Emily O'Dell doing epigraphy in Egypt (Photo: Marianne Barcellona)
Be a scribe!
Your body will be sleek,
your hand will be soft.
You will not flicker like a flame,
like one whose body is feeble…
Be a scribe, and be spared from soldiering!
You call and one says: ‘Here I am.’
You are safe from torments.
Every man seeks to raise himself up.
Take note of it!
— Papyrus Lansing
As an Egyptologist, I love deciphering hieroglyphs–it’s how I spend much of my time. Now, I finally have some company in Beirut to join me in this challenging linguistic pursuit. Even though we’ve only had two days of classes so far, my students in Lebanon are already deciphering hieroglyphic sentences on their own. They’ve learned the sequence of the syntax, the direction of the signs, and dozens of vocabulary words. Most importantly, they grasped right away how the language is both phonetic and pictorial at the same time…
It is a complex system…symbolic and phonetic all at once–
in the same text, the same phrase–even, I would say, in the same word. — Jean Francois Champollion
