Stuff in Egyptian

Things to read & things to study, in English and (sometimes) in French. I have no qualifications whatsoever for doing this.

[hierogloss-blog]

The St Andrews Corpus

The St Andrews Corpus contains in-line transliterations and translations of many major Egyptian texts. This is one of my favorite sources of Egyptian reading material.

The section above comes from the Westcar Papyrus, a collection tales about magic, adultery and man-eating wax crocodiles.

[meri-maat]

You actually picked out one of the most (sexually) ambiguous parts… the last setence could be understood both as “let us spend sime time in it” or “let us spend some time in her”. The speaker, by the way, is male, the one he is speaking to is female.

[hierogloss-blog]

Thank you for the alternative reading! I'm not entirely sure that it works, though. But before we get into any details, please keep in mind that I am totally unqualified when it comes to Egyptian, and you may be way better at this than I am. :-)

Anyway, here's the relevant portion of the text, minus some unnecessary bits I'm too lazy to typeset with JSesh:

aHa.n Dd.n pA nDs n tA Hm.t (...) …and then the commoner said to the wife (of Ubainer)

iwms wn Ssp.t (…) Surely there is a pavilion[feminine] (in the garden of Ubainer) 

mT n ir=n At im=s Look[feminine], let us spend some time in it/her[feminine].

Here, the key word is mT. This is normally used to address someone. It's pretty similar "Look" or "Hey" in English. It has a couple of forms—if you're addressing a man, you use mk. If you're addressing a woman, you use mT. If you're addressing a group, you use the plural mTn. This is all explained in Allen's handy list of particles.

So we have a pretty good reason to believe that mT n ir=n At im=s is directly addressed to Ubainer's wife. And if that's the case, then it doesn't make sense to read im=s as "in her." Sure, the pronoun =s is feminine, but that's because Ssp.t "pavilion" is feminine. And Egyptian is like French: inanimate objects are either masculine or feminine.

Anyway, the moral of this particular tale is:

If you sleep with the wife of a sorcerer, don't go swimming in the garden pool afterwards. You may be eaten by a magical wax crocodile.

If you like Egyptian, the Westcar papyrus is pretty… colorful. There's revenge, adultery and at least one pretty blatant abuse of power by the pharaoh Seneferu, where he orders the palace servants to go rowing while half-dressed. It's sort of the Egyptian equivalent of trashy reality TV.

[hierogloss-blog]

Essential Hieroglyphs: Flashcards for Anki

No, you don't need to learn 1,000 hieroglyphs to read Middle Egyptian! A mere 150 or 200 will be more than enough to get you started. I've made a list of the most important hieroglyphs and split it into three decks of flashcards for Anki, the incredibly effective open source flash card software:

Uniliterals (28 cards). Each of these hieroglyphs represents a single sound. It's worth learning these by heart.

Determinatives (86 cards). These hieroglyphs aren't pronounced. Instead, they represent an abstract idea: "woman", "man", "plant", etc. These are easy to learn, because any approximately correct answer is good enough.

Multiliterals (51 cards). These hieroglyphs represent two or three sounds. To make these easier to learn, I've only included the most important multiliterals, and I've added sample vocabulary words to each card. 

With these three decks, you should be able to recognize most of the signs in most Middle Egyptian texts. You'll still run into a few weird signs, but you can learn those as you go.

Here's a sample determinative:

Here's a sample multiliteral:

Credit where credit is due:

Hiéroglyphes égyptiens by Pierre Besson. I took the original lists of essential signs from this site, removed some of the less common ones and added a few that I see often. I also used this site for example vocabulary, Latin names of Egyptian animals, and descriptions of some signs.

Wikipedia. I used this mostly for notes on transliteration and pronunciation.

Egyptian Wiktionary. I used this for example vocabulary.

Egyptian Hieroglyphs. I used this site to help translate some of the hieroglyph descriptions to English.

Assimil's L'Égyptien hiéroglyphique. I used this for a bit of example vocabulary.

JSesh. Used to render the example vocabulary.

Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts. I used Gardiner.ttf from this site.

Other random sources. I've been tweaking this deck for a while now, and the occasional piece of data comes from another site.

If you find any errors, please let me know! This was a labor of love, and I'm certainly not an expert.

[hierogloss-blog]

Projet d'index global des inscriptions des temples de Karnak.

This is an amazing site: It allows you to browse a map of the temples at Karnak, and zoom it to view close-up photos of individual inscriptions. Typeset hieroglyphs and transliterations are provided.

No need to speak French to use this site.

[hierogloss-blog]

Pierre Besson has created an incredibly useful online dictionary of Egyptian for French speakers:

Wiki consacré aux hiéroglyphes égyptiens. Répertoire des signes (significations et occurrences dans le vocabulaire). Dictionnaire.

You can look up common signs by Gardiner group and by shape, which is often really helpful. It's not as comprehensive as the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae or even the Altägyptisches Wörterbuch. But it's my favorite dictionary for day-to-day use.

[hierogloss-blog]

More dubious hieroglyphic inscriptions seen on TV. This time, it's from the short-lived Dresden Files TV show. (I love the books. The show is occasionally amusing.)

