Comparisons in writing and translation

Opportunities for a Sydney resident to visit the British Museum are few. On most visits I seem to buy introductory books on hieroglyphs in the Museum souvenir shop. On one such visit I came away with Wallace Budge’s little book with sample sentences, Egyptian Language:

Budge, Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis. 1963 1983 [printing]. Egyptian language: easy lessons in Egyptian hieroglyphics with sign list. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

It looked heavy going, with full pages of hieroglyphs, with their translations below. And it was years before I looked at it in any way seriously. And several more years passed before it was returned to, to re-examine the sentences. By then I was beginning to notice more detail, but it was only in July 2013 that I realised that certain passages were more or less repeated. It all arose from the word mer for ‘pool’, which I had thought to mean ‘canal’ among other totally different things.

 But ‘canal is incidental to the story that follows, other than to say that the near-duplicated sections enable comparisons to be made.

One of the ‘duplicated’ sections begins on page 202. Here is is, rendered a little differently, having as it does my own analysis of it:

ILLUSTRATION 1

The corresponding duplicated section begins on page 236, for which the similarly treated presentation occurs below:

ILLUSTRATION 2

There are minor differences all the way through, but I have picked out a few with coloured patches. The yellowish patches above simply show quite different ways or rendering mAyat(i).

Anyone who looks at this entry might also wish to note that the passage marked out with square brackets in the last three lines of Illustration 2 are missing in Illustration 1 — hence the bracketing, presumably.

Now to look at the other parts of the duplication.

ILLUSTRATION 3

ILLUSTRATION 4

Comments

Comment 1

The first of the green patches shows ireten-ek in Illustration 3, but iren-ek in Illustration 4. This is a subtle difference. The inclusion of the <bun> sign (after <eye>) denotes a relative, hence the translation do what is did thou

Figure 1a: EAWB [202:7.2]

Figure 1b

Figure 2b

Comment 2

Even more minor is the form of the determinative in the second pair of green patches: <U-cross> in the first and <U-tub> in the second.

Figure 3a and 3b

These two determinatives appear to be slightly different renderings of basically the same element.

Comment 3

The third green patch shows the word heten-i or perhaps hAtun-i

Figure 4a and 4b

The last three signs in each case are:

— <SQUATTERMOUTH>: determinative indicating something to do with the mouth, in this case speaking / yelling

— <water> en: past tense marker

— <SQUATTER> i: 1sgNOM personal pronoun ‘I’

So the word is /ht/ het or hAtu. het is ‘call’ (yell, shout). hA could be an interjection ‘hey!’, leaving a mystery tu. tu has various roles, including as a pronoun as a verbal element. Possibly in the present instance hAtu is just a scribe’s alternative way of rendering /ht/.

sheden-i

ILLUSTRATION 5a

The following repeats the bottom of Illustration 3:

This is to be compared with the top of page 237, below. We are looking at the pink patches.

ILLUSTRATION 5b

The word concerned is sheden-i, which for some reason Wallace Budge indicates should be sesheden-i (which he has rendered: ‘se´seṭ - nå’). But ignoring that detail, we notice that on page 203 he has translated the word as ‘I dug’, while on page 237 it is translated as ‘I adjured (it)’.

ILLUSTRATION 5c

You probably did not notice, but the word was used earlier, in Illustration 2. The sentence concerned is repeated below, now with further pink patches applied:

And look: the translation offered by Wallace Budge is different again. Now it is ‘maketh to prevail’. Well, the ‘maketh’ part would be acceptable had the word had a se- causative prefix to make se-shed-en-ek su, but there is no sign of one. It is simply sheden-ek again. So what does shed mean? dig? adjure? prevail?

The ideas being expressed in these sentences are from a culture remote from the present and it is not easy to come to a conclusion as to the real underlying idea. While it is nice to use fancy words such as ‘prevail’ and ‘adjure’, they are not helpful in a quest to arrive at the fundamental meaning intended.

