Idle Expectations

ancientpeoples:

Two Chicago professors writing in ancient Egyptian and Hittite.

Professor Theo van den Hout writes a letter in Hittite cuneiform, while Prof W. Raymond Johnson copies out part of the Egyptian Book of the Dead in cursive hieroglyphs.

(Source: Oriental Institute, Chicago,YouTube channel)

I wish I could do this all day, oh my God.

thatlittleegyptologist:

sekhemkare:

coffee-n-cats:

still love this movie

Was thinking of blogging about this. Whoever did the glyphs for this scene made some… odd choices.

Line one reads: [rnpt] 100,010 r qbHw -pw ra m itn

For starters, this text is supposed to be, at the youngest, c. 4500 years old, at oldest 10,000 years old. Yet it’s written in Middle Egyptian, spoken probably c.1800-1650 BC. With signs which don’t develop until at least the later Old Kingdom, like the deteriminative to ‘Ra’, which is here the seated sun god with a sun-disk on his head. Given that depicting gods as a seated figure is a development of the 5th/6th Dynasty, this is anachronistic, to say the least.

Then there’s the use of the particle -pw here to form an A -pw B sentence, which is really a Middle Egyptian structure, since in Old Egyptian, -pw is a demonstrative.

Then there’s the decision to write ‘million’ with the hundred-thousand frog over a ten (which as far as I know makes 100,010, not a million), rather than the god Heh, which would actually spell ‘million’, or possibly ‘countless’.

Then there’s “Ra, the sun-god”. The text actually says “Ra, (being) the sun-disk”. Whoever wrote this chose this text to actually refer to the sun, not the sun-god. Of course, this presents a slight problem with Egyptian, since the word for the sun (ra) is the same as the name of the sun-god (Ra). itn (Aten), however, refers to the solar disk, so it remains… anomalous when used here.

Line 2 reads: m xtm.n=f qrs=f n Dt r nHH

Here, the text appears to say “In his having sealed and buried for eternity and everlastingness”. Because of the initial m, I would be most likely to read both verbs here as nominal forms. It’s very odd, given that the film suggests it was the people on Earth who buried the Stargate, that here the text suggests that was Ra.

Line 3 can’t be seen here, but reads: sb3=n sb3w=f

This is quite a clever pun on the Egyptian words for door (sb3) and star (sb3), and the Egyptians probably would have approved. Unfortunately, the n between the two, which should be a genitive particle (rendering the phrase ‘door of stars’), has had plural strokes added underneath, rendering the whole phrase mean “our door of his stars”.

Daniel also reads line one, contra most Egyptological manuals as it’s written (“A is B” rather than “B is A”), which is… unusual.

In conclusion, what the glyphs here actually say is:

100,010 years into the sky is Ra, the solar disk,
In his having sealed and buried for eternity and everlastingness,
Our gate of his stars.

As a postscript, teh film does contain a real line of ancient Egyptian in the scene right at the start of the film when Daniel gives a talk: he rights on the board h3 ppy -pw Ssp.n=k tp=k, which is a quotation from the Pyramid Texts of the Sixth Dynasty, and means “Ho there to this Pepi! You have received your head”. (Don’t worry, no-one knows what that means). Daniel also begins to write the cartouche of the Fourth Dynasty king Khufu in cursive hieroglyphs when he realises his last audience member has gone (as, most likely, my last reader has. Bye.)

There may be other glyphs in the film which are legible, but they scrolled past too quickly for me to read. What didn’t were the books on Daniel’s desk, which include Christopher Frayling’s The Face of Tutankhamun (why Daniel has a book on the 18th Dynasty boy-king on his desk, I don’t know - probably totally useless to him), and Michael A. Hoffman’s (likely more useful) Egypt Before the Pharaohs.

The dialogue on Abydos is not particuarly easy to understand, but the first thing said to them sounds like naturu aya, which sounds very like the phrase nTr aA: “the great gods!”. Which makes sense, given that the entire village then prostrates themselves.

Kasuf’s introduction is virtually unintelligible (at least to me), but as he walks forward it sounds like he says something like yuyu, which might derive from the verb iw, meaning to come (his actions seem consistent with saying “come along” or similar at that point), and his initial speech to the travellers definitely ends with ianak Kasuf, “I am Kasuf”.

Later in the film when daniel starts to understad Shau’ri’s dialect, she pronounces the word nTr, “god” as “nater”, nTrw (gods) as “naturu”, and also says words “nufi”, which may be nfr (good, beautiful, perfect), and “naney” (possibly nn(i), “no”).

When Daniel speaks to Ra, he asks “what are you going to do?”, for which he says something like y3 iry=k, (“indeed, you shall act!”). ix (“ikh” or “ish”) iry=k would have been a question.

Pedantic rant over.

In which Huw says everything I was thinking about the scene but didn’t want to freak the OP out! (Sorry OP! I actually love Stargate!)

<3

(Source: spockemon)