In this episode, a character has used an ancient stone tablet and a tattoo to invoke Anubis. In return, they've been granted the power to steal the bodies of others.

Let's see if we can make any sense out of this:

The seated jackal is often used to write inpw, "Anubis." So far, so good.

This appears to be nis "invoke." This certainly doesn't make much sense inside of a cartouche, because cartouches are generally only used for the names of pharaohs. You don't just stick a random inscription inside a cartouche just because it looks cool. But "invoke" does at least seem vaguely appropriate here, because the tattoo was supposedly used to invoke Anubis.

I'm not sure where they're trying to go with this. They seem to have mixed up Gardiner signs G1 and G5(?), but Egyptian has about a zillion nearly-identical bird signs, so we can forgive that:

Anyway, only the first sign makes sense here, as far as I can tell. So might be awAi "steal, theft" (or perhaps awA "watch over, take care of"). "Theft" makes sense, because the episode was about stealing bodies. Unfortunately, we don't seem to have any grammar here—just three words glued together—so it's sort of hard to figure out what's going on.

So anyway, I think this tattoo wants to say, "Anubis invoke theft." What it actually says is, "I found an English-to-Egyptian dictionary and I used it to make some bad life choices."

[polyvoxx]

I just wish scholars had more to work with to decode how these people actually spoke thousands of years ago, because right now all we have are various consonants and vowel approximations. Though I suppose it’s infinitely difficult without having a single native speaker present for a little over two millennia.

[hierogloss-blog]

I don't know what your book budget looks like, or how comfortable you are with linguistics jargon, but Antonio Loprieno's Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction has a short overview of what's currently known about Egyptian vowels. It's a fairly technical book, but it contains a lot of interesting information, and a big bibliography for those who want to dig deeper into the academic literature. (It's not a course, though—for that, see Allen's excellent introduction.)

The good news, of course, is that we don't need the vowels to read Egyptian. I personally find it somewhat friendlier than Latin, because I don't have to memorize lots of tables. (Yes, I'm lazy.) Egyptian grammar may be delightfully strange, but at least it's regular and the word-order tends to be predictable.

It's totally possible to learn Egyptian. 100 to 200 signs will cover the basics of the writing system. (I'll post an Anki deck soon.) A few pages of endings will be enough to get a handle on the noun and verb inflections. A handful of sentence patterns, a few verb tenses, and the various pronouns, and it will start coming together. I just wish that Assimil would produce an English edition of their excellent course, because that covers a lot of the basics in 50 or 60 one-hour lessons, and it's great for people who like to puzzle things out from lots of input. I asked Assimil on Twitter, and they think the English edition will come out in 2015. But they pretty much always say "next year", so take that with a grain of salt.

Anyway, Egyptian: It's awesome even without the vowels, and it's easier to learn the basics than you might think.

[hierogloss-blog]

Ruth Kramer has a great survey chapter on Egyptian grammar for linguists:

The Egyptian language was spoken for over four thousand years, from approximately 3000 BCE to 1300 CE. It is traditionally separated into five distinct stages: Old Egyptian (3000-2000 BCE), Middle Egyptian (2000-1300 BCE), Late Egyptian (1300-700 BCE), Demotic (7th century BCE to 5th century CE) and Coptic (4th to 14th century CE).

Written records are attested for each stage, providing a wealth of data on the course of the language over time. However, the fact that the language is no longer spoken poses challenges for the linguist. Phonological and phonetic investigations are based on indirect methodology at best (reconstruction from Coptic, loan words, transcription of Egyptian words into other languages, etc.; see Kammerzell 1998a for extensive discussion). The relation between the text and the spoken language of the time may be distant or distorted, especially considering that many texts from older periods are highly formal in register. Finally, since there are no more speakers of the language, we can never determine whether a given sentence or phrase was ungrammatical in Egyptian, which is key in determining a language’s grammatical system.

She includes some nice interlinear glosses:

[hierogloss-blog]

Assimil L'Égyptien hiéroglyphique

Who's it for? People who:

read French (at least until 2015), and

love learning from actual texts.

There are 101 lessons in this course, and each one theoretically takes about an hour. Each lesson contains:

A short text in hieroglyphs.

A transliteration.

A hyper-literal translation.

A natural translation.

Grammar notes.

Some easy exercises.

The lessons are organized as follows:

Introduction to the writing system

Lessons 1–7: Introduction to vocabulary and hieroglyphic writing.

Several easy stories which introduce the language gradually

Lessons 8–23: A garden, a great house, and those who manage it. 

24–31: A young scribe. 

32–47: Feeding some monkeys, and a monkey who steals a necklace.

Native materials

Lessons 48–63: Excerpt from the Westcar papyrus. A bored pharaoh asks 20 women from the palace to row a boat. One drops her fish-shaped necklace overboard. The necklace is recovered by a sorceror who causes half the lake to fold up over the other half.

