There are times when I think 'yeah I have a PhD, but it's only in the study of Ancient Egypt' and then the little bitch voice who screamed at me to get up during the depression I experienced during writing it re-emerges and just sticks something like this in the forefront of my mind:
It forces me to remember that, no, it wasn't 'just about Ancient Egypt'. My ass can read that with no issue. Not many people can do that. It's a skill, and one many people with a lot less skill in it will try to square up on. It feels egotistical, but at the end of the day, no, I do know more about this than most people.
Downside of this is that as soon as you learn the sentence structure for the Egyptian language, most people's attempts at faux hieroglyphs on things become so laughably fake it's kinda painful. Also people who use hieroglyphs in usernames to mean something else. Best one I saw was a guy using the 'enemy with axe embedded in their skull' hieroglyph as 'guys getting down at the club'. I mean they were at the club, but like the receiving end.
she should be at the club
the club in question:
#Being able to read hieroglyphics is such a flex #I got a BS in history and all I got was a 60 page paper on pharma bankruptcy in the 80s so. Wish had left academia with something useful
I can flex harder? I can read Old, Middle, and Late Egyptian, which is like reading Old, Middle, and Modern English. I can also read Hieratic, which is the shorthand form of the Hieroglyphic script, and I can do that in all those three languages too. On top of that, I can read Coptic. On top of that again, I am familiar with (academic) French, German (when brain is in gear), Spanish, and Italian. I have other languages, but those are the ones I'm most competent in.
That is incredibly impressive. Good job!
where can you learn hieratic? how does it compare to the hieroglyphs? is there a one-to-one conversion between the logographs between the two?
I learned Hieratic at university as part of my MA degree. It required me knowing Old, Middle, and Late Egyptian before I even started to learn it because you have to know what it is you're looking at. I don't know of anywhere you can learn it properly outside of an academic institution.
No, it's not a one to one conversion. I said it's like shorthand, and I meant that. Each sign has its own form, but it's not necessarily anything like the sign it represents. They're quick forms of the signs, designed to be written in ink rather than carved in stone (because they really didn't write in full glyphs in ink unless they were doing something special like a Book of the Dead, and even then that's called Cursive Hieroglyphs) and often they're just lines because there's an assumption that the reader is familiar with what *should* be there.
This is the difference:
The second image here is the *original* text, whereas the first image is the transcribed version into hieroglyphs which is easier for most Egyptologists to parse than the Hieratic original.
Some signs *might* look like their hieroglyphic counterpart, but the majority of them have a different form all together, and you have to be able to parse that. For instance, you have to know what you're looking at to understand that:
is
The full section is easier, but you still have to know some things:
You've really got to know what you're looking at to understand that the edge of the cartouche, the sun symbol, and the wsr (jackal head on a stick) symbol are all rolled into that sign that looks like a 13.
It ain't easy.
It's one for one on the number of marks on the page but not for what it looks like, and it all depends on the handwriting too. Some are better at writing than others, and some had more time to write. The text above is a legal text recorded at the time the trials were happening, so it's quick and messy. Something like P.Ebers, a medical papyrus, is much neater because it was copied up cleanly.
*Tentatively raises hand*
Question, or clarification, maybe, about the four lines at the beginning: Do you, then, know what those are based on the rest of the text? (If some handwriting's better than others it can't be due to the precise length or angle of the lines, right?)
*four lines at the end. Hieratic is read right to left.
Yes, usually you know what the missing signs are depending on context. Very common signs, especially those in formulas (like date lines and royal titles) get abbreviated because it's just easier and everyone knows what you meant. But this is what I mean by 'you have to know Old/Middle/Late Egyptian to read Hieratic' because you have to know what sign should be there in order to go 'yeah okay they've shortened that word'.
It's like someone who doesn't read English trying to make sense of y'all'might've. It makes sense to you and me because you know what letters are omitted, but someone who didn't know English is going to look at that and cry. Tbf you might cry if you know English too, but that's by the by.
