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.
Ancient 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.
Ḥeḥ was the personification of infinity or eternity in the Ogdoad in ancient Egyptian religion. His name originally meant "flood", referring to the watery chaos Nu that the Egyptians believed existed before the creation of the world. The Egyptians envisioned this chaos as infinite, in contrast with the finite created world, so Heh personified this aspect of the primordial waters. Heh's female counterpart and consort was known as Hauhet, which is simply the feminine form of his name.
The Book of the Dead is the name given to an ancient Egyptian funerary text generally written on papyrus and used from the beginning of the New Kingdom to around 50 BC. "Book" is the closest term to describe the loose collection of texts consisting of a number of magic spells intended to assist a dead person's journey through the Duat, or underworld, and into the afterlife and written by many priests over a period of about 1,000 years. In 1842, the Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius introduced for these texts the German name Todtenbuch, translated to English as 'Book of the Dead'. The original Egyptian name for the text, transliterated rw nw prt m hrw, is translated as Spells of Coming Forth by Day.
The ankh or key of life is an ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol used to represent the word for "life" and, by extension, as a symbol of life itself.
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 Uraeus or Ouraeus is the stylized, upright form of an Egyptian cobra, used as a symbol of sovereignty, royalty, deity and divine authority in ancient Egypt.
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 symbolised worldly power and holy might, also acting as a sort of mission statement for the duration of a monarch's reign.
Hor Awibre was an Egyptian pharaoh of the early 13th Dynasty in the late Middle Kingdom.
Pr is the hieroglyph for 'house', the floor-plan of a walled building with an open doorway.
Iput I was a queen of ancient Egypt, a daughter of King Unas, the last king of the Fifth Dynasty of Egypt. She married Teti, the first Pharaoh of the Sixth Dynasty of Egypt. Their son was Pepi I Meryre. She possibly ruled as regent for her son Pepi I.
Ancient Egyptian literature was written with the Egyptian language from ancient Egypt's pharaonic period until the end of Roman domination. It represents the oldest corpus of Egyptian literature. Along with Sumerian literature, it is considered the world's earliest literature.
Scarabs are amulets and impression seals shaped according to the eponymous beetles, which were widely popular throughout ancient Egypt. They survive in large numbers today, and through their inscriptions and typology, these artifacts prove to be an important source of information for archaeologists and historians of ancient Egypt, representing a significant body of its art.
The Egyptian hieroglyph representing gold, phonetic value nb, is important due to its use in the Horus-of-Gold name, one of the Fivefold Titulary names of the Egyptian pharaoh.
Atakhebasken (Akhetbasaken) was a Nubian queen dated to the Twenty-fifth Dynasty of Egypt. She was the Great Royal Wife of Pharaoh Taharqa.
Neferu II was the wife and sister of the ancient Egyptian king Mentuhotep II who ruled in the 11th Dynasty, around 2000 BC.
Nubemhat was an ancient Egyptian queen of the Second Intermediate Period.
Wolfram Grajetzki is a German Egyptologist. He studied at Free University of Berlin and made his Doctor of Philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He performed excavations in Egypt, but also in Pakistan. He published articles and several books on the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, on administration, burial customs and queens. He is also a researcher at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, UK, working on the project 'Digital Egypt for Universities'.