64–71: Excerpts from "The Eloquent Peasant." This is a surprisingly modern piece of literature, with a strong satirical bent. The "framing" tale concerns a peasant who is cheated by a rich land owner, and who takes a complaint before a judge. The peasant gives several eloquent speeches on justice and corruption. The judge is so impressed by the peasant that he drags the court case out and writes everything down. The brilliant part of this tale is that none of the government officials are actually corrupt, but the peasant nonetheless gets to spend quite a lot of time talking about the evils of corruption. This is how you safely discuss politics when the ruler is considered to be a god, I'd imagine.

72–84: Excerpts from "The Satire of the Trades." Another classic work of Egyptian satire, this one explaining why being a scribe is a sweet, sweet job, and pretty much any other job is horrible.

85–91: Excerpts from "The Tale of Sinuhe." A classic Egyptian adventure story, about a high official who overhears people plotting against him and flees the country. He rises to prominence in a foreign land, has adventures, and eventually returns to Egypt a hero. I understand that this tale was extremely popular in ancient times, and it exists in many manuscripts. Personally, I find that it drags a bit—for every paragraph of story, there are three paragraphs praising the Pharaoh. But, well, that's Egyptian for you.

92–100: Tomb inscriptions and prayers. Finally! These are highly ritualized and abbreviated, and many courses start with these. Assimil prefers to give you a pretty solid background in actual Egyptian literature before working on these.

101: "I am Ra, Master of Life" from the "Teaching for King Merykare." The author of the Assimil course describes this as one of the most beautiful passages of Egyptian literature.

I'm currently on lesson 62, and I'm really enjoying the course.

[hierogloss-blog]

The most authoritative dictionary of ancient Egyptian. If all else fails, you'll find it here. Unfortunately:

You'll need an account.

The site is built around some kind of horrible servlet technology.

The definitions are in German, and only occasionally in English.

But if you've exhausted your other options, and you're willing fight with it, it can answer your questions. There's even a huge database of actual Egyptian texts, and you can run corpus searches for collocations and usage examples.

I nominate this site for Egyptian Resource Most in Need of a Complete Software Rewrite.

[hierogloss-blog]

The St Andrews Corpus

The St Andrews Corpus contains in-line transliterations and translations of many major Egyptian texts. This is one of my favorite sources of Egyptian reading material.

The section above comes from the Westcar Papyrus, a collection tales about magic, adultery and man-eating wax crocodiles.

[hierogloss-blog]

Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs (James P. Allen)

This is just a terrific language course. In fact, it's one of the best I've seen for any language, at least if you like traditional-style courses with one-chapter-per-grammar-feature and lots of exercises. Apparently, it was originally based on a class for enthusiastic amateurs, and so it assumes little prior knowledge of grammar.

It's also a great reference when translating. For example, there's a great list of common particles from the second edition:

The third edition has some interesting changes. In particular, they collapse all the nearly-identical sDm=f forms into a few much-simpler forms:

Most importantly, the treatment of the verb has been greatly simplified in three respects. As discussed in Essay 26, scholarship in the past few years has cast doubt on two fundamental assumptions of previous grammatical studies of Middle Egyptian enshrined in the first two editions of this book: that gemination is an inflectional feature, that meaning and usage are critical indices for identifying forms of the sDm.f, and that the sDm.f and sDm.n.f have nominal/relative as well as regular forms. This edition treats gemination as a lexical feature and relies primarily on written forms for analyzing the verb. As a result, the four participles described in the first two editions have been reduced to two and the seven forms of the active and passive sDm.f have been reinterpreted as one active and one passive; this brings the Middle Egyptian verbal system more in line with that of later stages of the language, and should make it much easier for beginning students to comprehend. In addition, nominal/relative uses of the sDm.f and sDm.n.f are treated as a feature of syntax rather than inflection.

As an amateur, I've never really understood the evidence supporting the existence of all those nearly-identical verb forms. I can't wait to flip through the third edition.

If you're looking for a comprehensive Egyptian course for English speakers, I don't think you can much better than this.

(Buy from Amazon)

[hierogloss-blog]

Stargate: Daniel Jackson at the blackboard

Here's a really fun bit from the original Stargate movie. In the film, a mysterious set of stones has been dug up in the desert, and an Egyptologist named Daniel Jackson has been called in to translate them for the US military.

Daniel makes some snide remarks about Budge, and then gives the following translation:

A million years into the sky is Ra, sun god sealed and buried for all time his Stargate.

After watching this section the film dozens of times, I was eventually able to transcribe almost all the hieroglyphs using JSesh.

Now, Stuart Tyson Smith acted as a consultant on this film, so we have reason to believe that this inscription might be written in actual Egyptian. But sekhemkare has analyzed this passage in impressive detail, and he's confused: 

Was thinking of blogging about this. Whoever did the glyphs for this scene made some… odd choices.

He gives the transliteration and translation:

[rnpt] 100,010 r qbHw -pw ra m itn m xtm.n=f qrs=f n Dt r nHH sb3=n sb3w=f

100,010 years into the sky is Ra, the solar disk, In his having sealed and buried for eternity and everlastingness, Our gate of his stars.

Personally, I really want to read this:

As this:

But alas, that pesky triple line gets in the way. Am I missing something important here, or is this inscription a bit odd?