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Middle Kingdom wdpw 5». oŸ. OS. ed. 8 TS TS Te OR TS TR TS IS TIS. [Spi Dh TS bt Le oS Table 5. Variations of the writing of wb3 and wdpw in Middle Kingdom sources wb3 Since most of the stelae are from Abydos from the 12" dynasty, this written diversity cannot be explained by regional division or time of origin, nor even by the workability of the material, since almost all of the stelae are made of limestone. There are some examples of representing more variant forms of the same word on one stele.** As can be observed, the variations of wb3 are much wider than those of wdpw, even if wb3 has less than half as many occurrences as wdpw has. The explanation for this could be the novelty of the word wb3. Its consequent writing cannot yet be confirmed, and the main signs of it — the drill or the night sky — appear with diverse complements. In the case of wdpw, in contrast, the variations are confined to the numerous shapes of the vessel sign. If there is a complement after the vessel, it is always a waw. Complementing the word wdpw seems to have become more common during the First Intermediate Period when its appearance was relocated from the labelled depictions of tomb scenes to the texts of funerary stelae. In many cases the word stands alone in the text without any figural depiction, which became more frequent during the Middle Kingdom. Besides the variations of each word, we can also observe the combination of their writing with their signs mixed. The fact that the usage of the two words would not have been separated clearly from each other by that time, and the duties of these offices might not have been differentiated enough, could have caused their interchange and some orthographical shuffling between them as well." This, however, does not seem to have been a general tendency since this phenomenon can be observed only in four cases, which number is minimal compared to the total number of the appearances mentioned above. In three of the cases wb} is complemented with waw,* and in the fourth case the vessel sign is complemented with a leg and a b3-bird,* in an attempt to show which word they *+ For example BM 170, Budge, 1913, 7, pls. 12-13; BM 216, Budge, 1912, pl. 47. ® For further information, see Ward, 1978, 92, $178. *° Lange — Schafer, 1902, CG 20075, 91; CG 20171, 202; CG 20199, 226, pl. 16; Simpson, 1974, pl. 26, CG 20075. #7 Simpson 1974, pl. 81, MMA 63.154.
