing the reference from the line List of four known rulers in chronological order and instead adding the reference to the headers of the table that are supported and to the headers that are not supported by the source.

This seems, (to me), to be a reasonable, functional and workable way to improve the article. 75.69.0.58 (talk) 11:13, 14 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Who first supplied the names of the queens, or more importantly what is the source? There are several academics anxious to know. The incense burners at Adi Kaweh are significant enough because two of them mention "Hebrew" and the existence of a queen and two high queens of Sabaea/Sheba. In addition the alleged burial site of Queen Yodit of Damot was on the site of Wukro 1 and is cause of part of the growing speculation that the area, as Ullendorf suggest and the Kebra Nagast states, was home to an ancient Hebraic population. D'MT is becoming of increasing general interest and this sort of fake referencing is what undermines Wikipedia as a reliable source and has already caused it to be censored as a reference in academic assignments at better universities and treated with amusement and some scorn by others, including academics falsely quoted. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ntsukunyane Mphanya (talk • contribs) 01:53, 1 November 2009 (UTC)


 * According to the source you are in a revert war with the Anon IP over, it would appear to be Nadia Durrani, The Tihamah Coastal Plain of South-West Arabia in its Regional context c. 6000 BC - AD 600 (Society for Arabian Studies Monographs No. 4) . Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005 ISBN 1841718947. Ntsukunyane Mphanya, I would suggest you read the work, then explain on this talk page why this sourcee does not apply here before removing it from the article. -- llywrch (talk) 05:12, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

This subject of D’Mt is of growing historical importance. Recent excavations have found its is linked to Yeha. Unfortunately whoever controls this page is so obdurate about giving false references that the matter has now been taken to the arbitrators with copies of Dr Nadia Durrani’s emails distancing herself from the names of the queens. It is disgraceful that someone who lacks the ability pass a pre-sessional undergraduate university skills course should be allowed control over this page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ntsukunyane Mphanya (talk • contribs) 01:17, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

All said and done, I see that wikipedia is a case of "too many cooks spoil the brew". I very much feel that the right to interfere with any article by any other editor should be censored. Original writer is left with no respect in this way. I feel that reflects badly on the article. Many honest writers are discouraged due to such a practice. Pathare Prabhu (talk) 13:30, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
 * If you feel like that perhaps you should try Knoll. No one has special rights over a Wikipedia article, that's fundamental to the way Wikipedia works. Read WP:OWN. "All Wikipedia content[1] is open to being edited collaboratively. No one, no matter how skilled, has the right to act as if they are the owner of a particular article." Dougweller (talk) 16:31, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Re: Dʿmt
Best I can remember, I haven't seen the variant "Diʿamat" before. But I'm not surprised: every proper name related to Ethiopia has a lot of variant spellings, if not variant names. One example is "Addis Ababa" vs. "Addis Abeba", but also "Finfinne". BTW, thanks for fighting the good fight against the crazies. -- llywrch (talk) 05:05, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Your questions touch on a lot of issues & requires a TL;DR response, which I was trying to avoid. So I ask your indulgence to tackle those issues now in the depth they require.


 * First, any Google search on "D'mt" or Di'amat" is going to return a bloody lot of false positives due to how it parses the input. There's something about that apostrophe/glottal stop Google's search engine just can't handle. When I added "Ethiopia" to the string, Google returned a lot more useful hits -- for both forms.


 * Second, African archeology -- excluding Egypt -- is a very neglected subject; the state for Ethiopian archeology is better than average, but that's not saying much. The reasons for this include such things as racism, lack of funds, & the working environment; not only does a field archeologist need to deal with a lack of infrastructure, disease & wild animals, but also with chronic lawlessness which ranges from thievery to civil war. So there just aren't that many sources, let alone online, for Google to find & return in a search.


 * So I took my usual course & consulted the items in my personal library for examples of which form is likely to be used. Paul Henze, in his Layers of Time one of the standard general histories of Ethiopia, uses "Damot/Diamat", but he admits in his preface that he makes no attempt to be correct in his transliteration. Richard Pankhurst, who is considered the authority on Ethiopian History -- although his statements can be outdated or just plain wrong -- takes no position: in neither his The Ethiopians nor The Ethiopian Borderlands does he use either term. S.C. Munro-Hay, both in his Excavations at Aksum and his Aksum: An African Civilisation of Late Antiquityuses the form "D'MT", although in Excavations'' he mentions "Dia'mat" as a possible reading of "D'MT".


 * (At some point I should note that the inscriptions which mention D'mt were written without vowels, which was the usual practice for writing Semitic languages at the time. So "D'mt", "Da'mot", "Damot", "Di'amat" & "Dia'mat" are all equally valid forms; the authorities simply have their preferences, & not always for rational reasons.)


 * So what should be done here? Do what you think is best. I'm not too hung up on specific forms of the names used in Ethiopian articles as long as their use is attested -- & a serious effort is made to avoid diacritical ornamentation. (I personally feel using them risks eye glaze-over & makes it harder for the user to read the article.) And redirects are cheap; I haven't bothered to make them for many articles that should have them because I'd rather spend my time working on the articles. And if you don't want that much responsibility email Yom, who either wrote most of these articles or most of their content. I'm comfortable deferring to his judgment. -- llywrch (talk) 16:57, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

I've added some variants to help people search. I think we also need to create some redirects. Dougweller (talk) 12:55, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Hm, we already have an article Damot, so perhaps that shouldn't be an alternative for this article (although I've seen it ) used, and a redirect Da'amat, not one of the spellings I included. Dougweller (talk) 13:05, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
 * 'Damot' is also used here} -- some sources useful for this article are [http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ep7__RWqq4IC&pg=PA408&dq=Yeha&hl=en&ei=5wahTPr1CoiR4QbqzfDeDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CDsQ6AEwBDgK#v=onepage&q=Yeha&f=false  and   —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dougweller (talk • contribs) 13:42, 29 September 2010 (UTC)


 * But Llywrch, those scholars cannot pull those vocalisations out of thin air or make entirely baseless guesses, can they? Or is it a conventional vocalisation as used in Egyptology ([e], [ɛ] or [ə] as default vowel, [a] next to pharyngeals, [i] next to  and [u] next to  or something like that)? But that would at best explain [damət] or *Damet, not Da(')mot and certainly not Di(')amat or Dia'mat, which seems to transcribe something like */diʕmat/ with an epenthetic vowel [a] between [i] and pharyngeal (to make the transition easier). There has to be some sort of Sekundärüberlieferung or reconstruction based on more modern stages or languages involved as in the case of certain reconstructions of Ancient Egyptian.
 * By the way, the alternation Addis Abeba vs. Addis Ababa is just a consequence of the problem to transcribe the schwa vowel of Amharic, or, rather, ignorance or laziness on the part of the writer. The scientific transcription is Addis Abäba. (Well, those with a German keyboard layout do have an advantage here.) --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:14, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

Spelling
I'm copying a discussion from my talk page here: