STUDY GUIDE FOR KAMRIN
CHAPTER ONE
LESSONS 4, 5, AND 6
LESSON 4
Pages 25-28
You will see lots of right to left inscriptions in this course. You will also see inscriptions, some of them
in this book, that start in the middle and read outward in both directions.
Sometimes you will also see a word deliberately mispelled, Here's an example, reading from right to
left.
Very often, as in this case, a small sign which should occur before the bird will appear on a bird's back
because it looked better there and saved a little space. There are some other instances as well.
Some inscriptions are written backwards, you start from the backs of the figures. Those are very rare,
very delibertately done that way for somewhat obscure religious reason, and very absent from this
course. Don't worry about them.
You can do exercise 2 on pages 27-28 for practice if you want but don't post them to GlyphStudy.
LESSON 5
Page 28-29
Assignment: Do exercise 3 on page 28-29 and post it to the Kamrin 2010 site. For each item just write
down the MdC version of the name. In the example, you would write 'dn'. Remember, the MdC does
not show all the signs, just the sounds they make. The determinative that ends the example does not
make any sound, so it does not appear in the MdC. Make sure the title line of your post reads exactly
this: HW03. That's 'H' 'W' zero three. Yep, I want that zero in there. Do NOT put the letter "O" in
there, make sure it's a zero. It helps in computer alphabetizing.
LESSON 6
Page 29-33
This is the first lesson with some real meat in it. And some stuff to become very familiar with.
1st of all, learn the hieroglyphs on pages 29-30. For the first one, the sign showing the man with his
hand to his mouth, this is different than the one that appears on page 27. They are both determinatives
for "man" but the second one is used to denote anything to do with speaking, eating, thinking, etc.,
even if the person in that case is a female.
If you look the signs up in the back of the book, starting on page 234 you will see them listed as "A1"
(kneeling man) and "A2" (kneeling man with hand to mouth). Up above, at the top of the page, under
"Key", you will find that "A1" and "A2" are what Kamrin calls sign numbers. Just about everyone else
in the world (and I think Kamrin does, too), calls them "Gardiner numbers" or "Gardiner codes". Sir
Alan Gardiner wrote a monumental work on Middle Egyptian grammar in 1927. The 3rd edition of
this work is still in print. It's probably true that most English speaking Egyptologists in the field today
learned their grammar from Gardiner. Anyway, the sign list he produced at the end of his book is the
standard reference in the field. You will often see strings of letters and numbers in posts on
GlyphStudy. Those are Gardiner codes. Use them to refer to a specific sign. Become familiar with
this section of the book. Kamrin does not use the complete set of Gardiner codes. This is not a
complete grammar, so you won't see the complete list. The list does exist in several places on the
internet.
2nd of all, become familiar with the vocabulary. In particular you should know "this" (both masculine
and feminine versions), "thing", "man", "woman", "seat, throne". Note how the swallow determinative
is used for 'bin', "evil, bad".
Here's the MdC version of all the Egyptian words in the vocabulary list for this chapter:
Apd
iqr (don't write ikr - that would be a different word)
bin
pn
hA
hy
Hqr
xfty
xt
s
st
st
smsw
tn
Note that the words for "woman" and "seat/throne" have exactly the same two consonants. Remember
that we don't have the vowels so in real life the two words probably sounded rather different from each
other.
The first two paragraphs on page 32 are very important. If you have never encountered grammatical
gender before, this will be something very new. English does not have it. English used to have
grammatical gender but lost it a long time ago.
Egyptian words are classified as masculine or feminine. Except in obvious cases, for example: men
and women, grammatical gender has absolutely nothing to do with sex. There is no particular reason
why any given word belongs to either category. Most Egyptian words are masculine.
Egyptian adejectives always follow their noun. This is very different than English. We say "big tree",
Egyptians said the equivalent of "tree big". Adjectives never "modify" nouns. That's a quaint and
useless grammatical term that needs to be abolished - right now. Adjectives describe, they help identify
which item is being discussed. Instead of "tree" I might be talking specifically about the "big tree" or
the "big, leafy, tree", something like that.
In Egyptian all words and phrases that are descriptive like this follow the item they are describing.
