Egyptian Grammar: Being an Introduction to the Study of Hieroglyphs is a 1927 book by English Egyptologist Alan Gardiner. First published in 1927 in London by the Clarendon Press, it has been reprinted several times since. The third edition, published in 1957, is the most widely used version for the subject. Through a series of 33 lessons, the book gives a very thorough overview of the language and writing system of ancient Egypt. The focus of the book is the literary language of the Middle Kingdom. The creation of the book resulted in the development of an accurate and detailed hieroglyphic typeset, Gardiner's Sign List.
Gardiner's work is considered to this day to be the most thorough textbook of the Egyptian language in existence, although subsequent developments have supplanted a number of aspects of Gardiner's understanding of Egyptian grammar, particularly with regard to the verbal system.[citation needed]
Editions
First edition (1927), Oxford: Clarendon Press. OL6703756M
Second edition, fully revised (1950), London: Published on behalf of the Griffith Institute, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, by Oxford University Press. OL6071866M
The Egyptian language, or Ancient Egyptian is an extinct branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages that was spoken in ancient Egypt. It is known today from a large corpus of surviving texts, which were made accessible to the modern world following the decipherment of the ancient Egyptian scripts in the early 19th century.
Egyptian hieroglyphs were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system. Moreover, owing in large part to the Greek and Aramaic scripts that descended from Phoenician, the majority of the world's living writing systems are descendants of Egyptian hieroglyphs—most prominently the Latin and Cyrillic scripts through Greek, and the Arabic and Brahmic scripts through Aramaic.
Hieratic is the name given to a cursive writing system used for Ancient Egyptian and the principal script used to write that language from its development in the third millennium BCE until the rise of Demotic in the mid-first millennium BCE. It was primarily written in ink with a reed brush on papyrus.
Seshat was the ancient Egyptian goddess of writing, wisdom, and knowledge. She was the daughter of Thoth. She was seen as a scribe and record keeper; her name means "female scribe". She is credited with inventing writing. She also became identified as the goddess of sciences, accounting, architecture, astronomy, astrology, building, mathematics, and surveying.
Archibald Henry SayceFRAS was a pioneer British Assyriologist and linguist, who held a chair as Professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford from 1891 to 1919. He was able to write in at least twenty ancient and modern languages, and was known for his emphasis on the importance of archaeological and monumental evidence in linguistic research. He was a contributor to articles in the 9th, 10th and 11th editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
The Eye of Horus, also known as left wedjat eye or udjat eye, specular to the Eye of Ra, is a concept and symbol in ancient Egyptian religion that represents well-being, healing, and protection. It derives from the mythical conflict between the god Horus with his rival Set, in which Set tore out or destroyed one or both of Horus's eyes and the eye was subsequently healed or returned to Horus with the assistance of another deity, such as Thoth. Horus subsequently offered the eye to his deceased father Osiris, and its revitalizing power sustained Osiris in the afterlife. The Eye of Horus was thus equated with funerary offerings, as well as with all the offerings given to deities in temple ritual. It could also represent other concepts, such as the moon, whose waxing and waning was likened to the injury and restoration of the eye.
The system of ancient Egyptian numerals was used in Ancient Egypt from around 3000 BC until the early first millennium AD. It was a system of numeration based on multiples of ten, often rounded off to the higher power, written in hieroglyphs. The Egyptians had no concept of a positional notation such as the decimal system. The hieratic form of numerals stressed an exact finite series notation, ciphered one-to-one onto the Egyptian alphabet.
Sir Alan Henderson Gardiner, was an English Egyptologist, linguist, philologist, and independent scholar. He is regarded as one of the premier Egyptologists of the early and mid-20th century.
As used for Egyptology, transliteration of Ancient Egyptian is the process of converting texts written as Egyptian language symbols to alphabetic symbols representing uniliteral hieroglyphs or their hieratic and demotic counterparts. This process facilitates the publication of texts where the inclusion of photographs or drawings of an actual Egyptian document is impractical.
The tyet, sometimes called the knot of Isis or girdle of Isis, is an ancient Egyptian symbol that came to be connected with the goddess Isis. Its hieroglyphic depiction is catalogued as V39 in Gardiner's sign list.
Gardiner's sign list is a list of common Egyptian hieroglyphs compiled by Sir Alan Gardiner. It is considered a standard reference in the study of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Hotep is an Egyptian word that roughly translates as "to be satisfied, at peace". The word also refers to an "offering" ritually presented to a deity or a dead person, hence "be pleased, be gracious, be at peace". It is rendered in Egyptian hieroglyphs as an altar. The noun ḥtp.w means "peace, contentment". Davies (2018) interprets the concept of ḥtp as "the result of action in accord with maat [the proper order of the universe]".
Kurt Heinrich Sethe was a German Egyptologist and philologist from Berlin. He was a student of Adolf Erman. Sethe collected numerous texts from Egypt during his visits there and edited the Urkunden des ægyptischen Altertums which is a standard catalogue of Ancient Egyptian literature and text.
The Egyptian hieroglyphic script contained 24 uniliterals which today we associate with the 26 glyphs listed below.
The writing systems used in ancient Egypt were deciphered in the early nineteenth century through the work of several European scholars, especially Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young. Ancient Egyptian forms of writing, which included the hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts, ceased to be understood in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, as the Coptic alphabet was increasingly used in their place. Later generations' knowledge of the older scripts was based on the work of Greek and Roman authors whose understanding was faulty. It was thus widely believed that Egyptian scripts were exclusively ideographic, representing ideas rather than sounds. Some attempts at decipherment by Islamic and European scholars in the Middle Ages and early modern times acknowledged the script might have a phonetic component, but perception of hieroglyphs as purely ideographic hampered efforts to understand them as late as the eighteenth century.
Ḥaty-a was an ancient Egyptian rank and title given to local princes, mayors, or governors.
Akhet is an Egyptian hieroglyph that represents the sun rising over a mountain. It is translated as "horizon" or "the place in the sky where the sun rises". Betrò describes it as "Mountain with the Rising Sun" and an ideogram for "horizon".
In ancient Egyptian art, the Set animal, or sha, is the totemic animal of the god Set. Because Set was identified with the Greek monster Typhon, the animal is also commonly known as the Typhonian animal or Typhonic beast.
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