Perhaps the database can help. What follows are all the instances of the root shed in the database as it stands in July 2013:

Figure 5a, 5b and 5c

The grey column is the original translation, and the yellow the simplified ‘guess’ of your amateur researcher (JMS). JMS suspects that in the yellow column ‘extract’ and ‘dig’ convey the same basic idea. And also that ‘read’ is ‘extracting’ in the sense of extracting meaning from a text. That leaves half a dozen other ideas in the grey column including ‘foster’, ‘mortar’, ‘poultice’, ‘waterfowl’, ‘artificial lake', and ‘vulva’. Are these correct, or fanciful? As the database expands, perhaps more solid ideas of interpretation will present themselves.

--------------

Two final pages of duplication follow.

seden-i

ILLUSTRATION 6

The word of interest in Illustration 6 is seden-i. Wallace Budge translates this as ‘broke I’, as picked out by the pale blue patches.

ILLUSTRATION 7

In Illustration 7 Wallace Budge translates seden-i (note the pale blue patches) as ‘I made use of’.

I do not know what is really being described but it does seem as though a tablet of stone might have been broken and used to dig a ‘canal’, more or less in the manner a shovel. But of course some other idea altogether might have been intended. While your amateur researcher is an amateur indeed, this blog entry has attempted to show that great authorities such as Wallace Budge were equally unsure as to what they were claiming as authentic translations.

To recapitulate, Wallace Budge translated:

sheden-i I dug I adjured prevail (sheden)

seden-i broke (I) made use of

Your amateur research opts for 'extract' and 'break' respectively.

Jeremy Steele

Wednesday 31 July 2013

peti, peter: who? what? see

It is probably impossible to resolve now, but did the Ancient Egyptians (AE) say peti or peter for ‘who’, ‘what’?

The fact that peter also was used for ‘see’ is probably just a coincidence of language. Its use for senses of vision is usually marked by an appropriate determinative suggesting ‘eye’. 

We look at the ‘see’ examples first:

Table 1: peter: ‘see’

In this group the basic <stool bun mouth> 

configuration provides the reading ptr: peter, and the vision determinative shows it is to do with seeing. The last two examples have no vision determinative.

Table 2: who, what

In the ‘who / what’ interrogative pronoun group above, the determinative used is not vision but <SQUATTERMOUTH> 

— once again except for the last two. Once again, too, in every case the basic <stool bun mouth> 

configuration provides the reading ptr: peter.

Table 3: peti

There is, however, another group for which the scholars give a different reading, although it might in reality have been the same. Here are the examples:

All of this group has the <SQUATTERMOUTH> 

determinative, and the only difference in the ‘spelling' is in the first example, with < twig> 

instead of < twig: mouth> 

— the <mouth> portion of which does suggest /r/ of ptr: peter. It seems the scholars have decided the < twig: mouth> sign is a determinative and not part of the spelling of the sound of the word, on the basis that it occurs after the <pair> 

sign. But was it correct to assume this? There are many instances when scribes did not follow the strict sign-sound order, and not only for honorific (gods, pharoahs first) or graphic (what looks nicest) reasons. The <pair> 

sign in these examples indicates agency, the do-er of an action or role. Why the scribes chose to put it in front of the <twig> sign is unknown, but it does not really assure that the /r/ in the < twig: mouth> 

sign was NOT to be pronounced. In fact the first two examples in Table 3, repeated below:

Table 4: peter-i

include the alternative agency sign <reed> 

making the form peter-i: ‘who agent’, rather than peti.

Consequently to your amateur student of the hieroglyphs, it would seem that the probable correct reading of the peti examples might be peter-i.

Jeremy Steele

Sunday 28 July 2013

=================

pekher / deben confusion

Ancient Egyptian can be frustrating. And sometimes the scholars add to the confusion. 

rer

For example, Wallace Budge (EAWB) started off the confusion with the word rer.

Your researcher decided early on that this was unlikely, and transcribed the word as pekher.

The word notably featured the glyph <clip-R> F46 o. To modern eyes this sign looks like an office paperclip, and such an object has bends and turns and curves and folds, and changes in direction.

