The Egyptian language is an Afro-Asiatic language which was spoken in ancient Egypt. Its attestation stretches over an extraordinarily long time, from the Old Egyptian stage. Its earliest known complete written sentence has been dated to about 2690 BC, which makes it one of the oldest recorded languages known, along with Sumerian.
Egyptian hieroglyphs were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with a total of some 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. Through the Phoenician alphabet's major child systems, the Egyptian hieroglyphic script is ancestral to the majority of scripts in modern use, most prominently the Latin and Cyrillic scripts and the Arabic script and possibly Brahmic family of scripts.
In Egyptian hieroglyphs, a cartouche is an oval with a line at one end tangent to the oval, indicating that the text enclosed is a royal name. The first examples of the cartouche are associated with pharaohs at the end of the Third Dynasty, but the feature did not come into common use until the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty under Pharaoh Sneferu. While the cartouche is usually vertical with a horizontal line, if it makes the name fit better it can be horizontal, with a vertical line at the end. The ancient Egyptian word for cartouche was shenu, and the cartouche was essentially an expanded shen ring. Demotic script reduced the cartouche to a pair of brackets and a vertical line.
Iah is a lunar deity in ancient Egyptian religion. The word jˁḥ simply means "Moon". It is also transcribed as Jah, or Aah.
A hieroglyph was a character of the ancient Egyptian writing system. Logographic scripts that are pictographic in form in a way reminiscent of ancient Egyptian are also sometimes called "hieroglyphs". In Neoplatonism, especially during the Renaissance, a "hieroglyph" was an artistic representation of an esoteric idea, which Neoplatonists believed actual Egyptian hieroglyphs to be. The word hieroglyphics refers to a hieroglyphic script.
The Season of the Inundation or Flood was the first season of the lunar and civil Egyptian calendars. It fell after the intercalary month of Days over the Year and before the Season of the Emergence.
The Season of the Emergence was the second season of the lunar and civil Egyptian calendars. It fell after the Season of the Inundation and before the Season of the Harvest.
The ankh or key of life is an ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol that was most commonly used in writing and in Egyptian art to represent the word for "life" and, by extension, as a symbol of life itself.
Maa Kheru is a phrase meaning "true of voice" or "justified" or "the acclaim given to him is 'right'". The term is involved in ancient Egyptian afterlife beliefs, according to which deceased souls had to be judged morally righteous. Once the soul had passed the test, the Weighing of the Heart, they were judged to be mꜣꜥ ḫrw and was allowed to enter the afterlife. The phrase was often used to denote someone who had passed and become a god by placing it at the end of the name of the individual in question.
The system of ancient Egyptian numerals was used in Ancient Egypt from around 3000 BCE until the early first millennium CE. 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 place-valued system such as the decimal system. The hieratic form of numerals stressed an exact finite series notation, ciphered one-to-one onto the Egyptian alphabet.
The was sceptre is a symbol that appeared often in relics, art, and hieroglyphics associated with the ancient Egyptian religion. It appears as a stylized animal head at the top of a long, straight staff with a forked end.
In the field of Egyptology, transliteration of Ancient Egyptian is the process of converting texts written in the Egyptian language 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.
The royal titulary or royal protocol is the standard naming convention taken by the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. It symbolises worldly power and holy might and also acts as a sort of mission statement for the reign of a monarch.
The biliteral Egyptian hieroglyphs are hieroglyphs which represent a specific sequence of two consonants. The listed hieroglyphs focus on the consonant combinations rather than the meanings behind the hieroglyphs.
The following is a list of Egyptian hieroglyphs with triconsonantal phonetic value.
Cursive hieroglyphs, or hieroglyphic book hand, are a form of Egyptian hieroglyphs commonly used for handwritten religious documents, such as the Book of the Dead. This style of writing was typically written with ink and a reed brush on papyrus, wood, or leather. It was particularly common during the Ramesside Period, and many famous documents, such as the Papyrus of Ani, utilize it. It was also employed on wood for religious literature such as the Coffin Texts.
James Peter Allen is an American Egyptologist, specializing in language and religion. He was curator of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1990 to 2006. In 2007, he became the Charles Edwin Wilbour Professor of Egyptology at Brown University. In 2008, he was elected president of the International Association of Egyptologists. A graduate of Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology, he received his PhD from the University of Chicago.
Iah was a king's mother and queen of ancient Egypt c. 2060 BC, during the mid 11th Dynasty. Daughter of a pharaoh, possibly Intef II, and mother of pharaoh Mentuhotep II, she was the queen of Intef III.
The Pustule hieroglyph is a symbol in Gardiner's sign list as no. Aa2, in the unclassified category. Its identity is given to be of a pustule or a gland, though some Egyptologists interpret the symbol to be of "the embalmer’s two fingers bringing together the sides of the wound done for eviscerating of the body", connecting the symbol with the late attesting two fingers amulets which are used to invoke the magical healing of the wound by Anubis. The "pustule" symbol both as a phonogram and an ideogram has the values of wḥꜣ "oasis", wt "to bind, bandage", wḫdw "pain, purulency, inflammation", ḥsb "to add, count, calculate".
