E is for Egyptian

[muckefuck]

Ancient Egyptian. Loprieno, Antonio. (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1995)

Another bargain: Amazon lists this puppy for $35, but I snatched it up for just over $12 and in like-new condition to boot. Score! (It's funny: Although I try to purchase my books as often as I can, something about a pristine volume makes me tingle.) When? Sometime in the last few years. Where? No idea. It was worth every cent. Even though I already had a few books on Ancient Egyptian (including Gardiner's classic 700-page monster), I found the grammatical descriptions all but unusable. Until I discovered Loprieno, I thought that the only way I'd ever learn Egyptian grammar was by abstracting it from stacks of examples. Now if I still don't get around to learning it, at least I won't be able to blame the materials.

Not that Loprieno's book is easy going. He packs an amazing amount of description into a volume of moderate size. For starters, he covers all stages of the language, from Coptic back to the dawn of the Old Kingdom (and beyond, insofar as he includes snatches of reconstructed proto-Egyptian). And he talks about everything, from phonological oppositions to cleft sentences and adverbial predicates. The prose is dense; there's hardly a wasted syllable and the footnotes rain down like maple keys in springtime. But better more than I need than not enough.

One of the best things about it are the reconstructions. As you may know, like their buddies the Semites, the Egyptians never got around to indicating vowels in their writing--at least not until they chucked the hieroglyphics for Greek letters. (What's that you say? You didn't know that they even wrote consonants? Actually, almost all hieroglyphs include clear indications of their phonetic value--sometimes pleonastically. This is the source of the "hieroglyphic alphabet" you see trotted out on shlocky souvenirs.) But from the data points we do have--mainly Coptic and Akkadian transcriptions in the Amarna letters--we (and by that I mean "experts like Loprieno") can reconstruct most of the ancient values. So whereas other texts force me to make do with jnk ḥmk for "I am your slave", this one lets me confidently intone ja'nak 'ḥamak without fear of precipitating a divine smiting.

It's by no means a complete guide--he warns you at the outset that it's not meant to be a comprehensive grammar, much less a textbook for learning hieroglyphs. So it complements rather than replaces my Gardiner, with its sign list, dictionary, and extensive text samples, or my guide to use of hieroglyphs in Egyptian art by Wilkinson. (It's not just the nature of the script the recalls Chinese, but also the almost excessive prediliction for punning.)