More Newly Available Online Resources

Two recent pieces of good news for researching online:

From a Shahnameh (British Library)

The British Library has announced that it has uploaded 15,000 images from Persian manuscripts  in its collection. Go to Digital Access to Persian Manuscripts to access.

And the Dutch Institute for the Near East is digitizing its out-of-print backlist and making them available online. At least so far it's all the Ancient Near East. A few titles are in Dutch but the bulk are in French or English.

More and more material for the Ancient Near East is turning up online. I've noted in the past that the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago is particularly generous in this respect. The massive 21-volume Chicago Assyrian Dictionary can grace your bookshelves if you have a couple of thousand dollars to spare, or it can grace your computer for nothing at all if you're patient enough to download the PDFs here. Ditto the Demotic Dictionary for Demotic Egyptian, only completed recently And you might as well download  a Demotic grammar while you're at it, before rubbing elbows with the Ptolemies..

Ancient Egyptian Words in English Today: Ebony and Adobe

One of the better things about the Internet is that very old friends who live in far-flung parts of the world can still share a conversation and quote each other. My old friend of over 30 years ago who now blogs from Burundi as Diana Buja has a post on "Modern Words That Survive From Ancient Egypt —What, How and Why." The average reader probably would not be surprised to learn, for example, that our words for "pharaoh" and "pyramid" ultimately derive from Ancient Egyptian originals, but that's not what she's focusing on here: she's writing about ebony and adobe.

(A look at Ancient Egyptian vocabulary in Egyptian Arabic would yield a lot of examples, since Coptic words often are in colloquial use in agriculture and other areas in Egypt, and Coptic is just late Egyptian.,)

Diana, who works in agricultural development in Burundi, is trained in, among other things, Ancient Egyptian, Egyptology, Arabic, sociology, and ... well, if there's a more unpredictably eclectic blog than mine around, it's definitely hers. Though, as a dog person, I find she uses more cat pictures than seems proper in her posts (in this case, a cat on an ebony table), perhaps that is part of the Ancient Egyptian patrimony, as well. (And even our word "cat" may descend from Ancient Egyptian, as may Arabic qitt, or at least from Afro-Asiatic, some say, though the early forms aren't very close and ours comes via Greek.)

My Third Post on Demotic Egyptian in One Week

Maybe it's the fact that sometimes things come in threes. Anyway, after posting a week ago about the completion of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago's Demotic Egyptian Dictionary, and noting a few days later that their Demotic Grammar was also available online,  now I find yet a third reason to mention Demotic Egyptian in a week. This one is, admittedly, a bit kinkier. From a report at LiveScience, to wit:

A recently deciphered Egyptian papyrus from around 1,900 years ago tells a fictional story that includes drinking, singing, feasting and ritual sex, all in the name of the goddess Mut.

Researchers believe that a priest wrote the blush-worthy tale, as a way to discuss controversial ritual sex acts with other priests.

"Our text may represent a new and hitherto unrecognized Egyptian literary genre: 'cult' fiction, the purpose of which was to allow controversial or contentious matters pertaining to the divine cult to be scrutinized in this way," wrote professors Richard Jasnow and Mark Smith, who published their translation and analysis of the papyrus in the most recent edition of the journal Enchoria.

Since it's fragmentary and still being studied, it's probably not a good starter text for the beginner, if you were hoping for a sort of Fifty Shades of Ancient Egypt or some such.

The newly deciphered tale refers several times to having sex. At one point a speaker implores a person to "drink truly. Eat truly. Sing" and to "don clothing,* anoint (yourself), adorn the eyes, and enjoy sexual bliss." The speaker adds that Mut will not let you "be distant from drunkenness on any day. She will not allow you to be lacking in any (manner)."
The speaker defends his views by saying, "As for those who have called me evil, Mut will 'call' them evil."

Mut was a major Egyptian mother goddess.

[*"don" clothing? I think they're doing it wrong.]

Now That You Have the Demotic Dictionary, You Need a Grammar

I'm sorry for an omission. I posted a link to the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago's Dictionary of Demotic Egyptian, now available online. A great many other media (The New York Times, BBC, etc.) did the same, usually trying to link Demotic to something their readers might have heard of ("one of the languages on the Rosetta stone," "Cleopatra would have known it,"), etc. I did about the same amount of explication that they did.

But then, I may have forgotten my audience. This is a blog where my three-part "Why did Aramaic survive while Coptic is only a liturgical language?" series (here, here, and here) was in response to a question from a commenter on the blog. (And after all, Demotic evolved into Coptic by adopting the Greek alphabet, with a few Demotic characters, but they are two phases of the Egyptian language.)  I realize I have ill-served those of my readers whose first response may have been, "first dictionary of Demotic Egyptian, great. But how am I going to learn to actually speak Demotic if I don't have a decent grammar to use with the dictionary? What if time travelers abduct me and drop me in Ptolemaic Alexandria tomorrow?" For those of you hoping to be able to converse with Cleopatra, I was neglectful.

I may have failed you, but the Oriental Institute at U. Chicago has not. Egyptologist Janet H. Johnson, longtime Editor of the Dictionary (and whom I knew many years ago when she and Donald Whitcomb were digging the port of Quseir in Egypt), has also written Thus Wrote 'Onchsheshonqy - An Introductory Grammar of Demotic.

Once again, through the generosity of The Oriental Institute, the text is available online as a .pdf.

So now you have pretty much all you need to teach yourself Demotic. Except maybe tapes to show you how to pronounce 'Onchsheshonqy. Seriously, though, I want a copy.

