Talk:Solar barque

Merge and move proposal
I propose to merge Matet boat and Seqtet boat into Atet and move the resulting article to some other name, such as Mandjet and Mesektet or simply Solar barque. The two ships described in this article are identical to the two ships described at Matet boat and Seqtet boat, i.e. the articles are in fact about one and the same subject.

The full names of the barques in question are given in modern transliteration as mꜥnḏt for the day-barque and msktt for the night-barque. However, both of these names also occur in Egyptian texts in various clipped/shortened forms. Thus mꜥnḏt is also attested with the alternative writings mꜥḏt and ꜥḏt, and msktt is also attested shortened to sktt. A fact should be immediately apparent: Atet and Matet are nothing more than outdated 19th-century Lepsius-style transliterations of ꜥḏt and mꜥḏt (stripped of their diacritics), respectively, while Seqtet is similarly just an old rendering of sktt. Therefore all these articles are discussing the same thing under slight variations of the same names. They should be merged and moved to an article name that isn’t rooted in horribly outdated scholarship, i.e. Mandjet and Mesektet following the modern Egyptological pronunciation, or mꜥnḏt and msktt following modern transliteration, or just solar barque. —Vorziblix (talk) 17:35, 22 November 2020 (UTC)


 * Support merging into one article, preferably Solar barque. Egyptologists generally just use this overarching term for the solar vessels rather than using the specific names. Solar barque currently redirects to a section in the article solar deity, but I think it makes sense to have a specifically Egyptological article under that title (which solar deity would link to, naturally). "Solar barque" seems to be a term specifically used for ancient Egypt; a Google search for the phrase turns up almost entirely Egyptian examples even when you add "-Egypt" to the search string! And the few non-Egyptian examples of solar boat imagery mentioned at solar deity are prehistoric and not very well known.


 * A problem is that that we already have the article Ancient Egyptian solar ships, referring to the real vessels that were buried in pyramid complexes. I've never been entirely comfortable with that title for the article, as it's not actually known whether they were meant to be solar, and the existence of the Abydos boats mentioned in that article suggests that burying a vessel with the king was a tradition that predated the rise of the cult of Ra. Perhaps we could move that article to "Ancient Egyptian royal ships"?


 * Lastly, thank you for sorting out the names of these articles, . I've been working on an offline rewrite of the Ra article, and the profusion of names for the solar barques has been a minor sticking point. I didn't even know that the names "atet", "matet", and "seqtet" were related to the "mandjet" and "mesketet" I had seen in other sources. A. Parrot (talk) 19:27, 22 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Sure thing! Glad to be of some help. Your suggestions for moving to ‘solar ships’ to ‘royal ships’ and putting this article at Solar barque sound good to me, too; I’d support both moves. Thanks for giving input yourself! Vorziblix (talk) 05:50, 25 November 2020 (UTC)
 * It's been more than a week since your proposal, and nobody else has showed any interest, so I went ahead and moved ancient Egyptian solar ships. Solar barque has a few edits in its history, so I can't move it myself, but I requested a move at Requested moves/Technical requests. A. Parrot (talk) 00:21, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Ah, excellent! I see they’ve gotten around to fulfilling the requested move, too. Many thanks! Vorziblix (talk) 18:36, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
 * I've carried out the "merging" myself—but I didn't see any content in the other two articles worth keeping, so I'm not putting the "merged to" attribution templates on this page. A. Parrot (talk) 18:42, 5 December 2020 (UTC)