How to Look Up Hieroglyphs
Once you develop a real interest in Egyptian hieroglyphs, you will want to move beyond the
passive viewing of transcriptions like those on this website, and begin doing your
own translations. When this happens, you will need to be able to find out the
meaning of unfamiliar words. Since hieroglyphs are so unlike English words,
this can be a hard skill to master.
The first step to finding the meaning of an unfamiliar word in hieroglyphs is
determining how the word is pronounced. (I will assume you have a basic
understanding of how hieroglyphs are used to write the sounds of Ancient
Egyptian. If not,
see here.) It will save you enormous amounts
of time if you have committed to memory the pronunciation of all the
uniliteral glyphs (such as 
t), and as many of the bi-
(eg.
Hm)
and tri-literals
(eg.
anx)
as possible. Even so, you will inevitably come across glyphs with which
you are unfamiliar. Here is where a sign list is essential.
A sign list is simply a listing of hieroglyphs, grouped into categories and
assigned numbers within each category. The most important sign list is the
Gardiner Sign List. Glyphs in the Gardiner Sign List are assigned to
categories and each category is labeled with a letter of the alphabet,
for example A - Male Persons. Within each category, the glyphs are numbered.
The combination of category letter and sequence number within the category
is called the Gardiner number, and is an easy way for scholars to refer
to individual glyphs in formats (such as e-mail) that don't support
displaying the actual glyphs. When someone refers to glyph A1, everyone
can immediately determine that the writer is referring to this glyph:
.
The signs in the list are also accompanied by their pronunciation (or
meaning, if the sign is used as a determinitive), so
when you encounter an unfamiliar glyph in a text, you first determine
which category it belongs to (or seems to belong to), then find the
glyph in the sign list, and read off its pronunciation. Occasionally
it can be hard to figure out what a glyph represents, and so which
category it belongs to. An aid such as
this index to the Faulkner
Dictionary (see below) can be helpful, at least in determining the first sound
in the glyph.
I should also note that some textbooks (such as Collier and
Manley's How To Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs) have incomplete signlists,
and assign their
own category and sequence numbers that do not correspond to the
Gardiner numbers. You couldn't use these signlist numbers to
refer to glyphs and expect to be universally understood, but
they will still give you the proper pronunciation of the signs.
Once you have the pronunciation of a word, you can look it up in
a dictionary or a wordlist. One of the most common dictionaries
is Faulkner's Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian.
The words in this dictionary are arranged in
the transliteration alphabet order used by all Egyptologists, as
shown in my sign chart. All you need to do is find the word
you are looking for in its proper sequence in the alphabet.
Besides the meaning of the word and
its transliterated pronunciation, this dictionary also gives the
hieroglyphs used to write it, and significant variations in
spelling.
Another set of dictionaries you might run across in the
average bookstore is the two-volume set of Budge's
Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary. I don't have
the distain for these that many serious scholars have, and they have sometimes
been useful to me. Their main drawback is that Budge used a different
set of symbols for his transliteration alphabet (also shown on the
sign chart), but he did follow the same
alphabetical order as the currently-accepted alphabet.
Another way to find the meaning of a word once you know its
pronunciation is to use a wordlist, such as the Beinlich Wordlist.
As the name implies, this is a list of words with definitions. The
Beinlich list is somewhat more complete than Faulkner, but has
a couple of potential drawbacks. For one thing, all the definitions
are given in German, but access to a good German dictionary should
solve that problem. Since the Beinlich
wordlist gives the Egyptian words in their Manuel de Codage forms
(see the sign chart), another drawback to the wordlist is the inability to
see the glyphs that make up each word. You can download a
copy
of the wordlist, or use a web-searchable
form.
The only complication to this process of looking up Egyptian words
is the notorious fluidity of Egyptian spelling. Words are frequently
abbreviated, to the point of a single glyph standing in for a whole
word
(eg.
nfr 'beautiful').
Some words were regularly spelled defectively, that is, without
all the sounds represented by glyphs
(eg.
Hnqt 'beer').
Other words regularly changed
the order of the glyphs representing the sounds of the word, as in
wD 'command'.
The only recourse in these cases is to look for variations
in the spelling, if the most obvious transliteration comes up
empty. Another complicaiton is the fact that many Egyptian words
were pronounced the same (or, at least, their consonants were the
same), as in
'great' and
'here', both pronounced aA. Fortunately, the determinatives of most
words can be relied upon to point you to the appropriate definition.
One quibble I have with most Egyptian dictionaries and signlists is that
they lack an English-Egyptian index. The argument I have
heard is that, since we are only concerned with reading a dead
language (whose production of new texts has ended), we only need
the tools to read those texts, and not to produce texts of our own.
But I think having an English index to the Egyptian words comes
in very handy, for example, in trying to puzzle out an obscure word
from its context by trying alternative definitions. There is an
index to Faulkner, produced independently, but it is expensive and
I have heard it isn't very well-produced. Budge includes an
index in his dictionary, but it is very cumbersome to use, since
it gives only page numbers to the Egyptian entries. Entering every word
in Faulkner's dictionary into a spreadsheet and then sorting by the
English gloss would be a time-consuming but very worth-while personal
project.
