Thoth: God of Writing

So, now that our project is finished and the other group has translated our wonderful Egyptian hieroglyphics, it is time to unveil what they actually meant...drumroll please...

Thoth he gave the Book of Coming Forth by Day to Egypt. I know, very profound, yes? You are all shocked out of your minds? Well, we selected this phrase because the Book of Coming Forth by Day was also known as the Book of the Dead and, as we all know, the afterlife and how to prepare for it was very important to the Egyptian people. Thoth was the Egyptian god of writing and, as such, he gave this book to the people.

Step 1: Egyptian phrase

So first, we had to figure out how to write our phrase in Egyptian. We were lucky and came across the symbols for The Book of Coming Forth by Day and Thoth fairly easily. We had to do a lot more research to come up with our filler words: "he gave" for was given to and "Egypt". These took quite a large amount of searching, especially since, in one of the books that we found, the Egyptian hieroglyphics were ordered by the first symbol and we had no idea what the first symbol for any specific word was. We then had to figure out how the Egyptians wrote these words. We discovered that the direction that the words were read was determined by which way the animals in the hieroglyphics were facing!

Thoth, the scribe of the gods, is shown on the right recording the results of a heart weighing test (the heart must be lighter than the feather to pass)

We then had to find our medium on which to write. Originally, we had decided on papyrus, but sadly, the bookstore did not have any. So...we decided to write how the Egyptians would on walls and bought clay (which the bookstore DID sell!)

After Sam, Tanner, and I finished our clay artefact (Sam did an awesome job with the hieroglyphs), we transfered our artefact to Brenda, who then painted our symbols for us! Our only problem was that I had forgotten that Sculpey brand clay, when it bakes, feels more like plastic than like a rock. So, not as authentic as hoped.

 Step 2: Rosetta Stone-Greek to Egyptian

We received a little clay tablet from the Greek group covered in the Greek language. I think we were a little lucky with this one...everyone is at least a little familiar with the Greek language from math and science classes. Translated, the Greek words were the first line of the Odyssey: "Tell me, muse, of the man of many ways who wandered much." Translating Greek to English, check. Now we just had to translate this to Egyptian...

The Egyptian was a lot harder. We sat and searched through our library books from the Harold B. Lee library and were able to find the words "travel", "many", "man", "to speak", and the goddess "Hathor", who just happens to be the Egyptian muse! So that was really interesting, that the Egyptians and the Greeks actually had different words for the same thing. "Speak, Hathor, of the man of many roads and large travel" was as close as we could get in Egyptian. Carving the words into clay was not difficult at all, and Brenda even suggested we carve out parts of the hieroglyphs to make it look more authentic!



I thought it was really neat to change between languages. It was something that I had had a lot of fun with as I was learning Spanish in high school. I didn't know all of the words in the Spanish language, so when I was speaking to someone in Spanish, I would have to substitute whole phrases for a single word in Spanish that I did not know. I really enjoyed  thinking of "loopholes" in the language.

Our Rosetta Stone! Pretty amazing!