[B-Greek] OUSIEN?
Eric Weiss
papaweiss1 at yahoo.com
Sun Dec 10 17:47:00 EST 2006
In a book I saw at church today is a photo of an icon of Christ Pantocrator in the
inside of a dome of an Orthodox Church - a typical design. Surrounding the
icon is the phrase, as I recall (I might be missing a few words or not transcribing
it exactly):
EGW EIMI LEGEI KURIOS hO QEOS hO PANTOKRATWR
TO ALFA KAI TO OMEGA
hH ARCH KAI hO TELOS
hO PRWTOC KAI hO ESCATOS
EMPROSQEN MOU OUSIEN
It's this last word - OUSIEN - that has me confused. The first two letters look like
the typical icon way of showing OU - i.e., a v-shape on top of an omicron. The
icon at the link below shows this in the next to the last line - the "OU MH" has
the "OU" written as I describe:
http://www.orthodoxphotos.com/cgi-bin/photo.pl?path=Icons_and_Frescoes/Icons/Jesus_Christ&file=34.jpg
Anyway, after this "OU" are the letters CIE followed by a subscript-size N. The
"C" is of course a sigma, and I assume the little "N" belongs to the preceding
letters, but that then spells out "OUSIEN" - and I can't figure out what this is
supposed to mean.
The word KAI was abbreviated as K', but I don't recall any signs of abbreviations
in this last word.
Eric S. Weiss
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