ANCR-401 Lessons

Introduction
 I hope you understood your first close look at the hieroglyphic symbols last lesson. Today, we will look at hieroglyphs that do not have a separate symbol in our own Latin alphabet, and some that we may even struggle to pronounce, as their sound values are not part of the English language. You won’t be expected to pronounce them, but we will be needing them for our transcriptions in the future, so be sure to pay attention.

The Language of Ancient Egypt and Deciphering Hieroglyphs
The language spoken in ancient Egypt at the time the hieroglyphs were at the height of their use is called Middle Egyptian. Middle Egyptian was spoken in Egypt mainly from 2,055 B.C.E. to 1,650 B.C.E., but continued on in use as a written language until the 4th century C.E. While Middle Egyptian continued to be used in writing, in spoken and everyday communication, the language changed slowly over the centuries, first into Late Egyptian and then into Demotic and Coptic. In fact, one particular dialect of Coptic is still in use in the Egyptian Christian, or Coptic, church. Some of these doubled as scripts as well, and we will be covering them, along with others, a little bit more next year.

 From the younger forms of the language, we have some idea of how the hieroglyphs were pronounced. However, this relationship was not discovered until fairly recently in historic terms, namely when Jean-Francois Champollion finally cracked the parallel texts inscribed on the Rosetta Stone in the early 19th century. His discovery of the mainly phonetic values of most of the hieroglyphs has rightly been hailed as one of the greatest achievements of human intellect, and the Rosetta Stone has since become synonymous with intercultural communication and translation as well as a term for the key clue in understanding a particular problem or issue.

 What Muggles aren’t aware of is the fact that he had some help from an Egyptian wizard, whose family had long kept the secrets of pronouncing the hieroglyphs, although even they had lost the ability to actually understand the meanings behind the sounds over all that time. It was the very secret cooperation between Muggle scholar and wizarding family secret that finally uncovered the mystery of these phonetic values.

 The particular clue that helped crack the code of the Rosetta Stone was the discovery that both the Coptic script and the hieroglyphs spelled foreign words phonetically. This discovery meant that the first symbols could be assigned phonetic (sound) values, and through painstaking comparison and hard work, eventually all the hieroglyphs have been deciphered.

 The deciphering of the hieroglyphs as a mainly phonetic script (i.e. one based on sounds, not words as values for the symbols) is important, because it allows us to know the sounds of the ancient Egyptian language. If the hieroglyphs were merely pictographs or logographs (and some of them are, as we will discuss in future lessons), then we would still be able to decipher their message, but we would have no clue to the actual sound of their language. But thanks to Champollion and the Rosetta Stone, we do have a pretty good idea now.

Consonants in Hieroglyphics
While we will never be 100 percent certain about the exact pronunciation of the ancient Egyptian language, comparison with the later stages of the language as well as comparisons with the spelling of foreign words (such as those of Greek towns) in Egyptian compared to their pronunciation in their native language have given us a good idea of how the hieroglyphs must have sounded.

 Last week, we looked at sixteen symbols that are equivalents to some of the consonants in our own Latin script. Today, we will look at ten hieroglyphs that represent sounds we may have heard and used, as well as some that sound completely unfamiliar to our ears, and which we may even struggle to pronounce.  Some of these may look to be the same sound, yet there are important differences. It is important that you understand these differences, as they do have significance.

 To the left is a table of all the hieroglyphs that represent consonant sounds we do not have special letters for in the Latin alphabet. The first column shows the standardised hieroglyph, and the second column a description of what it represents. In the third column you will find the symbol that is normally used to transliterate or transcribe the hieroglyph, while the final column gives some examples of what the hieroglyph may sound like, although most of these are only an approximation, given that many of the sounds do not exist in English.

I hope you can see all the different dashes, dots, and circles clearly. Some of them may be small, but I have added a description of the correct transcription below each to help you. These small little marks are very important in studying ancient runes, because they can mean the difference between a safe and an unsafe incantation. Believe me, I do speak from experience.

 Although some of these hieroglyphs look very similar in the transcription, they are still different symbols, and thus carry different meanings. This shouldn’t be too complicated to come to grips with, however. After all, the letters “ough” in English may be used in different words, but can produce very different pronunciations in words such as “through,” “tough,” and “though,” and we don’t even have separate symbols to show us this difference.

 I’m sure you have also noticed that some of these symbols look similar to some of those we studied last week. I know it can get confusing, but if you look closely and pay attention to the details, you won’t get lost. Once we start transcribing, I will make sure to provide you with a handout of all the required symbols, just as has been done in previous years.

Conclusion
And so we come to the end of another lesson. You will have a quiz after the lesson to test you on all the material covered today. Although there will be no transcription exercise (we have to wait until next week when we will finish our survey of the basic alphabet), I urge you to study the symbols discussed today, and maybe even practice writing them. I always find that this helps me better remember their meanings.

Next week will also be your midterms, so I would recommend revising what we have learned so far this year. For those of you with a now-frantic look in your eyes, I will remind you that Baruffio’s Brain Elixir is more likely to turn you into a Bowtruckle than it is to boost your intelligence.

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Vocabulary
Coptic: A spoken language used in ancient Egypt from 300 C.E. to 1600 C.E.
Demotic: A spoken language used in ancient Egypt from 800 B.C.E. to 400 C.E.
Late Egyptian: A spoken language used in ancient Egypt from 1069 B.C.E. to 700 B.C.E.
Middle Egyptian: A language used alongside of the hieroglyphs we’re studying. Popularly used from 2055 B.C.E. to 1650 B.C.E. but continued on in some forms until roughly 300 C.E.
Rosetta Stone: A slab of stone found in Rashid, Egypt (known to many westerners as Rosetta, Egypt). This stone bears the same inscription three times, once in Greek, another in Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the last in Demotic. These parallel inscriptions, along with the collaboration between Champollion and the wizard, allowed the entire world to unlock the secrets of hieroglyphic pronunciations.

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Original lesson written by Professor Mathilda Stevens