Dilwyn Jones (1)

Drawing on archaeological and literary evidence, Dilwyn Jones examines the importance of the boat in Egyptian ritual and belief, as well as in everyday life. The sun god was thought to travel across the sky in a solar boat, and Egyptians believed that the deserving might join the god Osiris in his divine bark after death. Boats played an important part in funerary ritual; models were often placed in tombs to provide the deceased with safe passage through the Winding Waterway in the underworld. Also, boats are frequently depicted in tomb paintings.… (lisätietoja)

Almost certainly of no interest at all to anybody on this site, but I can’t resist bragging that the last available copy of this just sold for $370 on Amazon while I got mine for $24.95 at a local used bookstore.


Exactly what a book this esoteric was doing in a local used bookstore is unclear; it’s true Boulder is a college town and thus a variety of strange works show up in the used book market, but usually not this strange. As interesting as a handwritten photo offset glossary of an extinct language can be. The publication date of 1988 puts it before computer-generated Egyptian fonts; there were several Egyptian type metal fonts floating around, but unless you were independently wealthy (a condition not common among Egyptologists) they were way too expensive to use, since the number of people who could set hieroglyphic type and then proofread it upside-down and backwards was limited. As a result, most Egyptian textbooks and dictionaries were handwritten. In this one, at least, the definitions are typewritten with only the hieroglyphs by hand; in Faulkner’s Middle Egyptian dictionary, the definitive reference work, both the hieroglyphs and definitions are in longhand and Faulkner didn’t have particularly readable penmanship.


Even from just a simple word list like this you can draw some conclusions about ancient Egyptian maritime and riverine practices (or at least about the Egyptologists attempting to translate them). The Egyptians, like modern rivermen, seemed to distinguish between the captain of a river boat and the pilot (although some of the scholars hold that the term usually translated “pilot” is better understood as “lookout”). There’s a large number of distinct ship types, most of which are untranslatable – although basic terms like “warship”, “cargo ship” and “ferry boat” can be figured out a lot of other words are just lost (if you think of English, where you might have brigs, snows, luggers, sloops, hoys, pirogues, canoes, barks, schooners, clippers, gondolas, barges and many more all sailing around at once the difficulty is understandable). Almost all the ships are river craft; the Egyptians called a true ocean-going vessel a “Byblos ship”, meaning that it was capable of cruising up the Mediterranean littoral to Lebanon to pick up a load of cedar.


A little Egyptological convention might help; there are many titles translated as “Director of…”, “Overseer of…” and “Inspector of…” something (“Director of recruits”, “Overseer of dockyards”, “inspector of sailors”, etc.). These are all ranks rather than job descriptions; the term translated as “Overseer of Dockyards” was not necessarily somebody who stood around at a dockyard and watched what the dock workers were doing.
Since there’s about 3000 years worth of language here, I would have like it if there was an easier way to figure out what time period a particular term comes from (Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, etc.). Since there are references to the source for every definition, you could accomplish this by going back to the source material and figuring out where it came from, but that’s rather a tall order unless you happen to live in the Oriental Institute library. Nevertheless, author Dilwyn Jones performed yeoman service just by gathering all this stuff together, and I'm gloating over finding it.… (lisätietoja)