On Not Being a Yutz: Egyptian Religion

Ancient Egyptian religion: not self-explanatory.

While I have not posted on the subject recently, I continue to keep up on reading The Context of Scripture in a year. (Joseph’s got the beat covered, as usual.) Among the Egyptian canonical inscriptions, we have completed those that have a “divine focus” (cosmologies, hymns, prayers, incantations). Over the weeks, I have come to a conclusion:

A couple of years of instruction in Egyptian language notwithstanding, on the subject of ancient Egyptian religion, I am, relatively speaking, a yutz.

Nothing to be ashamed of: my schooling in the contexts of the Hebrew Bible, anchored in the West Semitic, has tended to look eastward to Mesopotamia. But, I feel the need to do some reinforcing reading (rapidly, given my time constraints).

I’ll be working the stacks for resources for a few days. Let me know if there is anything I should especially keep my eyes open for.

[On Not Being a Yutz: Egyptian Religion was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/03/16. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Visual Babel (Re-acquiring Scripts)

(Strong language alert for this video: mosey on down to under the vid if'n you'd rather keep the F-bombs at bay.)



I have two re-acquisition projects going right now. One of getting back my Egyptian: I had two excellent years of instruction while in school, eventually reading handily through Shipwrecked Sailor and Sinuhe and such. Since I didn’t use it during the dissertation years, and since teaching keeps me some busy, it’s not exactly ready-to-hand anymore. So, I have been making fresh flash cards and zipping through Gardiner again. I mean to have worked through the grammar and be into readings by spring’s end.

My other project is my OB and standard Akkadian cuneiform signs. My Akkadian grammar has stayed pretty good, because I have used it off and on, but mostly with texts already transliterated (and often already normalized). So, out have come the cuneiform flash cards, with a goal of getting back up to a literacy of 200 or more signs, knowing their usual OB and SA forms.

My routine has been to hump through Egyptian for several days until glassy-eyed, then turn to wherever I last left off with the cuneiform. Lather, rinse, repeat. In between, I “rest” for a day or two on rapid Hebrew or Koine or on snippets of Attic.

This is all to say, the inside of my head is a bowl of warmed-ever mnemonic soup: an exhilarating but faintly nauseating visual babel where ÉRIN is bumping heads with ṯ3ty, and and SIPAD has ḥnḳt sticking out of its pockets.