Writings from Ancient Egypt (Penguin Classics)

Product Information

I found this an interesting read. I know little about the culture of Ancient Egypt beyond a few obvious things - Mummies, Pyramids and hieroglyphics - so there was a lot of new information in here to get my teeth into. Finally, it sometimes happens that the pronunciation of words might be changed because of their connection to Ancient Egyptian: in this case, it is not rare for writing to adopt a compromise in notation, the two readings being indicated jointly. For example, the adjective bnj, "sweet", became bnr. In Middle Egyptian, one can write: There are a few gems even among the more traditional types of text. The autobiographical inscription of Harkuf is amusing for its preservation -- in the entirety -- of a letter sent to Harkuf by the young boy-king of his time as he was returning from one of his expeditions to Yam. Harkuf has captured a dancing dwarf, and the king is absolutely fascinated to hear of this, writing explicit and exact instructions for the dwarf to be well-cared-for, and promising Harkuf great rewards if he manages to bring the dwarf to the king safely. Meanwhile, the battle narrative of the Battle of Meggido captures the earliest detailed battle in history, and the Pianki Stela, while rather turgid, covers an entire military campaign in a fashion that could lend itself to novelisation. You learn a lot about Egyptian culture. How stratified it was. There are lots of bits of advice about how to put up with overbearing superiors. Women don't get a huge amount of a look in, especially lower class women (but that goes for lower class people in general.)

The author's intent was to produce readable (as opposed to purely academically accurate) translation of a representative sample of Egyptian texts, covering the period from 2350 BC to 323 BC. He has the credentials to do this, and I especially admired that he excluded demotic texts, because he is not an expert in them.This can be read st, ws or ḥtm, according to the word in which it is found. The presence of phonetic complements—and of the suitable determinative—allows the reader to know which of the three readings to choose:

Here, the 'house' hieroglyph works as a logogram: it represents the word with a single sign. The vertical stroke below the hieroglyph is a common way of indicating that a glyph is working as a logogram. Soukiassian, Georges; Michel Wuttmann; Laure Pantalacci (2002). Le palais des gouverneurs de l'époque de Pépy II: Les sanctuaires de ka et leurs dépendances. Cairo: Imprimerie de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale du Caire. ISBN 978-2-7247-0313-9. Because hieroglyphic writing was so complicated, the ancient Egyptians developed other types of writing that were more convenient. Hieratic writing, a cursive script that was written on papyrus with a pen or brush, or upon a piece of limestone called an ostracon was invented for use primarily on papyrus, a more fragile material. But, Dornan says, it rarely made the jump to formal monuments. Demotic, another form of writing that was developed in the 800s B.C., was used for everyday documents, as well as for literary works . 4. Hieroglyphic writing has odd quirks. bꜣ, meaning " Bâ" (soul); the character is the traditional representation of a "bâ" (a bird with a human head); Twenty-four uniliteral signs make up the so-called hieroglyphic alphabet. Egyptian hieroglyphic writing does not normally indicate vowels, unlike cuneiform, and for that reason has been labelled by some as an abjad, i.e., an alphabet without vowels.a b c d e f Allen, James P. (2010). Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. Cambridge University Press. p.8. ISBN 978-1139486354.

The standard inventory of characters used in Egyptology is Gardiner's sign list (1928–1953). A.H. Gardiner (1928), Catalogue of the Egyptian hieroglyphic printing type, from matrices owned and controlled by Dr. Alan Gardiner, "Additions to the new hieroglyphic fount (1928)", in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 15 (1929), p. 95; "Additions to the new hieroglyphic fount (1931)", in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 17 (1931), pp. 245–247; A.H. Gardiner, "Supplement to the catalogue of the Egyptian hieroglyphic printing type, showing acquisitions to December 1953" (1953). Unicode Egyptian Hieroglyphs as of version 5.2 (2009) assigned 1,070 Unicode characters. Erman, Adolf (1894). Egyptian Grammar: with table of signs, bibliography, exercises for reading and glossary. Williams and Norgate. ISBN 978-3862882045. Many texts have a strict patriarchal tone (especially the teachings, of course), and humour or satire is almost completely absent – in contrast to the Mesopotamian texts. That also says something about this society. What they do have in common is that the attention given to women is very limited (although they appear to have had more rights in Egyptian society than in Mesopotamia). Only in the Amarna texts, with Akhenaten's poetic ode to the solar disk, has a much more positive tone.

International

The script could easily be read by recognizing the direction the phonograms were facing. Images in any inscription always face the beginning of the line of text; if the text is to be read left-to-right then the faces of the people, birds, and animals will be looking to the left. These sentences were easy enough to read for those who knew the Egyptian language but not for others. Zauzich notes how "nowhere among all the hieroglyphs is there a single sign that represents the sound of a vowel" (6). Vowels were placed in a sentence by the reader who understood the spoken language. Zauzich writes: The glyphs have both semantic and phonetic values. For example, the glyph for crocodile is a picture of a crocodile and also represents the sound "msh". When writing the word for crocodile, the Ancient Egyptians combined a picture of a crocodile with the glyphs which spell out "msh". Similarly the hieroglyphs for cat, miw, combine the glyphs for m, i and w with a picture of a cat. Another word pr is the verb 'to go out, leave'. When this word is written, the 'house' hieroglyph is used as a phonetic symbol: