Of Signs and Sounds. Intro to the Scripts and Languages of Ancient Egypt
Come and join us for an evening of hieroglyphs, cursive scripts, and ancient Egyptian languages
Date and time
Location
Online
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About this event
- Event lasts 1 hour 30 minutes
Manon Y. Schutz, Of Signs and Sounds. Introduction to the Scripts and Languages of Ancient Egypt
Abstract
When thinking about ancient Egypt, most people think about pyramids, mummies, gold, but also about hieroglyphs, that is, the gods, people, birds, and other images that the ancient Egyptians used in their writing. However, the languages hidden behind those signs appear difficult to grasp, rather obscure, even fantastic to some. At the same time, there are other forms of writing that existed in ancient Egypt, their signs more cursive than their hieroglyphic counterpart: hieratic and demotic. Did they exist alongside the hieroglyphic script? Were they used to write the same language(s) or does each script correspond to a specific language? Can one language maybe be written with various scripts? And how does Coptic fit into all of this? If you are interested in these and similar questions, you might want to come along to this talk. In general, this paper aims to give an overview of the various languages and scripts that are attested in ancient Egypt. And no worries: it is not necessary to have any previous knowledge.
Speaker biography
Manon teaches ancient Egyptian languages and scripts at the Egyptological and Coptological Institute of the Universität Münster. Furthermore, she is interested in questions of how furniture reveals information on the general worldview, the lives, and afterlives of their owners. Thus, in her DPhil “Sleep, Beds, and Death”, completed at the University of Oxford, she focused on the use and meaning of beds in the funerary context of ancient Egypt. As for her current project “The Path to Power”, she analyses the various aspects of education and knowledge at the royal court of ancient Egypt, considering archaeological, iconographic, and textual material from the Old Kingdom to the Late Period. Being Luxembourgish herself, she also started a project on the links between Luxembourg and Egypt(ology) during the 19th and early 20th century. If she is not teaching or researching, she likes to read murder mysteries set in Egypt and watch mummy movies.
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