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Hieroglyph Detective: How to Decode the Sacred Language of the Ancient Egyptians
Egyptian hieroglyphs have long fascinated people the world over, though traditionally only specially trained scholars have been able to unlock their esoteric secrets. In Hieroglyph Detective , renowned Egyptologist Nigel Strudwick offers a historical background for the symbols as he takes the reader on a visual tour of museums around the world and provides step-by-step instructions on how to decipher inscriptions from ancient Egyptian tombs and temples. This hands-on field guide contains everything one needs to uncover age-old mysteries like a true detective!
160 pages, Paperback
First published March 4, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 21, 2022
5 stars! This book is really good! It actually tells you about the history of hieroglyphs and tell you the necessary details about Egyptian culture first, then it guides you on how to translate it. Not only that, this have photos of actual hieroglyphs and not just illustrations. The difficulty of the samples gradually go up so you might feel a bit out of your depth but that's just how it is! As an avid language learner, this is one of the most fun "language learning" books I've read in a while, complete with photos and illustrations. But to effectively learn it, you should be using a notebook and writing things down. I read this in one go without taking notes so I can assure you I know no more than about ten words but it was still really fun! When I have the time, I'll make sure to revisit this book and actually try to learn hieroglyphs. RTC for that I guess?
April 28, 2011
So far this book is freaking amazing. Well-laid out, very clear, and easy to understanding without making one feel like an idiot. The pictures are fantastic and give you a better sense of how these hieroglyphs really work. A fantastic beginners guide to Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Highly recommend it to anyone interested in anything Egyptian, or languages, or even mythology. I am so glad I found this book!
January 28, 2014
I never learned to read hieroglyphs, but enjoyed looking at them and reading the translations.
July 9, 2018
Excellent resource on hieroglyphs.
September 9, 2020
A fun book on the script and language of Ancient Egypt <3
March 13, 2021
If you’re sufficiently crazy, bored, or both to have a serious go at learning hieroglyphs in your free time, this is the place to start.
February 4, 2013
This small book is helpful to the new student of ancient Egyptian.
But Mr. Strudwick allows dogmas and ideologies to cripple his effort.
The old classification of African languages by Greenberg seems to be the source of Mr. Strudwick's linguistic confusion.
Srudwick deliberately misleads the general reader who may make the mistake of trusting scholars to always shed light on their subjects.
Instead of shedding light, Mr. Strudwick leaves his uninformed readers in the dark in order to perpetuate the linguistic myth that ancient Egyptian is not an ancient African language that is related genetically to modern black African languages. Strudwick sticks to the "party line" that ancient Egyptian is "related" to Semitic languages.
On page 28, Mr. Strudwick writes this piece of amazing nonsense: " .....some other languages of the Eastern Mediterranean , such as Hebrew and Arabic, are not always written with vowels....."
To imply that ancient Egyptian is a language of the "Eastern Mediterranean" and that Arabic and Hebrew are genetically related to the language of "Ancient Egypt" is a gross example of intellectual dishonesty.
Surely Mr. Strudwick must know that no one can demonstrate a genetic linguistic relationship between ancient Egyptian and any Semitic language! Of course there are surface, lexical relationships, but the deep structure of "ancient Egyptian" is Negro African.
Again on page 44, Mr. Strudwick misleads his least sophisticated readers by pointing out a rather isolated point that the possession is expressed in ancient Egyptian and Arabic in a similar manner: "Arabic expresses possession in a similar way...."
His readers would not have been left in dark had Mr. Strudwick been able to free himself of his Eurocentric dogmas and ideologies that refuse to consider modern African languages. But facts are indeed very stubborn things!
Perhaps Stridwick would have known that: " Egyptian expresses the past tense by the same morpheme, n, as Wolof; it has suffixal conjugation which reappears verbatim in Wolof; most pronouns are identical with those in Wolof. We find the two Egyptian pronoun suffixes, ef and es, with the same meaning in Wolof; demonstratives are the same in both languages; the passive voice is expressed by the same morpheme, u or w in both languages...." See Diop, p.155. African Origin of Civilization.
