What Ancient Egyptian Sounded Like - and how we know

Egyptian scribes wrote hieroglyphics for three and a half thousand years, from the dawn of history until they fell silent. Decades before the fall of Rome, they breathed their last in this temple, home of the last

know

n inscription. And yet today I can animate not a story of loss but of success, a story of

what

ancient

Egypt

sounded

like and, more importantly, how we

know

it. There is a popular narrative about the rediscovery of

ancient

Egyptian. It is about a Frenchman, an Englishman and a stone. The first time I heard it, I remember curled up on the couch watching a documentary, you know, one where the camera slowly pans across the pillars along the temple walls and then cuts to a bright flare of sun and saucers. colliding synth.

It was like this. In ancient times, hieroglyphs were forgotten. Dusty relics until the 19th century, when Napoleon invaded Egypt. A stone was found, the Rosetta Stone. Scholars marveled at the bewildering chains of birds, snakes, hooks and limbs. The stone had two Egyptian scripts and, fortunately, a perfectly legible rough translation in Greek. Champollion and Young raced to uncover its secrets, tediously relating names from the Greek text to mysterious Egyptian symbols. By most accounts, French won the game and the language of Egypt was finally restored! Oh, past me, I know you were comfortable and amazed. I'm sorry for disappointing you; that story is... hmm, do you think I'm about to say wrong?

No, not that, more... there is something missing hidden in plain sight in the story and even the very words of those famous codebreakers. Something we can discover by asking a different question: not "who deciphered it?", but "

what

did it sound like and how do we know?" 1810. Years before his famous decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics, here is Champollion running through the streets of Paris. He has begun making regular visits to learn from Abuna Yuẖanna, Father John of Egypt, whose liturgical and cultural language is Coptic. Abuna receives meager payments for his work here, however, in a move familiar to Egyptians after him who have experienced their share of the long history of human migration, Abuna has been sending much of what he earns to support the families of his two deceased brothers.

Champollion, as we see in his writings, is absolutely convinced that Coptic is the Egyptian language, the same one that goes back continuously for thousands of years, and that until he can dream in Coptic he will never understand Ancient Egypt. . Coptic, to outside eyes, looks like Greek with a touch of the Nile. In fact, it is written in an adapted form of the ancient Greek alphabet "in capital letters", with consonants and vowels, and that is about to become very significant. In addition to the initial set of 25 Greek letters, the Copts use seven letters derived not from Greek but from late forms of Egyptian signs.

The first sign of decipherment. Champollion eagerly absorbs all the grammar and sounds that Abuna teaches. And within years of work, it will be by connecting Coptic sounds and working from Coptic grammar that the decipherer will finally be able to look at the hieroglyphs again. Great problems prevented truly revealing the sounds of it. First, the consonants. Sure, many have parallels in Coptic, but what did they really sound like back then? Consonants were nothing more than annoying nuisances compared to the cloud of dust that hangs over Egyptologists to this day. Hieroglyphics are a desert of consonants. Where were the missing vowels?

Egyptologists scratched their heads and scribbled down some placeholders as a convenient way to pronounce words. Not because they thought Egyptians

sounded

like that, they simply found it easier to read Hatšepsut than ḥꜣt-špswt. Arbitrary substitutes aside, what sounds really resonated in these ancient spaces between consonants? Well, since Coptic is Egyptian, and Egyptian documents are abundant and span so much time, Egyptologists could compare Egyptian to itself. This is an "internal reconstruction" and resulted in an explosion of hieroglyphic knowledge. It reopened an entire human language, one that built words using a template where roots are abstract things made up of consonants.

The Egyptians then filled that template with vowels to form a word. Since they didn't write down those vowels, how can we fill in their vowels when we're stumped by a beautiful example like "nfrt"? Well, compare the Coptic dialects and suppose it could have sounded like /nafɾət/ or /nofɾət/. What happens to an animal's horn, its "db"? That's a /step/. And name, "rn"? Wow, it's /ɾin/. And "kmt", which means "Egypt"? Fill it in: /keːmət/. How about "p-rmṯ", which means "the person"? /pəroːmət/. However, you three, hold still because, as we will see, your stories have a twist.