However, back to rer: there is a word rer, or reri, meaning ‘pig’, whilst rer means ‘time’.

rer or pekher: turn

However, EAWB claimed the word rer (or pekher) to mean ‘go round about’, for which the simplified English translation in the Nedj Nedj database was ‘turn’. Gardiner provides one of numerous examples of this word:

pekher — with <mouth> /r/

It transpires that there are around two dozen examples in the database featuring pekher, all with an underlying idea of circularity, whether direct or tenuous. Here are four examples: 

In fact the Euphrates (line 2) does meander; and frontier guards (line 4) move about, or circulate, while on patrol.

The first example (line 1, final column) spells the word out: p-kh-r —, rather than relying on the shorthand ‘clip’ of the next two examples for the purpose.

Unaccountable extras: pekher

How the following two examples fit into the picture is anyone’s guess. There is no obvious circularity connection:

deben — with <water> /n/

For an unfathomable reason, there is another altogether different word conveying circularity, deben; it is in almost all respects the same as pekher in appearance in hieroglyphs. Here are several examples:

These deben hieroglyphic examples are virtually indistinguishable from the pekher group, except for featuring the <water> /n/ glyph instead of <mouth> /r/. And it is these sound complements that are the key to distinguishing which word is intended.

Apart from indicating circularity, deben also was used for a measure of weight.

Unaccountable extras: deben

There might be a connection in the following examples to the weight concept, but hardly to circularity. The determinatives <ring> and <horncup> often denote minerals:

Scholars confuse

Why it was suggested that the scholars sometimes add to the confusion is that in the English–Egyptian vocabulary in Gardiner there is an entry under ‘circulate’ on p. 608. The entry reads:

circulate  , 

If the glyph <clip-R> F46 o on its own stands for pekher, and the <mouth> sign is complementary (first example above), the second word above might be taken to read pekheren. In fact it is deben, with the <water> glyph complementary to the alternative stem word deben. But how would an amateur researcher know this?

Ancient Egyptians confuse

Gardiner, in his entry on glyph F46 ‘clip’: o , alerted his readers to two uses other than for phr  pekher and dbn deben above. Here are selected examples:

These uses are qAb and wedjeb. Just as the underlying idea for both pekher and deben was circularity, coupled with a few ‘unaccountable extras’, an underlying idea can be sought for each of qAb and wedjeb.. These underlying ideas might be:

qAb: fold

wedjeb: redirect

Here are three example for each:

qAb: fold

wedjeb: redirect

turn, r ‘away from’; turn back; revert, n ‘to’; divert offerings; direct action; r ‘to’ a purpose; recur of illness;

desist, compose oneself; turn oneself about;

noun: reversion offering;

Finally, Gardiner did not include what appears to be another ‘clip’-related word in his F46-49 ‘clip’ collection. The following example features the glyph <clip-Z: pap> M11 W. It relates to the word weden: ‘offer’

Why did Gardiner not include it? Because although it featured what may to us resemble a ‘clip’ variation, Gardiner classified this glyph not in his F ‘Parts of mammals’ category but in his M ‘Trees and plants’ category instead. 

Faulkner on the other hand, in just one instance, does record a ‘clip’ example for weden:

However, Faulkner also provides eight others weden examples featuring clip-Z: pap M11. So perhaps it is best to side with Gardiner and exclude weden from the ‘clip’ confusion.

Conclusion

The glyph <clip-R> F46 o has two basic associated word stems, phr pekher and dbn deben. Both have the underlying meaning of circularity. These two words have additional meanings and uses.

The glyph <clip-R> F46 o is also associated with the word stems ḳ3b qAb. These the underlying meaning of fold, and wdb wedjeb with the underlying meaning of redirect.

Are you a little confused by all this?

