Egyptian scribes wrote hieroglyphs for three thousand five hundred years, from the dawn
of history until they fell silent. Decades before the fall of Rome, they took one final
gasp in this temple, home of the last known inscription. And yet today, I get to animate
not a story of loss but of success, a tale of what Ancient Egyptian sounded like, and
more importantly, how we know.
There's a popular narrative about the rediscovery of Ancient Egyptian. It involves a Frenchman,
an Englishman and a stone. The first time I heard it, I remember cozying up on the couch
to some documentary, you know, one where the camera pans slowly through pillars across
temple walls then cuts to a bright sunflare and clashing synth cymbals.
It went like this. In ancient times, the hieroglyphs were forgotten. Dusty relics until the 1800s,
when Napoleon invaded Egypt. A stone was found, the Rosetta Stone. Scholars marveled over
the puzzling strings of birds and snakes and hooks and limbs. The stone bore two Egyptian
scripts and, auspiciously, a rough translation in perfectly readable Greek. Champollion and
Young both raced to unlock its secrets, tediously matching names in the Greek text back to the
mysterious Egyptian symbols. By most accounts, the Frenchman won the game, and the language
of Egypt was at long last restored!
Oh, past self, I know you were cozy and awestruck. Sorry to disenchant you; that story is...
hmm, you think I'm about to say wrong? No, not that, more...missing something hiding in
plain sight in history and even those famed decipherers' own words. Something we can uncover
by asking a different question: not "who deciphered it?", but "what did it sound like, and how
do we know?"
1810. Years before his celebrated decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, here is Champollion
hurrying through the streets of Paris. He's begun to make regular visits to learn from
Abuna Yuẖanna, Father John from Egypt, whose liturgical and cultural language is Coptic.
The abuna receives meager payments for his work here, yet, 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 back 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 very same one that stretches 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 bit of a Nile flourish. Indeed, it's
written in an adapted form of the old Greek "uppercase" alphabet, with both consonants
and vowels, and that's about to become very significant. In addition to the starter kit
of 25 Greek letters, Copts use seven letters derived not from Greek but from late forms
of Egyptian signs. The first hint at decipherment.
Champollion eagerly absorbs all of the grammar and sounds as abuna teaches. And within years
of work, it'll be by plugging in Coptic sounds and working from Coptic grammar that the decipherer
will finally be able to peer back into the hieroglyphs.
Major hitches impeded truly revealing their sounds. First, the consonants. Sure, many
have parallels in Coptic, but what did they really sound like back then?
Consonants were merely pesky nuisances compared to the dust cloud that looms over Egyptologists
to this day. Hieroglyphs are a desert of consonants. Where were the missing vowels? Egyptologists
scratched their heads and scribbled in some placeholders as a convenient way to pronounce
words. Not because they thought Egyptians sounded like this, they just found it easier
to read Hatšepsut than ḥꜣt-špswt. Arbitrary proxies aside, which sounds really echoed
in these ancient gaps between the consonants?
Well, since Coptic is Egyptian, and Egyptian documents are plentiful and span such a long
time, Egyptologists could compare Egyptian to itself. This is "internal reconstruction",
and it resulted in an explosion of hieroglyphic knowledge. It reopened a full human language,
one that built words using a template where roots are these abstract things made up of
consonants. Egyptians would then fill in that template with vowels to make a word. Since
they didn't write those vowels, how do we refill their vowels when we're stumped by
a beautiful example like "nfrt". Well, compare Coptic dialects and guess it might've sounded
like /nafɾət/ or /nofɾət/. What about an animal's horn, its "db"? That's a /tep/.
And name, "rn"? Why, it's /ɾin/. And "kmt", meaning "Egypt"? Fill it in: /keːmət/. How
about "p-rmṯ", meaning "the person"? /pəroːmət/. Though, you three, stay put because
as we'll learn your stories have a twist.
Evidence also comes from the languages 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
dragged on between Egypt and the Hittites. Wearily, the two sides settled on a peace
treaty. They wrote this treaty in two versions: in hieroglyphs on a temple wall at Karnak,
and on tablets in cuneiform. The elaborate hieroglpyhic title of Ramses starts with two
words: nswt, king of Upper Egypt and bjtj, king of Lower Egypt. Well, in cuneiform these
get written out entirely in syllables. After comparison, you might reconstruct an old
pronunciation like /nsiːʔ bijat/. Do you notice something? Ramses' Egyptian seems to
be dropping consonants, and presumably some vowels.
It's evidence that the language changed over time. Indeed, it evolved in stages from Old
to Middle to Late to Demotic and Coptic. So Egyptian changed... changed from what?
Answers came from linguistic clues far beyond Egypt.
Over two thousand kilometers southeast of Cairo, in this pocket of Ethiopia, there's
a cluster of languages grouped together under the label Omotic. The people here are of course
perfectly comfortable with their languages, while linguists are left less comfortable.
To many, Omotic shares traits with a broad family throughout North Africa and West Asia called
Afroasiatic. But Omotic is hard to classify, to such an extent that others don't see family
traits reflected at all. So why this detour? Simply because the traits used to make the
call on Omotic are found in other languages.
These traits echo in the streets of Cairo today, where you won't hear the latest form of Coptic,
but Masri or Egyptian Arabic. Arabic is in the Semitic branch of Afroasiatic. And,
by the way, it was in Arabic that medieval scholars made the first attempts at relating
hieroglyphs to Coptic sounds.
Who else should have these family resemblances but Egyptian? Afroasiatic linguists placed
Egypt in its own branch. They compared these various branches and traced them back
to a common ancestor, Proto-Afroasiatic, leaving us with a picture of the position of Egyptian
within a family. Now you could look for sounds by rewinding up from Coptic to Ancient Egyptian.
You could also start to fast-forward down from prehistory and triangulate sounds from
a more remote past, ancient even to them.
Sure, Coptic easily fills in the /i/ in /rin/ and the /e/ in /tep/. On the other hand, there
are words where Coptic doesn't match the vowels in its Afroasiatic relatives. In fact, it looks like
many o's must've been earlier a's: ⲁⲛⲟⲕ, the pronoun "I", came from an older /ja'nak/.
And do you remember the way I said the word for "person", with an o, /roːmə/? That shifted from
earlier /raːmac/. And when I guessed that "beautiful" might be /nafrət/ or /nofrət/? Now
we know why – it changed in stages from /nafɾat/ to /nofɾə/.
Scrutinizing sound changes gets tricky. Take the word wnwt. The hypothesis is it sounded
something like /w_naːwat/. And now you know the word for those unequal Egyptian hours
from my clocks video! Incompletely... because its first vowel remains unclear to us today.
The uncertainties don't stop there. Why is there no early hierogylph for the consonant "l",
and which signs were pronounced /l/ in which periods? And is d a voiced, emphatic or unaspirated t?
And what in the Duat is the value of this sign? Alas, this is not a phonology class.
We're starting to miss the delta for the reeds.
The key point is this. What I didn't realize, all cozy in front of that documentary, is
that it took all this, understanding Egyptian's ancestors, its relatives and its descendants,
to figure out that Aten's name was /jaːtin/, that ankh, meaning "live", was pronounced
/ˁaːnaχ/ and then later /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 longest written
language on earth. Thanks to patrons for following my updates, supporting me and appreciating the
artwork along the way. To everyone watching – stick around and subscribe for language.