"Anti-quity" does not mean you're 'against quitting.'

Isn't this exciting? Another day filled with fun and adventure!

And hieroglyphics, if you're me, Jenna, or the rest of our culture group.

Our group was the African cultures. Since the Bushmen don't have a written language, and no one can read the one for Tanner's culture, we decided to work in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

This was kind of a fun assignment. Those in my group may not have picked this up about me, but I love languages. I think translating things is oddly enjoyable. People might think I'm weird for that, like they do when I tell them I think chocolate covered pretzels taste good dipped in salsa, but I really do enjoy trying to convey the idea of an original text into a new language.

I also like making quasi-ancient artifacts. So this was really, as our friends across the pond might say, my cup of tea.

Here's my group's original clay tablet.

(It's on its side.)

We couldn't find any papyrus, like Jenna told you all in class, and the clay here wasn't good enough, so we had to fly to Egypt and discover a tomb to raid for an actual tablet. Just kidding. Obviously.

But really, we did use clay, which we carved with our chosen phrase, and then we fired it and Brenda was kind enough to paint it and make it look really cool. I only have pictures of it before the paint, but it's still quite nice, I think.

Then we got our tablet to translate. This is what the other group wrote:

Their tablet was also made of clay, though theirs wasn't fired, as you might be able to tell. Their culture was the Greeks, for which I was grateful, since that's a fairly straightforward alphabet to transliterate into the Roman characters that we use in English.

Here's a rough approximation of the Greek writing:

Andra moi ennepe mousa polytropon hos malapolla

One possible translation in English was:

"Tell me muse, of the man of many ways, who..."

However, they left off the last word, "planchthe," which would have made the thought more complete, since what they actually wrote was actually the first line of the Odyssey, and not the first whole sentence.

With 'planchthe' added in, it reads along the lines of:

"Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways who wandered much."

See my link above for a slightly different interpretation.

I think that this is a funny example of how things are 'lost in translation', or even transcription from one media to another.

In any case, to make the thought they had carved for us more complete, we added in the last word when we put it on our Rosetta Tablet, shown below with the translation into English and Hieroglyphics:

The hieroglyphics were even more interesting to work with this time, since we were using words written by an entirely separate culture and civilization - however, the great thing is that there is actually an Egyptian word for 'muse,' or Hathor, and hence a hieroglyphic.

Literally, our Egyptian translation reads:

"Say/speak, Hathor, (of the) Man (of) many roads (and) large travel."

I think we were able to capture the basic thought pretty well, despite the difficulties of using Egyptian. However, "of many ways" in the original probably had a connotation closer to 'resourceful' or 'skilled in many things' (see here for an alternate translation like these ones). Again, translation will never be quite as good as the real thing, in my opinion (unless it's by the power of God as per the Book of Mormon). I remember reading a book by a German author which had been translated into English, and feeling like the whole thing was oddly... off in how it was written. Not wrong, but it was strangely apparent that it had not been written in the language I was reading it in. Another reason learning many languages would be beneficial to us as learners.

Interestingly, and bringing in our past discussions from class, we were mostly limited to written sources of knowledge in our translation. The internet, obviously, cannot translate words into hieroglyphics very easily, except with the phonetic kind, and even then only to a limited extent. So we had to look through books of hieroglyphics, which were organized not by meaning, but by structure or symbolism, to try to find the right glyphs. And it felt great coming up with the closest ones we could find to the original meaning.

Just for fun, here's a paper from my notebook that shows me trying to work out how to write all the hieroglyphs in rough form:

So you see, there's a lot of work that we put into getting it right before we ever carved it into the clay! I think we've gotten accustomed to disposable media - typing, you can go back and fix things when you mess up, as I've already done SIX TIMES in this one sentence. Eight times now. With rock or clay or even just old fashioned papyrus, mistakes were significantly harder to cover up.

It makes me wonder how the prophets of the Nephites felt about writing on the plates. As one of my seminary teachers said once, it wasn't as though they had a little "liquid gold" vial to pour into the carvings if they made a mistake.

But perhaps that's a topic to delve more deeply into when we have more time.

Until then,

See you in class!

Atra du evarínya ono varda.

The Source

So to start, thanks, Jenna, for giving me the jump-off point for this post! It was while I was researching the Mayan language that I discovered all this information.

Once upon a time, about 1900 BC in fact, the first known consonantal alphabet was in usage.

It was called Proto-Sinaitic Script.

