Talk:Was-sceptre

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WikiProject Ancient Egypt to-do list:

Needed articles.

We should have an article on every pyramid and every nome in Ancient Egypt. I'm sure the rest of us can think of other articles we should have.

Cleanup.

To start with, most of the general history articles badly need attention. And I'm told that at least some of the dynasty articles need work. Any other candidates?

Standardize the Chronology.

A boring task, but the benefit of doing it is that you can set the dates !(e.g., why say Khufu lived 2589-2566? As long as you keep the length of his reign correct, or cite a respected source, you can date it 2590-2567 or 2585-2563)

Stub sorting

Anyone? I consider this probably the most unimportant of tasks on Wikipedia, but if you believe it needs to be done . . .

Data sorting.

This is a project I'd like to take on some day, & could be applied to more of Wikipedia than just Ancient Egypt. Take one of the standard authorities of history or culture -- Herotodus, the Elder Pliny, the writings of Breasted or Kenneth Kitchen, & see if you can't smoothly merge quotations or information into relevant articles. Probably a good exercise for someone who owns one of those impressive texts, yet can't get access to a research library.

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Wrong[edit]

Edited information that is unsubstantial and could mislead children studying Egypt forever, you should not put up one idea that is completely unfounded to be true as of today and not put them all up. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.18.81.243 (talk) 00:56, 28 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 11 June 2016[edit]

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: moved as proposed by nominator. (Pages moved by Anarchyte.) I'm closing my own request because Anarchyte already moved it as proposed, but after moving the page, left the move request open with a vote of a different opinion (which leaves this active move request malformed since the page has already been moved.) If the title needs to be moved again, at this point, that can probably be best accomplished with a new move request. Steel1943 (talk) 15:45, 18 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Was → Was (sceptre)
WAS → Was

– Since "was" is a very commonly used word in English, I fail to see how the current situation is not a WP:SURPRISE. Steel1943 (talk) 19:03, 11 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Support: agree on the grounds that it is confusing otherwise. Most people would not otherwise know the title was a Proper Noun. DaltonCastle (talk) 21:15, 11 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support per nom, no-brainer really. No such user (talk) 11:59, 13 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support per nom. Yes, it seems that Was would be a surprise. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 22:06, 13 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support this move 2601:541:4305:C70:FD5C:2DE0:8778:F9BE (talk) 17:46, 16 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support was-sceptre. The nomination is for something that is better than the current bad title, but all sources I have just reviewed, including both used for the article, and including the article itself, refer to the subject either with a two-word name "was sceptre" or more often hyphenated "was-sceptre". --SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:00, 17 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support was-sceptre as it's more common. [1] [2]. Anarchyte (work | talk) 03:25, 18 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Requested move 19 June 2016[edit]

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: moved. Although was a suggestion of using "staff", there is a clear consensus in favour of "sceptre". The hyphenation (or lack thereof) was largely undiscussed expect to say it was difficult to know which is more common, so we'll go with the nom on this. No prejudice against a new RM on that issue. Jenks24 (talk) 08:14, 27 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Was (sceptre) → Was-sceptre – All sources I have reviewed, including both used for the article, and including the article text itself, refer to the subject either with a two-word name "was sceptre" or more often hyphenated "was-sceptre". This title is superior both in terms of WP:NAMINGCRITERIA Recognizability and Naturalness, and is natural disambiguation (parenthetical disambiguation should be avoided). SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:44, 19 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Support per WP:NATURALDAB since it seems to apply here per the nom. Steel1943 (talk) 01:46, 19 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support - Either " was-scepter" or " was scepter". Meatsgains (talk) 21:06, 19 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: Just curious, does this mean that the word "was" should be lowercase? Steel1943 (talk) 21:07, 19 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

In running text, yes. It is not a proper name. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:38, 19 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I get that. But let's say it's the first word of a sentence. Does it seem like it would be capitalized there? (Compare this to iPhone where the "i" is lower case no matter where it is placed; I'm asking since all examples presented for the "war-sceptre" move presented so far have it lowercase, so I'm wondering if it is a rare "hard" lowercase.) Steel1943 (talk) 23:28, 19 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

[3] capitalises it in running text.

[4] capitalises in the title, but not in running text.

[5] uses italics or hyphenation (interchangeably!) and lower case.

[6] uses capitalisation (W & S), but not font cues. The same document describes the "mks sceptre" and the "heqa sceptre", but "Sekhem Scepter" and "Kherep Sceptre".

The article currently uses italicisation, of "was" but not "sceptre".

I don't think there is any rule. I think that italics, hyphenation, and capitalisation are variously used as visual cues to ameliorate the ambiguity of "was" being a very common word.

"Was" means "power"; it is just an adjective. It is also a hieroglyph, however I think it looks like the hieroglyph drevices from this was-sceptre, not vice versa.

