This is the amazing story of the life of one of Egypt's most talented
officials during the Old Kingdom. Weni began as a lowly palace
employee and rose to the highest ranks of the land. Three things
are phenomenal about his biography:
1) The man seems to have lived to the ripest of old ages ! He had
to be ninety if not more elderly, yet he seems to have been sharp
of mind and very active to his last dying breath! Weni's nickname
was "the elder" for very good reasons, indeed. Those who knew
him probably could not help but marvel at his age coupled with
integrity of mind, and his incessant activity up and down the
Nile ! He served under every king of the Sixth dynasty except
for Pepi II !
2) Weni was involved in pyramid construction! So, if you ever wondered
how the pyramids were built, you may find some incredible and
intriguing answers, spoken from the mouth of an Egyptian himself!
He went on missions to procure the building materials, off to
Aswan for granite, off to Amarna (Hatnub) for alabaster, to the
Wadi Hammamat for Basalt, on, and on, and on, and he was no young
man to be hauling blocks of stone! The diversity of his endeavors,
including military campaigns in Palestine, diplomatic and trading
missions in Nubia, and even dealing with conspiracies of a nefarious
nature in the palaces and harems of the various kings.... It just
boggles the mind that anyone could have had such a colorful and
successful life, and enjoyed it for so many years, year after
year, until he was as old as the hills!
3) This biography is the culmination of the Old Kingdom literature
that we still possess. The biography had very humble beginnings,
but it was to become the most significant genre of the Egyptian
repertoire. During the Archaic Period down through Dynasty IV,
tomb inscriptions consisted of two types of texts. 1) lists of
offerings, and 2) lists of the titles of the occupant of the tomb.
Now, the offering list changed during the Old Kingdom into a prayer,
known as the Invocation Offering Formula. The title lists also
evolved until people began to add narrative, explaining how the
person achieved his/her offices. This genre developed into the
Biography. It was not, however, until Weni's that the genre had
reached its fruition, from Weni on out, down through the end of
Egyptian History, these texts were filled with wonderful anecdotes
and history. They only presented the good sides of people, so
we have to realize that they are biased history, but they are
the source of much of our knowledge of life along the Nile in
ancient times.
Now, having said all that, let me get to the meat of this message,
which is to let you know what to expect from Old Egyptian.
Old Egyptian is very much like Middle Egyptian except for a few
details. You will be happy to learn, however, that Weni's biography
is very late Old Egyptian, and thus closer to Middle Egyptian
than most other Old Kingdom texts. The shifts in perspective will
be subtle, and not so confusing as to make it impossible for you
to read.
[ed. OE is the language of the Old Kingdom and First Intermediate
Period, 3000 - 2000 BCE]
Old Egyptian had very stable consonants, which did not have the
kind of variations to which you may have become accustomed in
Middle and Late Egyptian. The inventory of sounds was mostly the
same, with a few small differences.
Old Egyptian did not yet write the /y/ phoneme, which Middle Egyptian
developed as two reed-stalks or dual strokes. Instead, it only
had i. When you see ii (two reed-stalks written side by side), it is because the sound
of {i} occurred twice in the word.
Old Egyptian had two /s/-phonemes. You are probably already used
to my use of {z} and {s} as distinct sounds, though Middle Egyptian texts could substitute
one sign for the other and both were at the time pronounced /s/.
z, a very inept character, devised in earlier periods in Egyptology,
actually represented the sound of {th} as in English "think".
s was a simple sibilant {s}.
In Old Egyptian, the distinction between /d/ and /D/ was still carefully maintained. Middle Egyptian rdi "give" was rDi, and spd was spD, and fnd was fnD. You could not replace a {D} with a {d}.
The same was true of /t/ and /T/. One could not substitute one for the other.
Old Egyptian had not yet made a distinction between /S/ and /X/. {S} represented both, for the most part. The cow belly sign came
to represent /X/ rather late. I am not saying that it never occurred, but it
was not originally a common alphabetic sign. However, for the
purposes of keeping our words straight, just like I use {z} and {s} separately for Middle Egyptian, when it is not necessary, I
also maintain the difference between {X} and {S} in Old Egyptian, as do other scholars, just for the sake of
clarity, since everyone learns Middle Egyptian before Old Egyptian.
There were a few different features in the grammar, but most of
them are not very daunting. We will work with them as they come
along.
For one thing the indicative sDm=f, also called the perfective
sDm=f was very strong. You could express the past tense with sDm=f,
rather than sDm.n=f.
The most frustrating thing in an Old Kingdom text is that they
had not yet developed a way of writing the first person singular
pronoun suffix. This is because it was a vowel. Because Old Egyptian
never wrote vowels, the ending =i, as we have come to represent it, was not expressed in writing.
So, if you encounter something which makes no sense, see if putting
in a =i "I/me/my" helps you to make progress.
Geoff Graham
sokar@minerva.cis.yale.edu
[Posted to AEL, 23/10/97, The Language of Weni the Elder]
