Formulaic Language If you want to study the Book of the Dead or participate in the translation projects of the Ancient Egyptian Language Discussion List, you will need to spend considerable time learning the glyphs and the grammar of Egyptian. But in the meantime, if you just want to go to the museum or check out some Egyptian art books from the library and get used to the language, you can make surprising progress. The monuments and inscriptions you encounter make use of many fixed formulas, and it isn't hard with a little practice to recognize those formulas and get at least a basic idea of what a given inscription is talking about.

The word Hm.t "wife" is a good example. You can often find it combined in the phrase Hm.t-nsw.t "king's wife". (The sign for "king" comes before the sign for "wife", but follows it grammatically. This is called "honorific transposition", the placement of the glyph for an important personage at the beginning of a compound.) I also found this glyph on a delightful statue of an official flanked by two women, both of whom were labelled with the glyphs Hm.t=f mri.t  "his beloved wife" (without the sign for "woman", in this case; you can expect a certain variation in spelling, which in most cases doesn't affect the meaning).

The glyph for "beloved" can also be found as a frequent epithet for kings and other notables: mri rA   "beloved of Ra"; you might also encounter this with other gods' names. This is another example of honorific transposition. (This combination also demonstrates how glyphs can be made to refer to females or males simply by adding or removing a .t.) Yet another example of honorific transposition is the phrase mi rA  "like Ra".

An isolated glyph that is frequently encountered as an epithet is nb "lord" (in the civil, not religious, sense), or the feminine version nb.t  "lady".

You can find many variations of phrases based on the combination di anx(.w) wDA(.w) snb(.w), which is an abbreviation for "given life, prosperity, health". Sometimes you will see di "given" paired with fewer glyphs, sometimes just anx "life", or with different glyphs, such as Dam; "authority", or Htp "peace".

The final piece you need to interpret most epithets is the combination Dt "forever". Using everything from above, you should have no trouble interpreting the name below as "Amenhotep, the Lord, beloved of Ra, given life and authority, like Ra, forever":

This name demonstrates another feature of this kind of formula: the stringing together of many epithets, all referring to the same person, without any sort of grammatical "glue" to hold them together (in English, we use commas and words like "and"; the Egyptians did not).

One last useful combination are the glyphs Dd md.w "words spoken". Combined with the glyphs in "by", they mean something like "Thus says...", and are followed by the name of the person speaking, and then by his or her message. In scenes with figures, this phrase often acts almost like a word balloon, to tie a figure to the words over its head or just to one side. You can barely see this combination on the front of the canopic jar figurine that begins this page. A much clearer image can be found on the Sons of Horus page.

© 1999, Terrence Donnelly