Wikipedia's WP:MOSCT is very very pro sentence case, so I think a strong case would have to be made for always capitalising, or never capitalising even if as the first word.

I have softly proposed "was-sceptre" over "was sceptre". The second is so easily awkwardly read that it would need to be italised, as per the current situation. With hyphenation, the italisation can be dispensed with (while noting that many sources use hyphenation as the onyl visual cue).

I was tempted to propose "power sceptre", as it is the translation into English, but that it not used in reliable sources. Reliable sources seem to prefer to not translate, instead they appear to prefer to assume the sceptre was named after the hieroglyph.

--SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:27, 20 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I capitalised the W in the nomination, as that was accidental and seems to have led to this. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:28, 20 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the previous confusion with the move request's format plus the comments made by yourself and another editor in the previous discussion were what led to my confusion in the matter regarding the term's capitalization. I wasn't able to find anything stating the "hard" lowercase requirement, so I was wanting to make sure that I wasn't overlooking something. Thanks for the clarification. Steel1943 (talk) 00:32, 20 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Support "was-scepter" or "was scepter". It's hard to say which form is more common, but both are widespread. (The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt says it should be called a staff rather than a sceptre, but that's based on a rather finicky distinction between short sceptres like the sekhem and full-length staffs that isn't recognized by dictionaries or our article on sceptres.) A. Parrot (talk) 00:34, 20 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Propose Was (sceptre) → Was staff as per Google Was staff gets over 1 million hits and Was sceptre only 17000. --Robertiki (talk) 11:41, 20 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"was" and "staff" are common words, ghitting would want to be done very carefully.

Using google ngram, [7], "the was staff" is never found, "the was sceptre" is. Adding the word "the" at the start removed most false hits (eg eliminating "the man was staff yesterday but unemployed today", "the last task in the Initiative was staff training", "While there was staff training"). The hyphen doesn't look to be reliable with google ngram. Going to "staff" would be a big change, is out of scope for this current fine scope question, and would be even worse ambiguity. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 13:09, 20 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

About "the man was staff yesterday", is it english ? With Google I get zero hits. But I concede, that if I search "the man was staff" I get about 14300 hits referring to Staff Sergeant or other similar. Using "the was staff" I find 4000 hits, of which was staff, was staff, David Wilcock, Andrew Andrew Hunt Gordon, was staff, as first hits, with only one wrong. --Robertiki (talk) 09:44, 21 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

There seem to be three questions, (1), (1a) and (2):

(1) parenthetical or natural. Was (scepter) or Was sceptre / was-sceptre; Was (staff) or Was staff / was-staff

(1a) if not parenthetical, hyphenated or unhyphenated. Was sceptre or was-sceptre; was staff or was-staff.

(2) sceptre or staff?[8] Was (sceptre) or Was (staff). Was-sceptre or was-staff. Was sceptre or was staff.

On (1) there seems agreement to not use parentheses.

On (1a) the preferences are explicitly slight. I note that no hyphen (status quo) means continuing with italics, use the hyphen and the italics can be foregone. Are you supporting no hyphen?

On (2), it seems independent of both (1) and (1a), can I suggest leaving your question until after resolving (1) and (1a)? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:27, 21 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Support per my reasoning in the last discussion. And I'd like to apologise for the mess that previous closure made, SmokeyJoe. Anarchyte (work | talk) 07:36, 27 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

w3s vs wꜣs[edit]

Editor TheLateDentarthurdent, with these edits suggests that the Egyptian spelling of was uses a numeral '3' in place of an aleph (ꜣ). Editor points to Allen in support of this claim. Note the search term: 'w3s' and compare that with the actual text in Allen where the character used is clearly not the Latin numeral '3'. The search discrepancy is likely due to the limitations of OCR scanning of the original book. Repeating the search with an aleph in place of the '3' fails.

Similarly, Editor TheLateDentarthurdent changes the parenthetical: '(called waset in Egyptian)' to '(called w3st in Egyptian)' again with the numeral '3' in place of the aleph. Except for styling and punctuation, that parenthetical was word-for-word the same as the source cited before these changes were made. Allen does support the wꜣst spelling with an aleph but not with the numeral '3'; see page 516.

Really? A numeral '3' character in place of an alef character?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 17:44, 16 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Practical use as tool?[edit]

I'm wondering if there has been speculation that 'was' scepter was actually a useful implement too. I can think of a few off the top of my head. ˥ Ǝ Ʉ H Ɔ I Ɯ (talk) 01:27, 11 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

"symbol" may be misleading[edit]

The article's opening calls it a symbol, which is misleading and makes it sound as if the physical items don't exist, but a cursory search online reveals several physical was scepters have been found in tombs etc.

47.50.104.82 (talk) 02:25, 21 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]