[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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