Jeremy Steele

Thursday 20 June 2013

Glyphs in the summary line

(šsp: shesep) "daylight" daylight Gardiner [595.2:9] <tug stool sun: rays>

Your amateur researcher into Egyptian hieroglyphs has made a database to help him with his enquiries. This database has been referred to in earlier posts in this Nedj Nedj blog. The database reveals similarities in words, enables glyph sequences to be searched for, and shows how words were, or might be, made up from stems, prefixes and suffixes to provide their meanings. Examples from the database have been used on many occasions so far. These examples sometimes have taken the form of graphics, such as an analysis of the word ‘shesep’:

Fig. 1 shesep

 and sometimes as summary lines for the graphic group concerned:

(šsp: shesep) "daylight" daylight Gardiner [595.2:9] <tug stool sun: rays>

So it is that the summary line for the above graphic for ‘shesep’, meaning ‘daylight’ (and also ‘image’ / ‘statue’) is presented with the following elements:

— šsp: official spelling

— shesep: simple-to-read transliteration

— "daylight" translation offered by the source

— daylight JSM (JS main) translation in the database

— Gardiner [595.2:9]: source, including the page and line, and item within the line

— <tug stool sun: rays> glyph sequence, using database names for the glyphs

So, at the end of the summary line, the glyph composition for the word ‘shesep’ is shown, using the names your researcher has devised for them for his own convenience, in order to make the database work: tug / stool / sun: rays

Is there something obvious missing here? After a while it seemed that if this database and blog were intended to help others, not just your researcher, to see what lay behind the hieroglyphs, if the blog were to help show how the Ancient Egyptians made the hieroglyphs work, then the summary lines were deficient in a major respect. Everybody other than your researcher would be unfamiliar with the (sometimes-regrettably-far-from-obvious) names used for the glyphs. Those people (i.e. all of you) would be at a disadvantage in trying to understand what was being discussed. Hieroglyphs are obscure enough without adding another layer of obfuscation. So why not have the hieroglyphs themselves included as part of the summary lines? Why not, indeed.

The reason was that the big hieroglyphics you can see in the coloured picture above, with the pink and purple and yellow explanatory bars, are actually pictures, just as if they were photographs.  In fact, here is the very group concerned, from a wall in Karnak:

Fig. 2 shesep from Karnak

This is obviously a picture, not a keyboard character. This group in this picture is to be read top to bottom, and right to left. That is why everything looks backwards in relation to the graphic analysis of the word at the start of this entry.

What is the problem? Why can’t the hieroglyphs appear as part of the line of text? Well, no doubt they could, if you only knew how to do it. And certainly not your researcher, who is neither computer programmer nor smart young member of the modern world but only a retired administrator who once used to help things along in a big organisation. In short, he is no-one at all special.

Yet the problem gnawed away. The summary lines really ought to include the glyphs. 

If the glyphs were to appear in a line of type, then maybe if they were themselves characters in a type font it might be possible for them to be there. Your amateur researcher knew there were lots of fonts on his computer as this segment from near the start of the font list reveals:

Fig. 3 Font list A-B

In the list above there’s ‘Arial Hebrew’, and ‘Baghdad’. 
Could there be a font for Egyptian hieroglyphs? Have a look . . .:

Fig. 4 Font list F-G

Well I never: what’s ‘GlyphBasicA’ and so on? 

GlyphBasicA turned out to be:

Fig. 5 GlyphBasicA displayed

That looked promising, but it also turned out that there were not enough characters in all the 'GlyphBasic' fonts together — not nearly enough.

This led to a search for other fonts on the internet —and  a Laser font was duly found, with a wider range.

Then either the computer itself, or the database program, caused new difficulties. For, to achieve the hieroglyph image you want to see, you have to type on a ‘qwerty’ Roman alphabet keyboard. Thus it was that at first, when the glyphs were required to appear, up they came as a series of jumbled ordinary letters, not as hieroglyphs at all. Somehow the keyboard had to be ‘told’ that the /k/ between the slashes was a duck hieroglyph k and not a k at all.

