Hieroglyphs – Lecture 2

 ntr – ‘netchur’ – God

 sntr – senetchur – incense
 determinative will come at the end
 Ideograms make words on their own
 Draw the line underneath or to the side to make it an ideogram
 ‘true of voice’ often comes at the end of a funerary transcription and means ‘justified’
 wd – woo – decree: this word is spelt out the wrong way around, as Egyptians thought it
looks nicer (can also be put above the quail)
 rearranging character to make it look nicer, can happen often
 this can also happen with determinatives
 3 hills – foreign places
 Honorific Transposition – more important words can come first if they are extremely
important e.g. God or King
 Ra, the sun God comes before King - it is more important

Hieroglyphs – Lecture 3

 Masculine nouns have no endings (although rarely an ‘oo’)

 Feminine endings have a -t ending
 Ntr – God, Ntrt – Goddess
 The female form is signified by a semicircle, with flat side parallel to the ground
 Some words are both male and female
 Singular and plural work the same way in Egyptian, though they also have a word for pairs of
things
 You can indicate how many of a thing by writing the amount that there is
 You can also put three lines under something (in the same way you make an ideogram)
 The dual (for dealing with pars) you add -wy on the end for masculine and -ty for feminine
 ‘Nb’ – semicircle with line parallel to the top – everything, or all
 If nb comes at the beginning of a phrase, it means lord, or master
 When putting to nouns to each other, it means a of b
 ^^ This is called a direct genitive, because the two elements are put on top of each other
with nothing in between
 There is also an indirect genitive (the equivalent in English as of)
 Suffix pronoun have four uses:
 put after a noun to make possession
 after a preposition (the preposition -to- the noun) e.g. upon them
 after verbs
 after ds (self/own)
 ‘n’ can appear in genitive and dative (revise)

Hieroglyphs – lecture 3

 Saying and – Egyptian has no word for and

 You can put two nouns together, implying an ‘and’
 ‘heir’ – means and/upon (looks like a face)
 Demonstratives: depending on demonstrative, it will end in a letter…
 This God – the word ‘this’ goes after the noun (pn)
  Plural of pn is nn – goes before the noun (usually)
 Pf – means ‘that’
 Numbers are divided into units of ten: 10,100,1000,10000 ect…
 You can arrange a numbers by any order of units
 Years are divided into three seasons consisting of four months of 30 days
 3 seasons: Akhet – inundation/flood season (September to January)
 Peret – Growth (January to may)
 Shemu (harvest) – may to September
 Abed – word for months
 The extra 5 days in the year are given two other names
 Hrw – day
 People would date with the regnal year
 Regnal year comes first
 There is a five-part title for kings:
 Horus name
 Two ladies name
 Horus of gold name
 Son of ra name
 Dual king name
 They sometimes all are used and sometimes, just a few
 Throne names would often be similar to smooth over the succession
 After the regnal year, put hr – means before/under
 The idea is that its is the year under this king
 Hm – we translate as majesty

Hieroglyphs lecture 4

 Adjectives come after the noun, and must agree and gender and number
 Prepositions say how words are related to one another
 Draughtsman – someone who grids the characters before they are inscribed
 Ptah – God of craftsman
 Amun – (lit. the hidden one)
 The gods as a collective is known as The Ennead (there are 9)