Middle Egyptian

Grammar

James E. Hoch

Middle Egyptian

Grammar

James E. Hoch

SSEA Publication XV

Benben Publications, Mississauga, 1997

Copyright @ 1997 by James E. Hach, Toronto

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written

permission of the copyright owner.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Hach, James E. (James Eric), 1954-

Middle Egyptian Grammar

(SSEA Publications; v. 15)

Co-pUblished by the Society for the Study of Egyptian

Antiquities

ISBN 0-920168-12-4

1. Egyptian language-Grammar. 1. Saciety for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities. II. Title. m. Series.

PJ1135.H63 493'.1 C95-932358-9

LESSONI

§1. Egyptian Connections to African and West Asian Languages

The Egyptian language has usually been taught as a unique language in isolation. But, in fact, it is a member of the large Afro-Asiatic language family. Older works refer to this family as "Hamito-Semitic," but this is not a scientific categorization, since it assumes a false dichotomy between the Semitic languages and the "Hamitic languages." Afro-Asiatic languages were-and still are-spoken by people in central, northern, and eastem Mrica, the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant and Mesopotamia.

There are five or six main branches of the Afro-Asiatic family: Berber, Chadic (including Hausa), Cushitic, Egyptian, and Semitic. Bach of these branches-apart from Egyptian-has sub­divisions into distinct languages. Of the ancient Afro-Asiatic languages, both Egyptian and Akkadian (the Semitic language of Assyria and Babylonia) exhibit a considerable degree of linguistic change, right from the earliest traces in writing. In Egyptian, there are, not surprisingly, many words cognate1 to counterparts in Hebrew, Arabic, and Akkadian, the best known of the ancient languages. For example, Egyptian Ir J ~ IJ,sb "to calculate," Hebrew :1W ('b,liSa12) "to reckon," and Arabic ~ (tuzsaba) "to calculate."2 There are also cognates with many modern Mrican languages, but these have not yet been studied as thoroughly and in any case are more difficult to compare, given the large gap in time.3 Many of the connections are difficult to recognize because of metathesis (a shift in the order of the consonants) and phonetic changes­some of which are quite drastic. Similarly, there are many affinities in the grammatical features of these languages. The exact grammatical mechanisms may be quite different, but frequently the general approach is similar.

§2. The Historical Phases of Egyptian

Egyptian writing at its incipient stage before 3000 B.C.E. is mostly used to identify individuals and groups by name, as on the Narmer palette, which contains depictions of historical events,

lI.e. historically (genetically) related to each other, having descended from a common ancestrallanguage. For example English "cow" is cognate with German Kuh and English "father" is cognate with Spanish padre. By contrast, English "facade" is a loan-word borrowed from the French /Qfade, but is not "cognate" to it.

2The cognates will be indicated in the vocabulary lists to show the extent of the relationship with the Semitic languages. Cognates with other Afro-Asiatic languages are not included since almost all of the evidence is from modem languages, and is in any case beyo~d the scope of an introductory grammar.

3 A good introduction is J.H. Greenberg, The Languages 0/ Africa (Bloomington: 1966), pp. 42-51. Our recently expanding knowledge of Old Nubian. although dating to ca. 1200 C.E., may stimulate scholarship in the relations between Egyptian and other African languages.

4 MIDDLE EGYPTIAN GRAMMAR

symbolic pictograms, and rebus (sound alike) signs for the names. Somewhat later, pictographic . signs are used in offering lists to represent such things as a leg of OX, a bundle of onions, and offering Ioaves. Some of these signs developed directly into hieroglyphic writing; others did not.

The Egyptian language has an extremely long history,-spanning some 4,500,years,.....and can be divided into five main phases, although with some overlaps:

I Old Egyptian ca. 3000-2135 B·.C.E., Dynasties 1-8

n Middle Egyptian, classical ca. 2135-2000 B.C.E., Dynasties 9-12 post-classical, ca. 2000-1300 B.C.E., Dynasties 13-18

m LateEgyptian ca. 1550-715 B.C.E., Dynasties 18-24

IV Demotic ca. 715 B.C.E.-470 C.E. .

