But we have to have real experts tell us that's what it says because we'd never figure it out for ourselves. Too many words and phrases are not in the dictionaries. And there is no standard spelling and no standard pronounciation. Sometimes the arrangements are in the dictionaries but with different determinatives that change the meaning dramatically, say, from "little bird" to "death by impaling." Most frustrating. Plus the translations add missing characters. I can see now that this book on the best of Egyptian literature is insufficient to learn the language. We'd need fifteen such books, and comb them like nobody's business.
That just reminded me. Some things are fairly certain. Soon as you see them, generally, you can form an idea. Unless the sound of the sign is used for another word unassociated with the original meaning. Like the ibis.
There are several ibis signs and they mean different things and they have different sounds. But when you see this one picking through the sand on the shore then you can be fairly certain the idea is "find." And I think that's cute as heck.
I like this bird. For its certainty. Because it's picking. Is that great, or what?
It also means "gm" so wherever those phonemes are required you might get the sign for "g" and the sign for "m" or you might get this ibis, or all three.
The one center far right, sitting down, is the one that you see little figures of all over the place. I have one. Blue wood with bronze neck, head, and beak and feet. See them on eBay, for example, when it's not represented as Thoth, Ebay [egyptian ibis]
Luckily, most writing you'll see chiseled in stone on temples should you go there to take it all in, is formulaic as heck. It's formal. Codified. So a visitor has a chance to read it. At least read the names of the pharaohs and recognize the formulas.
One time Zahi Hawass asked his assistant, a young American working on her doctorate, annoying as heck because she is unfit to explore, if she knew what the hieroglyphs said on the tomb of Wennis. Also instantly identifiable by the hare representing "wn", Nobody else has that rabbit in thier name. You see the hare in a cartouch and you know instantly it's Wennis.
She said, "Yeah."
He asks, "What?"
She said, "Offering."
He exclaimed excitedly, "YES!" Such a bright little girl. He was thrilled she could recognize a common formula seen everywhere. And the cameraman is all over the place. He cannot hold steady for three seconds. He swings back and forth sweeping across the hieroglyphs then on to something else that has his attention. He had no interest whatsoever in the stunningly clear hieroglyphs. And I'm going out of my mind because I wanted to read the offering. How much cattle was sacrificed? How much beer and bread spread around to the priests, how much linnen and fowl, what are the quantities? Is it a long formula or a short formula? Which god is it to. That would tell us how big a deal the dedication of the structure was. But mere "offering scene" satisfied Hawass. He assumed from that she knew all of it. She probably did. But we didn't get the chance to discover that. Their language is just not that interesting to people. Shame. Because they're telling us everything.
As to the absence of common spelling I cannot be critical. Our own language lacked it since forever until recently. I was reading exerpts from Meriwether Clark's journal in Time magazine (before they dropped off into the deep end) and cracked up laughing at their clever typesetting. I doubt this was accident. They wrote Clark sounded out his words as he wrote and he didn't know how to pronounce some of them, spelled the same word differently at different times, that Clark was an incredibly imaginative
*turn page*
speller.
That's how these hieroglyphs are. Incredibly imaginative. I can see by the end of this book we'll be just as lost as we are now.
1 comment:
lol opening GIF: O hai
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