One example of genuine Proto-Sinaitic

This alphabet coexisted with Egyptian, and in fact took its symbols from the Egyptian hieroglyphs. This was either due to an Egyptian conquest of Sinai, or a more friendly spread of literacy through shared trade and workers, though it is uncertain which one (or both) was more influential (source). Oddly, though Egypt had a phonetic alphabet, as I mentioned in this post, the Proto-Sinaitic Script didn't make use of these symbols to represent the sounds of their own language. Instead, seemingly at random, they chose signs from the hieroglyphs and assigned them values.

This newly formed alphabet pre-dated even Phoenician, which came into being about 1100 BC. However, the two are very closely connected. In fact, Proto-Sinaitic is the Alphabetic "grandfather" of most alphabets that are still used in our modern world! (Source)

Look at this chart I found, showing the evolution of the alphabet over many years from Proto-Sinaitic to Greek:

I dunno about you guys, but I think this is unbelievably cool. This finally gives a purpose to all the random lines, curves and shapes that make up our alphabet - coming from the original Egyptian, they once had an intrinsic meaning! It was simply lost over time.

My favorite was the example for the letter M:

Water. It clearly begins as a series of wavy lines, to illustrate water, and then changes with time: the symbols came to be more simply represented, in order to make them easier to write or carve.

This made my life make more sense; now we can know a little better why on earth it is that we use seemingly random shapes to represent certain sounds.

Of course, English isn't very consistent with the whole "spell it like it's said" idea.

But then, that's a part of what makes it so awesome.

(If you're really interested in random facts about Egyptian written language in particular, view this website page. It has a lot of great information on other writing systems as well.)

Click here to travel forward in time to my next post, which isn't even written yet!

(Here)

The Difficulties of Change

Writing now is so common now that we rarely think about a time when it was a sign of high social or intellectual status, something that had to be sought after.

The shift from orality to written knowledge was not a sudden change. In fact, in most cultures, it probably took many years after the invention of written language for their knowledge systems to adapt to the new medium.

Why was this? the initial difficulty of procuring the knowledge needed to communicate through literacy may have been simply because it was a much more difficult medium. Anyone can learn to talk, under normal circumstances. But writing? In these times it was a much different story.

(Much of the information I used in researching this topic came from a paper title "From Clay Tablets to Canon: the Story of the Formation of Scripture", written by Kerry Muhlestein, a professor of ancient scripture here at BYU and my interviewee from my previous post.)

In Egypt specifically, as well as in other regions that made use of logographic or symbolic rather than phonemic characters, the writing system itself was a hindrance to the spread of this new form of knowledge. To quote Dr. Muhlestein, "The greatest prohibition in writing was the writing system itself. In order to write proficiently with either the hieroglyphic or cuneiform script, one had to master thousands of signs" (Muhlestein).

Nowadays, even young children can write many of the signs of our alphabet. But hieroglyphics were much more difficult to master.

A picture of Hieroglyphics, showing a wide range of characters and symbols.

This meant that training a scribe was on the level of training a bard, like we discussed in class - long, labor intensive, and not something just anyone would up and do one day. It was your occupation, along with classes in governmental workings and mathematics, since no other people could write in order to perform the needed functions (Muhlestein). The Rhind papyrus shows a great example of Ancient Egyptain mathematics, compiled, and actually copied from an even older source, by a scribe named Ahmes (source).

Here are two pictures of part of the Rhind Papyrus, clearly showing geometry problems:

Even when there was an opportunity for someone to attend a school of writing, "Generally only the elite could afford to send their children to a scribal school, and many of these probably dropped out" (Muhlestein) because of the strict regimens of the ancient Egyptian schools, which proclaimed to their students, "Do not spend a day in idleness or you will be beaten" (Adolf Erman, ed., The Ancient Egyptians: A Sourcebook of Their Writings (New York:Harper and Row, 1966), 189., as cited by Dr. Muhlestein). This of course further limited the spread of writing, for even those with the chance to learn the art may have been discouraged by the harsh regimen.

There is another aspect that may have been even more influential in slowing the shift from oral to written knowledge systems among the common people. This was the idea that oral communication still held the most authority in the world of communication and learning, and written words were just to keep records of these spoken transactions or decrees, as well as important events or conquests and so on.

"The primary purpose of a scribe was to keep records, not to create great literary works. While some certainly did create such works, the mindset of the societies and their schools was that scribes were primarily functional. In such societies, the locus of authoritative ideas lay in the spoken word, or oral tradition, not the written word" (Muhlestein).

In fact, the verb in Hebrew that is now translated as 'to read' originally meant to 'call out' or 'proclaim' (Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, eds., A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (London: Oxford University Press, 1906), 894–97. As cited by Dr. Muhlestein).

I apologize for how lengthy this post is becoming, but there's so much pertinent information in this article and elsewhere that I am still going to have to cut it shorter than I could go, just for the sake of my group.