V Coptic third-sixteenth centuries C.E. (still used as the liturgicallanguage in the rites of the Coptic church, and spoken to a certain extent as a revived Ianguage by modem Coptic Christians)

Old Egyptian and classical Middle Egyptian are presumed to be fairIy elose to the spoken language of their respective eras, and almost certainly reflect the dialect spoken by the royal family or that of the capital city. Old and Middle Egyptian are generally quite similar, apart from a few changes in the verbal system and the use of differing particles. Middle Egyptian continued to serve as the written Ianguage into the early New Kingdom (Eighteenth Dynasty) although the

spoken dialect had undergone some major structural changes.

Late Egyptian reflects the spoken Ianguage of the New Kingdom, but after the Twenty-first Dynasty, monumental inscriptions were written in something approximating Middle Egyptian. The dialects attested in the later periods are all fairly elose to Late Egyptian, the major break being between Middle and Late Egyptian.

§3. The Scripts of Egyptian

Over the course of four and a half millennia, Egyptian was written with four distinct scripts:

I Hieroglyphic ("holy carving"): The forms elosely reflect what they represent; they are often carved in stone; sometimes they are written on papyri, especially for religious texts.

n Hieratic ("priestly"): A cursive script for use with pen on papyrus (or on an ostracon-a

potsherd or limestone flake-a cheap, common, and very durable writing surface). The cursive forms emerged very early, and there is evidence from the First Dynasty. Only rarely were inscriptions written on stone in this script.

m Demotic ("popular''): This is a late (7th century B.C.E. on) cursive script that derives from

hieratic, but is much abbreviated. It was used for everyday documents and literary works. Religious texts continued to be written in hieratic and sometimes cursive hieroglyphs.

IV Coptic (from Greek Atyvm:o~ "Egypt"): The script is Greek, but with additional Ietters derived from demotic, e.g. t (tz), ~ (S), q (j), ~ (b), ~ (b), ~ (~), ~ (tsh), r:; (gy).

LESSONI 5

A comparison of a few signs in the various scripts is presented in Table 1. Of course, as can be easily seen, Coptic is an alphabetic script. The Egyptian script is not direCtly related to the Semitic and Greek (and Roman) alphabets, but it served as the inspiration. Many hieratic and hi~roglyphic signs .were used in the. ancient Phrenician syllabic script of Byblos (ca .. 2000 B .C.E.) that evolved into the western alphabets.4

TABLE 1: A COMPARISON OF THE EGYPTIAN SCRIPTS

Sign Beetle Ring Stand Foot Owl

Value5 IJpr g b m

Hieroglyphic ~ 2iI l 1\ Hieratic vl ~ l 3 Demotic J:, \r- L !!:J Coptic ~ume (5 & Al

§4. The Writing System of Egyptian

From the earliest phase down to its demise, Egyptian is characterized by two principal features: the use of logograms and the rebus principle. Logograms are signs that represent words, both concrete and abstract. For instance, the sign 0 represents the sun, and could be read varlousIy depending on the meaning: r"sun," the god Ree, "(every) day"; hrw "day(time)"; sw "day x (of the month)" in dates. This is easy enough for simple, concrete words, such as C? pr "house."6 But how, for example, might one write the preposition "to," the noun "life," or the verb "to be­come"? The rebus principle was the solution: one used words that sound alike (Le. have the same root consonants) to stand for these words that could not be easily depicted. Thus, the sign depicting a "mouth" <> (pronounced r) was used for the preposition "to" (r). The "sanda! strap" .sr- (':nlJ) was used to write "life" (enlJ), and the scarab beetle ~ (lJprr) was used to write "to become" (lJpr). These signs, since they are used for their similar pronunciation and not for their basic meaning, may be termed "phonetic signs." A core group of phonetic signs must be Ieamed by memory, since according to rules of Egyptian orthography, certain combinations of consonants are written only with particular phonetic signs.

Very early on in the history of Egyptian writing, certain signs were assigned the values of the Egyptian consonants, thus forming an alphabet of sorts (minus vowels). The Egyptians never

4M. Dunand, Byblia Grammata (Beirut: 1945), pp. 71-138; G.E. Mendenhall, The Syllabic Inscriptions from Byblos (Beirut: 1985); J.E. Hoch, "The Byblos Syllabary: Bridging the Gap Between Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Semitic Alphabets," Journal of the Society for the Study 0/ Egyptian Antiquities 20 (1990), pp. 115-24.

SThe transliteration ofthe Egyptian signs and their probable phonetic values will be discussed in §S. &rite use ofthe strake indicates that the sign is to be read as what it represents (and not phonetica1ly, for instance).

The strake will be dealt with in § 13.