Diop's opinion is nothing new, as early as Jean Francois Champollion, the African reality of ancient Egypto-Nubian Civilizations was recognized:
"Finally the Egyptian language has nothing in common, in its basic structure, with the Asiatic languages.
The language of Egypt is as different fundamentally as Egyptian writing is from the writing of the Phoenicians, Babylonians and the Persians."
(La lanque egyptienne enfin n'avait rien de commun, dans sa marche constitutive , avec the langues asiatique: elle en differ tout aussi essentiellement que les ecritures de l'Egypte different des anciennes ecritures des Pheniciens, des Babyloniens et des Perses.)
..... " Tout semble, en effet, nous montrer dans les Egyptiens un people tout-a-fait etranger au continent asiatique".
(In fact, everything seems to show us that the Egyptians were a people completely foreign to the Asian continent).
See Champollion: PRECIS DU SYSTEME HIEROGLYPHIQUE, p.456.
Even Sir Wallis Budge seemed to had risen above the open British vulgar anti-African bigotry of his time:
"no one who has worked at Egyptian can possibly doubt that there are many Semitic words in the language, or that many of the pronouns, some of the numbers, and some of the grammatical forms resemble those found in the Semitic languages. But even admitting all the similarities that Erman has claimed. it is still impossible to me to believe that Egyptian is a Semitic language fundamentally.There is, it is true, much in the Pyramid Texts that recalls points and details of Semitic Grammar,but after deducting all the triliteral roots, there still remains a very large number of words that are not Semitic, and were never invented by a Semitic people. These words are monosyllabic, and were invented by one of the oldest African(or Hamitic, if that word be preferred),peoples in the Valley of the Nile of whose written language we have any remains.These words are used to express fundamental relationships and feelings, and beliefs which are peculiarly African and are foreign in every particular to Semitic peoples. The primitive home of the people who invented these words lay far to the south of Egypt, and all that we know of the Predynastic Egyptians suggests that it was in the neighborhood of the Great Lakes, probably to the east of them". Introduction of Vol. 1 (lxviii) Hieroglyphic Dictionary, W. A. Wallis Budge.
Of course Sir Wallis Budge was slandered and defamed for taking off his blinders and following the facts. The facts led not to Asia but to the GREAT LAKES REGION OF AFRICA, the ancestral home of mankind and birthplace of language and culture.
If Mr. Strudwick sought to inform his general readers about close linguistic relationships between the "ancient Egyptian" language and other languages he most certainly chose the wrong languages.
"Mainstream scholars"(Eurocentric) are mercilessly punished if they dare step outside the European Intellectual Paradigm, the Master Narrative. Perhaps Strudwick knows all too well what happened to the late Wallis Budge!
Perhaps it is more a matter of the lack of intellectual courage?
In any case we feel that Mr. Strudwick has left far too many readers in the dark.
But Mr. Strudwick allows dogmas and ideologies to cripple his effort.
The old classification of African languages by Greenberg seems to be the source of Mr. Strudwick's linguistic confusion.
Srudwick deliberately misleads the general reader who may make the mistake of trusting scholars to always shed light on their subjects.
Instead of shedding light, Mr. Strudwick leaves his uninformed readers in the dark in order to perpetuate the linguistic myth that ancient Egyptian is not an ancient African language that is related genetically to modern black African languages. Strudwick sticks to the "party line" that ancient Egyptian is "related" to Semitic languages.
On page 28, Mr. Strudwick writes this piece of amazing nonsense: " .....some other languages of the Eastern Mediterranean , such as Hebrew and Arabic, are not always written with vowels....."
To imply that ancient Egyptian is a language of the "Eastern Mediterranean" and that Arabic and Hebrew are genetically related to the language of "Ancient Egypt" is a gross example of intellectual dishonesty.