To conclude, the shift from oral to written knowledge systems was not as smooth or speedy as the invention of writing itself - which was itself not a simple thing. The process took time, years of it in many cases, until a greater number of people were able to communicate through writing, and therefore preserve and pass down knowledge through this method for anyone to use. Until then, oral traditions would still hold sway in many areas.

Sources:

Muhlestein, Kerry. “From Clay Tablets to Canon: the Story of the Formation of Scripture”. 2006.

Medew Netcher - the divine speech

(I have to apologize in advance - the formatting was confused on this post. I fixed most of it, but it's still a little skewed.)

"Life is too short to devote years of study to learning that what went on with the ancients was just more of the same. It is too short to let us live both our lives and theirs from day to day unless they have something to add to the story, something we do not have, something quite wonderful and unexpected. Of all people the Egyptians are most likely to supply us with such matter." -Hugh Nibley, from Abraham in Egypt

The Old Kingdom is the term for the Egyptian dynasties between about 2686 BC and 2181 BC. It is known as the Age of Pyramids, when the great Architect, Imhotep,

was a servant to the Pharaoh Djoser (For a very interesting theory about Imhotep's

relation to a well-known biblical prophet, see this link).

It was also an age of religious change for the Egyptians.

The Egyptian religion was hugely complex, and had already gone through several

changes in what or who was worshiped, the qualities of the gods, and even in who was said to have created the universe. It is believed that the original pantheon of

gods was compiled from various tribal myths and local religious traditions, which were

then reconciled by the 'official'

priests in order to make them all conform. During the Old Kingdom, the change was different than any before.

This new shift in their religion involved mainly one figure: the sun-god, Ra.

That's him.

Ra was said to be the king of the gods, the ruler of earth. This was a departure from

the previous incarnations of religion in Egypt,since before there had been no

discernible ruler of the gods.

In some ways, he was made to be analogous to Zeus or Jupiter, though with a major difference - he was the Sun-god rather than the god of the sky, since the Egyptians believed that the sun was the source of knowledge and power for the earth. (source)

Along with this shift, and possibly serving as the reason for it, was a change in attitude towards the Pharaohs. The royal line was declared to be descended directly from Ra, and so presumably worthy to inherit power over his creations on the earth.

From this came the interesting fixation with the afterlife - since they were descended from gods, the Pharaohs wanted to make sure that they were in good standing with their 'relatives,' especially upon their death.

From this came what is known as 'pyramid texts.' On the walls of the burial chambers and hallways of the Pharaoh's pyramid or grave site, they would write down words and phrases to be sung or spoken to the gods during the final portion of the king's burial ceremony. The language addresses each deity individually with nearly the same requests or speeches,both of which attest that the Pharaoh is worthy of joining the gods in their abode. In fact, they seem to be attempting to convince the gods to accept him(see here for an example translation of one pyramid's wall inscriptions for the Pharaoh Unas).

These inscriptions provide an excellent example of Egyptian persuasive speech and writing. We can see the use of the rhetorical idea of pathos, or a petition to the emotions of the audience.

Here's an excerpt that shows an appeal to Ra:

"He [comes] to you, O his father, he comes to you, oh Re [(Ra)], he comes to you, O his father, he

comes to you, O Overthrown One, he comes to you, O his father,...he comes to you, O Wanderer."

-From the east wall of the sarcophagus chamber in the pyramid of Unas

Their two main techniques are pretty clear here, in my opinion. Not only do they appeal to Ra emotionally, reminding him that Unas is his 'son' and therefore should be accepted by him, but they also make use of repetition, an even bigger tool they enjoyed using. It's far too long to put it all here, but you can check out the lengthy, repetitive appeals to each god in the link I gave above.

The repetition in the priests' recorded speeches reminds me of ancient Hebrew writings, like the Bible: the most important points would be emphasized by repetition to impress them on the audience.

Here, the only difference is that the ones they were trying to convince were not mortal, and were believed to be in charge of deciding the fate of their king's eternal soul. A lot was at stake for these priests to invoke the gods well on the pharaoh's behalf.

Who knows, maybe if they did it wrong, this would happen:

Just kidding. But seriously, they were under a lot of pressure to do their best to implore their pantheon on behalf of the Pharaoh, and they probably used the best techniques of speech that they knew. In my opinion, that's why these pyramid texts are so revealing about how the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom used their rhetorical skills.

Just on the fun side, I really enjoyed researching this topic, and I learned a lot of new and interesting things.

For example, the above is my name, transliterated as near as I could get it into ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics.

And as a bonus, here's a short video about how the uni-lateral symbols of the Egyptian "alphabet"

work. Enjoy!