AEL Battle of Kadesh

This is a new reading on GlyphStudy that starts September 9th.

Would you like to follow along? Would you like to keep up with the group and turn in assignments too? Wouldn't that be fun?

You must first be a member of GlyphStudy and then you must state your desire to join the reading group, and you do that by contacting the site owner and kindly saying you would like to do those two things.

Karen at Glyph Study.
GlyphStudy-owner@Yahoogroups.com

Then you will get emails.
1) to sign up to GlyphStudy site
2) join the reading group

If you do not want to turn in assignments, that is okay too.

You know about the battle of Kadesh. Proper propaganda in hieroglyphics. The battle was a standoff but you wouldn't know that from the tale chiseled in stone on temple walls. Hugely told too. Big ass lies! BLAM Right there. That's the story and Ramsses II is stick'n with it.

Here is what Karen writes about what to expect in the group.

The Battle of Kadesh is a New Kingdom text describing a battle between Egyptian forces under Pharaoh Ramesses II and Hittite forces led by Muwatallis II.  The story is recorded in two texts, known as the Poem and the Bulletin.  We will be reading the latter, in the version published by Budge in An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Reading Book for Beginners.  The text is presented in hieroglyphs and in Budge's (outdated) transliteration. 

Budge's version has 99 lines of text.  The expected pace is five lines, or roughly 110 glyphs, every two weeks, although that could change depending on our experience of the text.  (This is just a bit slower than the pace maintained by the Great Hymn to the Aten group that just concluded.)  The reading will start on Monday, September 9, with the first assignment to be due on Sunday, September 22.

They make fun of Budge in Stargate, do you notice that? I own his dictionaries and I use them a lot. He is wrong about many things, but that is no reason to disregard him altogether. I find his dictionaries useful for the back and forth translations, or attempts, and his very many variations are interesting. I have used his ideas to work out phrasing for greeting cards.

Karen does not mention for the period of the Kadesh reading group you will be receiving emails from people all over the world approaching Egyptian hieroglyphics from their various points of view. Their own native languages start them, and many languages are better, it seems, than English for points of departure. The things these people bring into the discussion is astounding.

The students write to each other in code. They must. Code for the symbols. And the symbols are already a code they are attempting to decode. The code they use to keep all their languages straight is the Manuel de Codage, itself based on Gardiners's list of signs. You can download a free program, JSesh, for all this if you like, then when they are talking in code you can type it all in and see what that looks like in pictures. They're actually speaking in pictures but expressing that in alpha-numeric code, easiest of all codified codes, period.