Egypt's Golden Couple Quotes

“Three thousand, three hundred and seventy years is a remarkably long time for knowledge of the events of a single day to survive. On the day in question, February 22, 1347 BCE (give or take a week or two), there were only a few places in the world where such knowledge even had a chance of surviving. Of course, Egypt had hieroglyphs—the “word of god” as the Egyptians termed it. The ancient Near East employed the cuneiform script, first developed for Sumerian in the southern portion of Mesopotamia (roughly the modern countries between the eastern Mediterranean coast and the Tigris River), then adapted for Akkadian and later for Hittite (and other languages). Early Greek was written in the syllabic Linear B script of the Mycenaean world, while in Shang Dynasty China, written characters were in use as aspects of divinatory practices. As far as we know, no other culture possessed a writing system at this time.”
― John Coleman Darnell, Egypt's Golden Couple: When Akhenaten and Nefertiti Were Gods on Earth

“We take down the first volume of the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache. On pages 6–7 we indeed see several words with the basic spelling of ab (listed in the dictionary under the transliteration 3b). We note that abeb might well be a writing of the word “abey” (transliteration 3bi), “to desire, to wish.”
― John Coleman Darnell, Egypt's Golden Couple: When Akhenaten and Nefertiti Were Gods on Earth

“The first stop in the oft-repeated looking up of a word is the massive Egyptian-German dictionary, Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache, a project begun in 1897, its five volumes of entries eventually published between 1926 and 1931. The archive of note slips that were used to compile this dictionary—still a standard reference for hieroglyphic texts—has now been digitized. By inputting the page number and word entry from the published Wörterbuch, we can scroll through scans of paper slips containing handwritten copies of snippets of ancient Egyptian texts containing a particular word.”
― John Coleman Darnell, Egypt's Golden Couple: When Akhenaten and Nefertiti Were Gods on Earth