Evidence also comes from the languages ​​the Egyptian interacted with, both in words they borrowed and words they lent. In the New Kingdom, during the reign of Ramses II, a decades-long conflict between Egypt and the Hittites raged. Tired, the two sides agreed to a peace treaty. They wrote this treaty in two versions: in hieroglyphs on the wall of a temple at Karnak and on tablets in cuneiform writing. Ramses' elaborate hieroglyphic title begins with two words: nswt, king of Upper Egypt, and bjtj, king of Lower Egypt. Well, in cuneiform these are written entirely in syllables. After comparison, you could reconstruct an ancient pronunciation as /nsiːʔ bijat/.

Do you notice anything? Ramses' Egyptian appears to be eliminating consonants and, presumably, some vowels. It is evidence that the language changed over time. In fact, it evolved in stages from the Ancient to the Middle, the Late, the Demotic and the Coptic. Then the Egyptian changed... changed from what? The answers came from linguistic clues far beyond Egypt. More than two thousand kilometers southeast of Cairo, in this pocket of Ethiopia, there is a group of languages ​​grouped under the Omotic label. Of course, people here are perfectly comfortable with their languages, while linguists are less comfortable. For many, Omotic shares traits with a broad family across North Africa and Western Asia called Afroasiatic.

But Omotic is difficult to classify, to the point that others do not see family traits reflected at all. Why then this detour? Simply because the features used to make the call to Omotic are in other languages. These traits resonate today in the streets of Cairo, where not the latest form of Coptic is heard, but Masri or Egyptian Arabic. Arabic belongs to the Semitic branch of Afroasiatic. And, by the way, it was in Arabic that medieval scholars made the first attempts to relate hieroglyphics to Coptic sounds. Who else should have these family resemblances but the Egyptian? Afroasiatic linguists placed Egypt in its own branch.

They compared these various branches and traced them back to a common ancestor, the Proto-Afroasiatic, leaving us with a picture of the position of the Egyptian within a family. You can now search for sounds going back from Coptic to Ancient Egyptian. You could also start fast forwarding from prehistory and triangulating sounds from a more distant past, ancient even to them. Of course, Coptic easily completes the /i/ in /rin/ and the /e/ in /tep/. On the other hand, there are words in which Coptic does not coincide with the vowels of its Afro-Asiatic relatives. In fact, it seems that many or must have been earlier: ⲁⲛⲟⲕ, the pronoun "I", comes from an older /ja'nak/.

And do you remember the way I said the word “person,” with an o, /roːmə/? That changed from /raːmac/ above. And when I figured "beautiful" could be /nafrət/ or /nofrət/? Now we know why: it changed in stages from /nafɾat/ to /nofɾə/. Examining sound changes becomes complicated. Take the word wnwt as an example. The hypothesis is that it sounded something like /w_naːwat/. And now you know the word for those uneven Egyptian hours in my watches video! Incompletely... because its first vowel is still not clear to us today. The uncertainties do not end there.

Why is there no early hieroglyph for the consonant "l" and which signs were pronounced /l/ in which periods? And is d a voiced, emphatic or unaspirated t? And what is the value of this sign in the Duat? Unfortunately, this is not a phonology class. We are starting to miss the delta because of the reeds. The key point is this. What I did not realize, so comfortable in front of that documentary, is that it was necessary all of this, understanding the ancestors of the Egyptians, their relatives and their descendants, to realize that Aton's name was /jaːtin/ , that is, ankh, which means "alive." , it was pronounced /ˁaːnaχ/ and then /ˁoːnəχ/, and that Egypt's name /keːmə/ was earlier /kuːmat/ and its language /ɾaˀnikuːmat/.

Thank you for taking this journey with me to rediscover the sound of the world's longest written language. Thanks to the patrons for following my updates, supporting me, and appreciating the artwork along the way. To everyone watching: stay and subscribe for the language.