It has all the good stuff. No wait a minute, no, it doesn't.
I just now found the table of contents and it's actually rather sparse.
1) The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor. I already read this story before. I know how it goes. But it'll be great to have it dissected by a pro.
2) The Story of Sinube. Never heard of this
3) The loyalist Instruction. I'll show you this one.
4) The Instructions of Kagemni's Father and Ptahhotep. I read this one already too. But now it's totally delineated.
5) The Discourses of the Eloquent Peasant. I read this already too.
6) The Debate between a Man and His Soul. Read this one already too, but in English.
7) The Herdsman's Tale. Never even heard of this.
8) Hymns to Senwosret II. Sounds like a drag.
Wow. That's not very many. What a bummer.
This book suffers a serious handicap that renders it nearly unusable. It's a small formatted book, small in the had, and it really should be much larger. Maybe Kindle version is better if you can enlarge the print. It's ridiculously tiny printing. Same as the textbook that this book supports. This is intended as auxiliary to James Allen's textbook and that one is printed achingly small to. Very tiny hieroglyphs. Allen must have the eyesight of Horus.
Or else incredibly anal retentive.
This exercise is lifted from a stela. Apparently nobody bothered to photograph the original stela with any sense of care. The only copy I found online is the same very poor quality photo printed in the book. I'm reading the book with a magnifying glass. And even then sometimes it's impossible to make out the exact hieroglyph being used. I'm copping a bad attitude about the both of these tiny print books. The guy is a genius so why so stupid about his physical books? It doesn't make sense. And where the little pictures are crucial.
Allen translated the hieratic to hieroglyphic, just what I want, then provides the transliteration, the phonetic symbols for Egyptian words, and his translation in English. And useful grammar information. If you can make sense of the meta grammar that's used to analyze all other languages that have parts of speech and types of grammar that English doesn't have. It sound like this:
jzwt.tn jj.t i' d.t(i) SUBJECT Stative. with a second stative used as an unmarked adverb clause. The suffix tn is for 1s n is a way of indicating that the feminine ending of jzwt was pronounced before a subject pronoun.What? Yeah, right. Okay.
You might find my study habits a bit strange, drawing pictures and using Photoshop. Everyone else thinks that. Parents, acquaintances, intimates other students. I've been chided a lot, and back then when I cared about what other people think, that really did affect my feelings. Until eventually I showed myself this is the way that I managed to pull in A's when everyone else struggled and did so poorly. And being such a dummkopf besides. It didn't match. One time I goofed around making up hieroglyphs for numbers and math signs to test to see if they'd work on my Algebra homework, so that's a lot of goofing around, and all the answers worked out and I had a major epiphany about numbers and math signs all being symbols that can be anything. The numbers are symbols just like the symbols are symbols. You can change them to anything. It sounds stupid now but back then it hit me like a ton of bricks. All those mathematicians through history just made all this shit up! This is the language they agreed upon. This is how I learn, and I'll tell you, f'n around like this really makes it sink in. Beats the heck out of sitting there being all rote. See, I had to key in every single hieroglyph. That means I had to know how to find them, or know how to say them, or know the code for them.
Allen says this is the only bit of ancient Egyptian literature for which the author is known, supposedly, because the guy wrote his name on the back of the stela.
There are 69 more copies of this Loyalist Instruction that survived on papyrus and on wood. This is the oldest and it's the shortest. So it's believed that the other copies have been elaborated. But then this copy is chiseled in stone so they might have shortened it.
It's formatted in couplets. With a few tercets to break the monotony. There will be a phrase and then another helping phrase. The basic composition is thought-couplets. The second line mirrors, complements, contrasts, or expands the first sentence of the couplet. That's what Allen said in the introduction. And knowing that really helps.
On the stone there's a bunch of introductory stuff, honorifics and laudatory exaggerations that proclaims how fantastic the guy is. Those eight lines are ignored. And there's a bit at the end too that says who the scribe was. They did that. They related who the scribe is, not who the author is. But this one did have the author. Or maybe not. Maybe that's part of the propaganda. There's no way of knowing for sure.
4 comments:
I saw the title and thought it was about the Greencoats in the American Revolution.
Do they read from right to left?
Chip's complaint about the tininess of the print and hieroglyphics reminds me of art books with tiny reproductions of paintings. What were they thinking? Of course economics come into play. The cost of producing a really first rate art book like the ones Rizzoli offers has to be astronomic, witness the retail cost of those books. So maybe likewise with this Egyptology book. Maybe they didn't have the dough or figured there wasn't enough of a market for a big format high cost book on this subject. Although, on reflection, there ought to be such a market, considering the crowds shows like King Tut drew.
It makes it very VERY hard to read.
And I don't even know how people do.
They're reading the book, but I'm re-writing the book, and picking up the magnifying glass every time I need to see something when my hands are needed for writing is a major pain in the beau-tox. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, for hours.
I've looked at book holders with lights and magnifiers but everyone complains about those; lights broke second time, too heavy tips over, plastic lens distorts, useless, etc.
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