Hieroglyphs 102 · Chapter 01

It is water

Chapter 00 ended on a god saying jnk nb-p,t — “I am the lord of the sky” — and promised that the sentence type behind it would open properly here. It does. Middle Egyptian can build a complete sentence out of two nouns and nothing else, and by the end of this page you will have read one of the most argued-about examples in Egyptian literature. Two signs first.

Batch two

Draw each five times — the ripples in three even rows; the jug with its sling.

Grammar bite — the nominal sentence

Egyptian’s shortest sentence type puts two things side by side and lets them be each other. No verb “to be” appears at all. The commonest shape hangs the little word pw — “it is, that is” — after the first noun:

X pw — “it is X.”

That is the whole machine. Mw pw: “it is water.” The grammars call this the nominal sentencea sentence made of nouns side by side, no verb "to be" at all — Egyptian's mw pw, "it is water" — a sentence made of nouns — and you have already met its other face: chapter 00’s jnk nb-p,t, where an independent pronoun (jnk, “I”) stands in the first slot instead. First slot names, second slot identifies; Egyptian trusts the bare arrangement to say “is.”¹

Ptahhotep, mid-maxim

Now the real thing — and its famous context. The Maxims of Ptahhotep is Egypt’s classic of worldly wisdom: an aging vizier handing his son advice, maxim by maxim, on how to live among people. In the maxim on loving one’s wife — feed her, clothe her, gladden her heart, keep her long in your house — the old vizier suddenly drops to two signs:

• mw — “water”: your new sign, alone, carrying the word.
• pw — “she is / it is”: 101’s stool 𓊪Q3 · p · reed mat or stool doing the little word’s whole work — pw is spelled with p alone here, as it often is.

What did he mean? Translators have argued for a century — water as what slips through your fingers, water as what nourishes the field, water as what takes the shape of its vessel. The grammar, unlike the metaphor, is beyond doubt: noun, pw, sentence. You have just read a line scholars still fight about, and the fight was never about the reading.

The little n — “of”

Water again, from a different shelf entirely. The temple library kept spells, and a spell needs a label:

• rʾ — “spell, utterance”: 101’s mouth 𓂋D21 · r · mouth, with the upright stroke 𓏤Z1 · the word-sign stroke — 'this sign means what it shows' confirming “this is the thing itself.”
• n — “of”: the single ripple, standing between two nouns as the genitivethe grammatical case of possession or belonging — "the king's house", "lord of Lagash" — Egyptian’s usual way of saying “X of Y” is simply X n Y, the grammars’ indirect genitivethe grammatical case of possession or belonging — "the king's house", "lord of Lagash".
• mw — “water,” closing the phrase.

Keep the two ripple-signs apart in your head from today: one ripple 𓈖N35 · n · ripple of water is the sound n and the little “of”; three stacked 𓈗N35A · mw · three ripples of water are the word water itself. The corpus writes both constantly, often in the same line.

Born like the sun

And the milk jug at work — at Amarna, in a hymn to the royal family, where being royal means resembling the Sun itself:

• msi̯ — “to bear, give birth”: 101’s ms sign 𓄟F31 · ms · three fox skins tied — born of with its s complement 𓋴S29 · s · folded cloth, exactly the pair you learned in 101’s birth chapter.
• ≡tw — “one”: a suffix meaning “somebody, one” — with the next piece, “one bears you,” Egyptian’s way of saying “you are born.”
• ≡k — “you”: the suffix pronouna mini-pronoun glued to the end of a word — "his", "your", "hers" as a single sign on the verb, 101’s basket.
• mj — “like”: your new jug, doing its preposition job.
• msi̯.w Jtn — “the Aten is born”: the birth verb again, and the sun-god of Amarna spelled j-t-n with the sun-disk 𓇳N5 · rꜥ · sun disc; the god Ra closing its own name — the same architecture as chapter 00’s p,t.

A verb wearing two suffixes and telling a whole story — that is Middle Egyptian’s engine, and you have now seen it run twice without being told how it works. The wait is over next chapter: the suffix conjugationthe Egyptian verb form whose subject is a suffix pronoun on the stem — the grammars' sḏm≡f, "he hears", taken apart properly, in the mouth of His Majesty himself.

Drill before you go on

1. Draw 𓈗N35A · mw · three ripples of water and 𓏇W19 · mj · milk jug in a carrying net from memory; say mw, mj.
2. Compose, in transliterationthe sign-by-sign rendering of ancient writing in modern letters, so every sign stays accountable: “it is the sky” (chapter 00’s noun, this chapter’s pattern) — then write it in signs.
3. Read rʾ n mw aloud and explain which ripple is which.
4. In the Amarna line, point to both suffixes and say what each does — then enjoy not yet knowing how the verb form works. That is next chapter’s cliff.

Next: “His Majesty says” — the suffix conjugationthe Egyptian verb form whose subject is a suffix pronoun on the stem — the grammars' sḏm≡f, "he hears", and the falcon that watches over words.