Chicago's Demotic Egyptian Dictionary is Online

The Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago has completed work on its landmark dictionary of Demotic Egyptian. The work, edited by Janet H. Johnson, is being made available to the public online, as the Oriental Institute has also done with its monumental Assyrian Dictionary, which I blogged about a while back. 

To access the Demotic dictionary online or download it, or read more about it, go here.

Demotic, the simplified script used for everyday purposes, reflects the daily language of Egypt as opposed to the formal language of the hieroglyphs; Demotic was the third language, along with hieroglyphic Egyptian and Greek, on the Rosetta stone.

Aramaic vs. Coptic: Language Survival vs. Fossilization, Part I

I'm on vacation. As I did last year, I've prepared a series of posts in advance on historical, cultural, and linguistic topics that are not time-constrained. If events warrant, I will add current posts, but at least one new post will appear daily in my absence. Enjoy.
 

This is Part One of a multi-part post which, I hope, will be of interest not just to those interested in Coptic and Aramaic, but to anyone interested in the survival or non-survival of minority languages throughout the Middle East.  It seeks to answer, or explore the elements of an answer, to this question: Aramaic today still has over half a million speakers; Coptic, though one of the most ancient languages on earth, and the Copts being the largest Christian group in the Middle East, has been reduced to a liturgical language for centuries. Why?

During my vacation postings about this time last year, I had several posts about Aramaic and Syriac through the centuries, spoken Western Aramaic today, and spoken Eastern Aramaic today. Aramaic, once the lingua franca of the whole Middle East, with inscriptions found from Egypt to China and India, still lingers in a few islands of speakers — some 15,000 speakers of Western Aramaic, in Syria,  and perhaps half a million speakers of Eastern Aramaic in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and a Western Diaspora. Most of these speakers are Christian, but there are Muslim speakers in Syria, and others are Jewish, Samaritan, or Mandaean. It is also of course the liturgical language of several Eastern Christian denominations, Karaite Judaism, Samaritanism, and Mandaeanism.  See last year's posts, linked above, for more.

When Coptic Pope Shenouda III died earlier this year, a commenter raised an interesting question: why does Aramaic still survive as a spoken language, however scattered, while Coptic is reduced to only a liturgical language? The Copts are by far the largest Christian community in the Middle East, and their language, which is merely the last form of Egyptian, has an unbroken lineage of some 4500 or more years. Yet it has been several centuries since anyone learned Coptic at their mother's knee; it is today a religious and scholarly, not a native, spoken tongue. Why did Aramaic survive (if hanging by a thread) as a spoken tongue while Coptic did not?

It's a great question. I'm not sure there's a single answer, and it also requires us to delve into some controversial debates (like, exactly when did Coptic cease to be spoken natively? 14th century? 17th century? 19th century? All have their advocates). And since my doctoral dissertation was on the ‘Abbasid period in Egypt, the eighth and ninth centuries,  a key period of Arabization and Islamization, it brings up some memories of my own historical research. (And contrary to my younger colleagues' claims, I did not write my dissertation during the ‘Abbasid period.)

Though perhaps too many of my posts tend to focus on Egypt, I think this one actually has considerable interest beyond that. What has preserved other non-Arabic languages across the Arab world, not just Aramaic but bigger languages like Kurdish and the Amazigh/Berber tongues, Nubian, Armenian, Circassian, Mehri and the other surviving South Arabian languages, etc?

This map from the Gulf 2000 site (click here or on the map to see an enlargeable version) doesn't even include North Africa, but is a reminder that the Arabic-Persian-Turkish-Hebrew image most of us carry in our heads is a gross oversimplification.

If the Caucasus, Sudan, and North Africa were included, the map would be even more colorful.

But these islands of minority languages, ranging from big ones like Kurdish to tiny enclaves like the three towns north of Damascus that speak Western Aramaic, all have survived, for various reasons, in the sea of Arabic.

Yet Coptic, with 4000 years of history and a cohesive minority that outnumbers many of those whose languages endure, is only a liturgical tongue today? Why?

Bear in mind that I don't know the answer, but I intend to spend several posts considering the evidence.

A Short History of Egyptian

The earliest evidence of proto-writing in the Nile Valley is gradually being pushed back, but seems to date from around 3200 BC or even a couple of centuries earlier. By the time a language can be discerned through the proto-writing, that language is Egyptian. That language, after millennia of evolution, is still used in parts of the liturgy of the Coptic Orthodox Church, and may have been in daily use as a spoken language as recently as three centuries ago. That is nearly 5000 years of a living, if changing, language. The earliest Chinese writing dates from the second millennium BC, and Hebrew was reduced to a liturgical language for some 1500 or more years before its revival; neither can approach Egyptian in terms of probable, documented endurance as a language. (Though, like Chinese, that language changed enormously through the millennia.) The hieroglyphic writing system had a simplified form known as hieratic, and eventually evolved a more cursive system called demotic, and the language evolved through multiple changes.

Coptic is merely Egyptian in its latest form. It was written in the Greek alphabet, with an additional six (or in one dialect, seven) characters taken from demotic. Coptic was Egyptian transformed through Hellenization and Christianization, and thus was influenced by external elements, while remaining Egyptian. Though it had a lengthy history of its own which I'll discuss next time, it also was very much the tongue of Egypt, and was spoken for more than a millennium in its own right. 

Check in after the weekend to see where I'm going with this. Since not everyone will be interested, other posts will be interspersed.