Translating Ancient Egyptian Culture and Language

This lecture will first explain how and why ancient Egyptians wrote their Language in different scripts and present these scripts with their specificities, specificities which make them much more subtle and expressive and ,in a way, different from most other languages using an alphabetic script to express themselves in writing. These specificities particularly common in Literary texts, have so far been often misunderstood by western scholars or dismissed when translating, giving rise to different, weaker or inaccurate translations, and certainly not responding as well to the spirit of the original text. The lecture will present other problems of translating from ancient Egyptian to a western language, among these are expressions and metaphors which fortunately often have their equivalent in Egyptian Arabic, thus indicating the continuity of Culture in Egypt and maybe also show the privilege of being an Egyptian when translating Ancient Egyptian texts.

As for religious texts, one can grosso modo divide them into exoteric or esoteric texts. While the first group of text deals usually with hymns or rituals, they are easier to understand, and they often remind us of their equivalent in modern Egyptian beliefs and folklore. As for the second group, it covers more elaborate “transformation texts”, initiation texts for priests to allow them to face the statues of the gods they serve in their sanctuaries, or for the dead to enable them to survive in the afterlife and to reach life among the gods after justification. These texts are by definition much more complicate and until today often still complicate.

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