Hieroglyphics!
So, I have many projects for the summer (and I swear one is writing about Europe!!), and one is to attempt to learn to read Egyptian hieroglyphics. I’ve had a book for some time now, titled (aptly) “How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphics,” and I’ve gotten through Chapter One about three times now, but that was about it. Until today! When I embarked on the journey that was Chapter Two. And it’s going pretty well. At the end of the chapter they expected me to get data out of this incredibly badly reproduced version of the Abydos king-list, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I’d like to hope (and I think it’s probably true) that if faced with the same thing, and entrusted with the same task (figure out what kings were missing from the list) I could actually do it. But with a 6 inch, incredibly dark, low-contrast version of it, no dice. It’s a little disappointing to fail miserably at the final capstone of the chapter, but I think my blame is in the correct place. I could barely make out the glyphs—I couldn’t get more than a few lines—but if I could see them, I could read them.
The most impressive thing for me so far, though, is how quickly this is going, and how much I’ve learned so far. Take the following for example:
Now, granted, that is copied by mouse from the book, and I’m even worse at drawing on the computer than I am drawing by hand, so probably even an Egyptian scholar couldn’t read it. But you can get the idea. Before today, that looked roughly like “stick, pizza, croquet, baseball bat, banjo, cartouche, teepee, ankh [that one's right—well, 'nḫ], eye, snake,” or pretty much that. I have to say that I do in fact remember some of the following by remembering things like “teepee” or “banjo,” but it still works out to the same thing.
After reading and working on Chapter Two, the writing (whether it will tomorrow or not) looks to me like a bunch of sounds which I don’t want to slowly copy all the phonetic characters for. And those sounds, at least for now, translate easily in my head to: “Regnal year 25 under the person of the perfect god, the lord of the two lands Nimaatre, given life like Re enduringly.” Which is just awesome. It’s only a date, but the fact that I can look at that random mess of symbols above and understand what it means is just incredible to me.
There’s clearly a lot I still have to learn, and I also have no idea how much of this I’ll really retain, but if I keep at it I’m pretty sure that I’ll be able to keep a fair percentage of it. Practice practice practice, I suppose.
I thought I should share (and boast, however little there actually is to boast about).