It took about a fortnight of entering the Laser characters into the companion ‘JS Hiero Names’ database, as well as some serious pondering over how to make the characters actually appear. And finally here is the result for the summary line at the start of this entry. It includes a new group at the end:

(šsp: shesep) "daylight" daylight  Gardiner [595.2:9] <tug stool sun: rays> {opf}

That new group appears in what are small characters, but here they are enlarged:

{opf}

And to show that getting them to appear at all was not a fluke, here is a longer example, chosen at random:

Fig. 6 ateput

The word is ‘ateput’, and it means ‘load’.

Here is the entry for ‘ateput’:

Fig. 7 ateput entry

and here is its summary line, complete with the glyph sequence at the end:

(3tpwt: atepu) "load" load  Faulkner Concise [7:1.1] <eagle bun stool quail bun SQUATTER: hat arm: stick PLURAL> {atpwt‹˚¬}

Here is the glyph portion enlarged:

{atpwt‹˚¬}

How was it done? By a combination of ‘container’ fields, scripts, and advice from a son-in-law who really knows what you need to know.

Here is the first of the two scripts used.

This one copies all the typographic glyphs (as opposed to the ‘picture’ versions) from the separate fields they were in, as shown in one of the coloured graphics (shesep and ateput) above into a single ‘field’. 

HIERO JS NAMES ID01::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID02::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID03::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID04::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID05::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID06::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID07::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID08::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID09::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID10::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID11::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID12::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID13::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID14::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID15::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID16::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID17::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID18::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID19::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID20::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID21::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID22::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID23::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID24::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID25::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID26::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID27::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID28::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID29::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID30::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID31::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID32::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID33::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID34::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID35::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID36::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID37::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID38::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID39::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID40::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID41::font item Laser & HIERO JS NAMES ID42::font item Laser

and here is the result of that script for ‘ateput’:

Fig. 8 Glyphline with errors

This illustrates what is typical about a process to try to achieve what you want. First the glyphs come up as jumbles ‘Roman type’ letters. Then they come up only partially what you were hoping for. So while the first four characters seem right, the rest are not. Consequently they could not help to produce a useful, accurate, summary line.

Then it was found that simply by clicking in this field for ‘ateput’, a new result appeared:

Fig. 8 Corrected glyphline, after clicking

After one had simply clicked in the field, everything looked right! Somehow, by clicking, the desired appearance of the characters was activated. The ‘wrong’ images occurring in some cases were possibly due to being derived from a font other that the exact one used for the first four. So near and yet so far. How to tell the computer to click in the field itself?

It was discovered that copying this field into another field had the effect of clicking in the field. The result was that the characters all presented themselves as desired. This is shown in the next illustration, where the transferred characters appear in the new blue bar:

Fig. 9 Glyphline transfer, and original glyphline

They do not appear there automatically, but in response to an instruction: a keyboard combination ‘command 3’ [cmd3] activates the transfer, with the result shown above. 

Here is the script to achieve this:

Fig. 10 Script to effect the transfer to the new 'transfer' glyphline

The challenge was then to copy the glyphs of the blue ‘glyphline transfer’ bar above into the desired summary line. Here is the script amended to achieve this result:

"(" & transcription & ":" & " " & If(prefix 1=""; "" ; prefix 1 & "-") & If(prefix 2=""; "" ; prefix 2 & "-") & If(respelt JS =""; "" ; respelt JS)  & If(sfx DFX 1=""; "" ; "-" & sfx DFX 1) & If(sfx DFX 2=""; "" ; "-" & sfx DFX 2) & If(sfx tense=""; "" ; "-" & sfx tense) & If(postfix 1 =""; "" ; "-" & postfix 1) & If(sfx pronoun nom=""; "" ; "-" & sfx pronoun nom) & If(sfx pronoun acc =""; "" ; "-" & sfx pronoun acc) & If(postfix 2 =""; "" ; "-" & postfix 2) & ")" & Char(9) & Quote (meaning) & Char(9) & Eng JS main & " " & Eng suffix & " " & Eng JS adj & Char(9) & source & Char(9) & "[" & page & ":" & line & "]" & Char(9) & "<" & identity JS & ">" & Char(9) & "{" & If(glyphline transfer =""; "" ; glyphline transfer) & "}"

