Egyptian scribes wrote hieroglyphs for three
thousand five hundred years, from the dawn of history until they fell silent. Decades
before the fall of Rome, they took one final gasp in this temple, home of the last known
inscription. And yet today, I get to animate not a story of loss but of success, a tale
of what Ancient Egyptian sounded like, and more importantly, how we know. There's a popular narrative about the rediscovery
of Ancient Egyptian. It involves a Frenchman, an Englishman and a stone. The first time
I heard it, I remember cozying up on the couch to some documentary, you know, one where the
camera pans slowly through pillars across temple walls then cuts to a bright sunflare
and clashing synth cymbals. It went like this. In ancient times, the hieroglyphs
were forgotten. Dusty relics until the 1800s, when Napoleon invaded Egypt. A stone was found,
the Rosetta Stone. Scholars marveled over the puzzling strings of birds and snakes and
hooks and limbs. The stone bore two Egyptian scripts and, auspiciously, a rough translation
in perfectly readable Greek. Champollion and Young both raced to unlock its secrets, tediously
matching names in the Greek text back to the mysterious Egyptian symbols. By most accounts,
the Frenchman won the game, and the language of Egypt was at long last restored! Oh, past self, I know you were cozy and awestruck.
Sorry to disenchant you; that story is... hmm, you think I'm about to say wrong? No, not that, more...missing something hiding in plain sight in history and even those famed
decipherers' own words. Something we can uncover by asking a different question: not "who deciphered
it?", but "what did it sound like, and how do we know?" 1810. Years before his celebrated decipherment
of Egyptian hieroglyphs, here is Champollion hurrying through the streets of Paris. He's
begun to make regular visits to learn from Abuna Yuẖanna, Father John from Egypt, whose
liturgical and cultural language is Coptic. The abuna receives meager payments for his
work here, yet, in a move familiar to Egyptians after him who have experienced their share
of the long history of human migration, abuna has been sending much of what he earns back
to support the families of his two deceased brothers. Champollion, as we see in his writings, is
absolutely convinced that Coptic is the Egyptian language, the very same one that stretches
back continuously for thousands of years, and that until he can dream in Coptic he will
never understand Ancient Egypt. Coptic, to outside eyes, looks like Greek
with a bit of a Nile flourish. Indeed, it's written in an adapted form of the old Greek
"uppercase" alphabet, with both consonants and vowels, and that's about to become very
significant. In addition to the starter kit of 25 Greek letters, Copts use seven letters
derived not from Greek but from late forms of Egyptian signs. The first hint at decipherment. Champollion eagerly absorbs all of the grammar
and sounds as abuna teaches. And within years of work, it'll be by plugging in Coptic sounds
and working from Coptic grammar that the decipherer will finally be able to peer back into the
hieroglyphs. Major hitches impeded truly revealing their
sounds. First, the consonants. Sure, many have parallels in Coptic, but what did they
really sound like back then? Consonants were merely pesky nuisances compared
to the dust cloud that looms over Egyptologists to this day. Hieroglyphs are a desert of consonants.
Where were the missing vowels? Egyptologists scratched their heads and scribbled in some
placeholders as a convenient way to pronounce words. Not because they thought Egyptians
sounded like this, they just found it easier to read Hatšepsut than ḥꜣt-špswt. Arbitrary
proxies aside, which sounds really echoed in these ancient gaps between the consonants? Well, since Coptic is Egyptian, and Egyptian
documents are plentiful and span such a long time, Egyptologists could compare Egyptian
to itself. This is "internal reconstruction", and it resulted in an explosion of hieroglyphic
knowledge. It reopened a full human language, one that built words using a template where
roots are these abstract things made up of consonants. Egyptians would then fill in that
template with vowels to make a word. Since they didn't write those vowels, how do we
refill their vowels when we're stumped by a beautiful example like "nfrt". Well, compare
Coptic dialects and guess it might've sounded like /nafɾət/ or /nofɾət/. What about
an animal's horn, its "db"? That's a /tep/. And name, "rn"? Why, it's /ɾin/. And "kmt",
meaning "Egypt"? Fill it in: /keːmət/. How about "p-rmṯ", meaning "the person"? /pəroːmət/.
Though, you three, stay put because as we'll learn your stories have a twist. Evidence also comes from the languages Egyptian
interacted with, both in words they borrowed and words they lent. In the New Kingdom, during
the reign of Ramses II, a decades-long conflict dragged on between Egypt and the Hittites.
