Hieroglyphs 102 · Chapter 06

Life, prosperity, health

Every time this course has written “Pharaoh, l.p.h.,” those three letters stood for something Egyptian scribes wrote so often they compressed it to three signs. This chapter teaches the wish itself, the Great House it followed, and — with today’s batch — lets you read the openings of three of the most famous stories in the language.

Batch seven

Draw each five times — the column on its side, the swallow, the drill with its cap.

Grammar bite — the wish, and the two greats

No new sentence type — the course taught its three, and they hold. Two pieces of reading knowledge instead:

• ꜥnḫ wḏꜣ snb — “may he live, be whole, be healthy”: three wish-verbs in a row, hung after a royal name or title like a bow after a signature. Scribes wrote it thousands of times and almost always in shorthand: 𓋹S34 · ꜥnḫ · sandal strap? knot? — the ankh: life𓍑U28 · ḏꜣ · fire-drill𓋴S29 · s · folded cloth — the ankh, your new drill, a single s — which Egyptology abbreviates “l.p.h.” From today you read the signs, not the abbreviation.
• The two greats. ꜥꜣ 𓉻O29 · ꜥꜣ · wooden column, laid flat is bigness — of buildings, doors, things; wr 𓅨G36 · wr · swallow is greatness of standing — elders, chiefs, gods. The senses overlap and the corpora mix them, but the habit is worth holding: columns for size, swallows for rank.

At the court of Sneferu

Chapter 02 opened royal speech with Khufu and ḏd.jn ḥm≡f. The Prophecy of Neferti — a classic set one generation earlier, at the court of Khufu’s father Sneferu, the good-humored king of Egyptian story — uses the same hinge, grown by the wish you can now read:

• ḏd.jn ḥm≡f — chapter 02’s formula, sign for sign: the storyteller’s “then,” the club, the falcon, the viper.
• ꜥnḫ-wḏꜣ-snb — the wish, in its classic shorthand: the ankh 𓋹S34 · ꜥnḫ · sandal strap? knot? — the ankh: life for live, your new drill 𓍑U28 · ḏꜣ · fire-drill for be whole, and a lone s 𓋴S29 · s · folded cloth standing for all of snb, “be healthy.”

Father and son, two tales, one formula — and the course’s oldest reading habit, the compressed spelling honestly read, carries the whole wish.

The Great House

Where did the word “pharaoh” come from? Egyptian palaces were called pr-ꜥꜣ — “the Great House” — and by the New Kingdom the building’s name had become the polite way to say the king himself, exactly as “the White House announced” means the president did. In the tale of Merire — a scribe so loyal he agrees to descend to the netherworld in his ailing king’s place — the word is everywhere:

• ḏd≡f n — “he said to”: the plain sḏm≡f with the little n, “to.”
• pr-ꜥꜣ — “the Great House”: 101’s house-plan 𓉐O1 · pr · house (ground-plan) and your new column 𓉻O29 · ꜥꜣ · wooden column, laid flat — the whole word “pharaoh” in two signs. From Egyptian pr-ꜥꜣ the word passed into Hebrew as parʿō, into Greek as pharaō, and into English as the only Egyptian word most people ever say.
• ꜥnḫ-wḏꜣ-snb — the wish again, riding the title exactly where the bite said it lives.

The swallow, twice

The other great, at both of its jobs. First as rank, inside an Old Kingdom name:

• Rꜥw-wr — the sun-god’s name Rꜥ spelled r + ꜥ, then the swallow: “Ra is the great one” — a man’s name that is a little nominal sentencea sentence made of nouns side by side, no verb "to be" at all — Egyptian's mw pw, "it is water", exactly the kind chapter 01 taught you to see.
• swrj — “drink”: s, then the swallow carrying only its sound wr, an r confirming it, a j — and then two silent friends: chapter 01’s water 𓈗N35A · mw · three ripples of water classifying the liquid, and the hand-to-mouth man 𓀁A2 · man with hand to mouth — classifier: eat, speak, think classifying the act. The word comes from the Report of Wenamun, the travelogue of a temple official whose mission goes wrong in every port — offered a drink at a foreign court at the low point of his luck.

One bird, two jobs — meaning in a name, pure sound in a verb — with the classifiersEgyptology's name for a determinative — the silent sign closing a word to say what kind of thing it is: person, speech, plural, idea, as ever, silently keeping order. That is the whole writing system, working.

The course pauses here

Seven chapters, sixteen new signs, seventy-nine percent of the corpus’s sign-occurrences under your eye — and, more to the point: three sentence types, the suffix conjugationthe Egyptian verb form whose subject is a suffix pronoun on the stem — the grammars' sḏm≡f, "he hears", three negations, the recipe register, and the royal wish, every one taught from a real line and walked piece by piece. The tales these chapters opened — Khufu’s court, the Doomed Prince, Merire, Wenamun, Neferti — keep going; later chapters read deeper into them, and Sinuhe is still waiting where the classics keep their best seat.

The course pauses here; more chapters are coming.

Drill before the pause

1. Draw 𓉻O29 · ꜥꜣ · wooden column, laid flat, 𓅨G36 · wr · swallow, 𓍑U28 · ḏꜣ · fire-drill from memory; say ꜥꜣ, wr, ḏꜣ.
2. Write 𓋹S34 · ꜥnḫ · sandal strap? knot? — the ankh: life𓍑U28 · ḏꜣ · fire-drill𓋴S29 · s · folded cloth and read it in full — then say what each sign stands for and which word is almost entirely missing.
3. Explain to an imaginary friend where the word “pharaoh” comes from, with the two signs to prove it.
4. Read all three story-openings in this chapter cold, covering the glosses. You are reading the first lines of Egyptian literature’s shelf of classics. That was the point of these chapters — and of the school.