And here is the successful result, now including the glyphs at the end:

Fig. 11 ateput entry, including glyphs at the end

Here too are the glyphs from the end, enlarged:

Fig. 12 ateput glyphs enlarged

And here is the now standard summary line presentation for it:

(3tpwt: atepu) "load" load  Faulkner Concise [7:1.1] <eagle bun stool quail bun SQUATTER: hat arm: stick PLURAL> {atpwt‹˚¬}

For general information only

Here is the whole photograph from the great temple at Karnak, from which the actual ‘shesep’ example was obtained:

Fig. 13 Heavily incised hieroglyph wall at Karnak

The extract can be seen just below the big hole near the top left corner.

You know the direction of reading is from right to left as all the glyphs with faces (birds, snakes, etc.) face to the right.

Your amateur researcher was there on 8 March 2009. Here is part of a diary entry for that day:

“Karnak is the largest religious complex in the world, and much photographed. At first there is a great open space, and the complex stretches behind it, heralded by the first of ten 'pylons', which are short tall walls, broken in the middle by a gap, through which some extent of the complex can be glimpsed, through successive further pylons and spaces.

Karnak is the work of a series of pharaohs, with Ramses II being a singular contributor. His statues and cartouches were practically everywhere.

As pharaohs added sequentially to the complex, the buildings first encountered were the most recent. The first pylon was attributed to Nectanebo II, in power at the same time as Alexander the Great. The pylon was not fully finished, so much so that ramp works still remained behind the pylon, giving a fairly clear indication as to how these great structures might have been made, including the pyramids. The ramp was held together by big mud bricks, about 40 cm long, with other dimensions to match. It might have been 20 metres wide, and it had some parallel internal walling, the rest being filled up with general rubble. It might have been 5-10 m in height where it touched the pylon  — nowhere near the top of the pylon, so perhaps much of it had been dispersed over the centuries, or perhaps had been demolished, for the present ground level, taken back to the original ground level, was many metres lower than it was when Muslims had built a mosque on the ruins, the front entrance to which is now way up in the air.

Then next wonder, and wonder it truly was, was the great and famous hypostyle hall with its 134 giant columns. This had been started by Seti I and completed by Ramses II. There were very many columns, but because they were placed so close together it was not possible to obtain many diagonal views through them. After Ibrahim's [the guide’s] presentation of the complex I returned there to photograph everything I could think of, particularly the hieroglyphics, in the brief time allocated for free inspection.

We went through the various spaces, and took a right turn someway down, for the last four pylons branch off in that direction. Here and there one would come upon some item already familiar from photographs in books of Egypt or on TV programs. At the lake we were let loose to photograph what we wanted.

[’Queen Hatshepsut of the Eighteenth Dynasty erected some six obelisks in the 16th year of her reign, around 1485 BC. One still stands at Karnak, 97.5 ft high, 8.6 ft wide at the base, and 5.3 ft wide at the top, making a taper of 1 in 27.' <http://mysite.du.edu/~etuttle/classics/obelisk.htm >] [‘The photograph shows an obelisk erected by Queen Hatshepsut (1473-1458 BC). It is 97 feet tall and weighs approximately 320 tons (some sources say 700 tons). An inscription at its base indicates that the work of cutting the monolith out of the quarry required seven months of labor.’]

There is also a fallen obelisk of Hatshepsut’s.

[‘Hatshepsut raised four obelisks at Karnak, only one of which still stands.’ <http://www.sacredsites.com/africa/egypt/obelisk.html >]”

Nearby stands a smaller obelisk erected by Tuthmosis I (1504-1492 BC). It is 75 feet high, has sides 6 feet wide at its base, and weighs between 143 and 160 tons.

Jeremy Steele

Monday 10 June 2013