Surely Mr. Strudwick must know that no one can demonstrate a genetic linguistic relationship between ancient Egyptian and any Semitic language! Of course there are surface, lexical relationships, but the deep structure of "ancient Egyptian" is Negro African.
Again on page 44, Mr. Strudwick misleads his least sophisticated readers by pointing out a rather isolated point that the possession is expressed in ancient Egyptian and Arabic in a similar manner: "Arabic expresses possession in a similar way...."
His readers would not have been left in dark had Mr. Strudwick been able to free himself of his Eurocentric dogmas and ideologies that refuse to consider modern African languages. But facts are indeed very stubborn things!
Perhaps Stridwick would have known that: " Egyptian expresses the past tense by the same morpheme, n, as Wolof; it has suffixal conjugation which reappears verbatim in Wolof; most pronouns are identical with those in Wolof. We find the two Egyptian pronoun suffixes, ef and es, with the same meaning in Wolof; demonstratives are the same in both languages; the passive voice is expressed by the same morpheme, u or w in both languages...." See Diop, p.155. African Origin of Civilization.
Diop's opinion is nothing new, as early as Jean Francois Champollion, the African reality of ancient Egypto-Nubian Civilizations was recognized:
"Finally the Egyptian language has nothing in common, in its basic structure, with the Asiatic languages.
The language of Egypt is as different fundamentally as Egyptian writing is from the writing of the Phoenicians, Babylonians and the Persians."
(La lanque egyptienne enfin n'avait rien de commun, dans sa marche constitutive , avec the langues asiatique: elle en differ tout aussi essentiellement que les ecritures de l'Egypte different des anciennes ecritures des Pheniciens, des Babyloniens et des Perses.)
..... " Tout semble, en effet, nous montrer dans les Egyptiens un people tout-a-fait etranger au continent asiatique".
(In fact, everything seems to show us that the Egyptians were a people completely foreign to the Asian continent).
See Champollion: PRECIS DU SYSTEME HIEROGLYPHIQUE, p.456.
Even Sir Wallis Budge seemed to had risen above the open British vulgar anti-African bigotry of his time:
"no one who has worked at Egyptian can possibly doubt that there are many Semitic words in the language, or that many of the pronouns, some of the numbers, and some of the grammatical forms resemble those found in the Semitic languages. But even admitting all the similarities that Erman has claimed. it is still impossible to me to believe that Egyptian is a Semitic language fundamentally.There is, it is true, much in the Pyramid Texts that recalls points and details of Semitic Grammar,but after deducting all the triliteral roots, there still remains a very large number of words that are not Semitic, and were never invented by a Semitic people. These words are monosyllabic, and were invented by one of the oldest African(or Hamitic, if that word be preferred),peoples in the Valley of the Nile of whose written language we have any remains.These words are used to express fundamental relationships and feelings, and beliefs which are peculiarly African and are foreign in every particular to Semitic peoples. The primitive home of the people who invented these words lay far to the south of Egypt, and all that we know of the Predynastic Egyptians suggests that it was in the neighborhood of the Great Lakes, probably to the east of them". Introduction of Vol. 1 (lxviii) Hieroglyphic Dictionary, W. A. Wallis Budge.
Of course Sir Wallis Budge was slandered and defamed for taking off his blinders and following the facts. The facts led not to Asia but to the GREAT LAKES REGION OF AFRICA, the ancestral home of mankind and birthplace of language and culture.
If Mr. Strudwick sought to inform his general readers about close linguistic relationships between the "ancient Egyptian" language and other languages he most certainly chose the wrong languages.
"Mainstream scholars"(Eurocentric) are mercilessly punished if they dare step outside the European Intellectual Paradigm, the Master Narrative. Perhaps Strudwick knows all too well what happened to the late Wallis Budge!
Perhaps it is more a matter of the lack of intellectual courage?
In any case we feel that Mr. Strudwick has left far too many readers in the dark.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews