nwt

There is some disagreement about how to read this word and its ideogram ; the German tradition (cf. the Wörterbuch) tends to read nt or nwt, while Loprieno reads nʔt with an unwritten but phonemic glottal stop, and the Anglo-American tradition (cf. Gardiner, Allen, Faulkner) reads njwt. Gardiner supports the latter reading with reference to n(jw)tjw^? (“those belonging to the lower heaven”) from the Pyramid Texts, derived from nj(w)t (“lower heaven”). The German readings are supported by a writing of for the name of the goddess Tefnut (tfnwt or tfnt) in the Amduat IV 48, as well as by the use of the word in place of nt in writings of ḥnt (“pelican”). The reading of nwt is apparently supported by Diodorus Siculus, who claims that Thebes was named after Osiris’s mother, presumably the goddess Nut (nwt). Loprieno’s reading with a glottal stop is supported by the Hebrew rendering נֹא (nōʾ) of the name of Thebes as well as its Akkadian transcription 𒉌𒀪 (né-eʾ, ni-iʾ). Other evidence includes the very late variant writing n(j)wtkꜣrṯ for Ancient Greek Ναύκρατις (Naúkratis) and the (late) Greek rendering of the word as νη (nē) in the name of the pharaoh Psusennes.