Wearily, the two sides settled on a peace treaty. They wrote this treaty in two versions:
in hieroglyphs on a temple wall at Karnak, and on tablets in cuneiform. The elaborate
hieroglpyhic title of Ramses starts with two words: nswt, king of Upper Egypt and bjtj,
king of Lower Egypt. Well, in cuneiform these get written out entirely in syllables. After
comparison, you might reconstruct an old pronunciation like /nsiːʔ bijat/. Do you
notice something? Ramses' Egyptian seems to be dropping consonants, and presumably some
vowels. It's evidence that the language changed over
time. Indeed, it evolved in stages from Old to Middle to Late to Demotic and Coptic. So
Egyptian changed... changed from what? Answers came from linguistic clues far beyond
Egypt. Over two thousand kilometers southeast of
Cairo, in this pocket of Ethiopia, there's a cluster of languages grouped together under
the label Omotic. The people here are of course perfectly comfortable with their languages,
while linguists are left less comfortable. To many, Omotic shares traits with a broad family
throughout North Africa and West Asia called Afroasiatic. But Omotic is hard to classify,
to such an extent that others don't see family traits reflected at all. So why this detour?
Simply because the traits used to make the call on Omotic are found in other languages. These traits echo in the streets of Cairo today,
where you won't hear the latest form of Coptic, but Masri or Egyptian Arabic. Arabic is in
the Semitic branch of Afroasiatic. And, by the way, it was in Arabic that medieval scholars
made the first attempts at relating hieroglyphs to Coptic sounds. Who else should have these family resemblances
but Egyptian? Afroasiatic linguists placed Egypt in its own branch. They compared
these various branches and traced them back to a common ancestor, Proto-Afroasiatic, leaving
us with a picture of the position of Egyptian within a family. Now you could look for sounds
by rewinding up from Coptic to Ancient Egyptian. You could also start to fast-forward down
from prehistory and triangulate sounds from a more remote past, ancient even to them. Sure, Coptic easily fills in the /i/ in /rin/
and the /e/ in /tep/. On the other hand, there are words where Coptic doesn't match the vowels
in its Afroasiatic relatives. In fact, it looks like many o's must've been earlier a's: ⲁⲛⲟⲕ,
the pronoun "I", came from an older /ja'nak/. And do you remember the way I said the word for
"person", with an o, /roːmə/? That shifted from earlier /raːmac/. And when I guessed that "beautiful" might be /nafrət/ or /nofrət/? Now we know why – it changed in stages from
/nafɾat/ to /nofɾə/. Scrutinizing sound changes gets tricky. Take
the word wnwt. The hypothesis is it sounded something like /w_naːwat/. And now you know
the word for those unequal Egyptian hours from my clocks video! Incompletely... because
its first vowel remains unclear to us today. The uncertainties don't stop there. Why is there
no early hierogylph for the consonant "l", and which signs were pronounced /l/ in which periods?
And is d a voiced, emphatic or unaspirated t? And what in the Duat is the value of this
sign? Alas, this is not a phonology class. We're starting to miss the delta for the reeds. The key point is this. What I didn't realize,
all cozy in front of that documentary, is that it took all this, understanding Egyptian's
ancestors, its relatives and its descendants, to figure out that Aten's name was /jaːtin/,
that ankh, meaning "live", was pronounced /ˁaːnaχ/ and then later /ˁoːnəχ/, and that
Egypt's name /keːmə/ was earlier /kuːmat/ and its language /ɾaˀnikuːmat/. Thank you for taking this journey with me
to rediscover the sound of the longest written language on earth. Thanks to patrons for following
my updates, supporting me and appreciating the artwork along the way. To everyone watching – stick around and subscribe for language.
The discovery of the Rosetta Stone has to be one of the greatest and luckiest finds in history.
Roggan?
Donahue?
Habidakus
I really feel like this person should have spent more time actually letting us know what it sounded like. He says a few words, that’s it. Really disappointing. If you skim through you’ll easily miss what you’re here for from the title.
Was thinking more like this
Goddamn, people in this thread have the attention span of a moth. It's ten minutes, guys.
Skip to 10:22 to hear Ancient Egyption.
Good video, but the creator really should have put some at the start of the video to keep people interested in hearing the history. Especially when it's the title of the video.
I don’t have time to skim through a 10 minute video for the 5 seconds I’m interested in.
But what does "kree" mean?
Timestamp?