An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, Vol. 1 by E.A. Wallis Budge

An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, Vol. 1 Reviews

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  Banole

  The two volume Hieroglyphic Dictionary is still a very useful work. This massive work is well organized. You should buy BOTH volumes 1 and 2 in order to properly use the dictionary. Keep in mind that volume 2 contains the various indexes for both volumes and part of the huge dictionary of ancient Egyptian words and the index of all the English words. So you need both volumes!
  There are numerous very useful comments and insights into the ancient cultures of the Nile.
  Budge was an expert in Semitic languages and in Coptic. He was a talented and skilled linguist who could read the ancient Egyptian language as well, if not better than most scholars today. Many points of ancient Egyptian grammar and exact word meanings are unknown and much of what passes for "modern scholarship" is mere guesswork!
  It is interesting to note that people who can't read a word of ancient Egyptian have the audacity to criticize a profoundly erudite and talented linguist and translator of many ancient Semitic and ancient Egyptian text.
  After many, many years of study of almost every aspect of ancient Egypt culture, Budge abandoned the pure assertion that ancient Egypt was an "Oriental" or "Eastern culture". Based largely, I imagine, on Hegel's pure assertions that "The History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning." These ideas have become part of European intellectual DOGMA. Africa is not a part of human history; Ancient Egypt belongs to Europe. This is pure DOGMA. Hegel's children are still among us.
  But on the other hand, after years of objective study of the language, religion, society and customs of the ancient Egyptians, Budge was led screaming and kicking, I might add, to the realization that the religion of the Egyptians was BLACK AFRICAN. The concept of the "ka" and the "ba" are found almost everywhere in Black Africa today! The language was a BLACK AFRICAN language and the customs were purely African. The ancient Egyptians were: "African Negroes" or "Nilotic Negroes" wrote Budge in several of his later works. In spite of the anti-African racism that we find in his earlier and even his later works, Budge rose above the strong prejudices of his time and followed the facts. The facts led to the heart of Africa, not to Asia.
  
  Budge seems to be thinking out aloud when he writes in the Introduction of Vol. 1 of Hieroglyphic Dictionary (lxviii)these words which led, in part, to his banishment from halls of western ACADEME: "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".
  Even Champollion Le Jeune, the man who first deciphered ancient Egyptian, in his Grammaire Egyptienne(p.xix Introduction) says virtually the same thing. Like Champollion,Budge was a true scholar who followed the facts where ever those facts led.
  Many modern African scholars have confirmed that the language of ancient Egypt was a "typical" Black African language.
  For example Dr. Theophile Obenga(ORIGINE COMMUNE DE L'EGYPTIEN ANCIEN DU COPTE ET DES LANGUES NEGRO-AFRICAINES MODERNES) has proven the genetic linguistic relationship between the language spoken by the ancient Egyptians, Coptic and modern Black African languages. No competent linguist can demonstrate that the language of ancient Egypt has any genetic relationship to the Semitic languages....it can not be done!!!
  In fact, Dr. Theophile Obenga, a native speaker of Mbochi, Lingala and several other African languages, has put forth a new classification of African languages based on modern linguistics.
  No more "Hamito-Semitic" , "Afro-Asiatic" or "Afrasan" language families.
  When you study the language of ancient Egypt you study an ancient Black African language...Budge dared follow the truth-even if it led him outside of the Eurocentric white supremacy intellectual paradigm.
  Most Eurocentric scholars go along with the program-they place tenure,acceptance and prestige above scholarship. The world of Western scholarship can sometimes be too narrow , too petty and too deeply rooted in its religious,cultural and racial dogmas. Ethnocentrism seems to almost always distort scholarship.
  Budge's two volume dictionary is often slandered because of his system of transliteration and the so-called "advances" made in understanding and translating the language of ancient Nile Valley Egypto-Nubian civilizations. Modern African scholars such as Theophile Obenga, Cheikh Anta Diop, Babacar Sall and a host of others have demonstrated time and time again that the language of "Ancient Egypt" can be only fully understand within its Black African social, religious, ethnic and cultural contexts. The old Greenberg classification of African languages must be rejected in the face of the works of Obenga. It is now understood that the language of ancient Egypt can not be fully understood outside of its Negro African cultural, ethnic, social and religious context.
  This huge two volume dictionary would be a welcomed addition to any serious student of the ancient language of Kmt(Egypt).
  
• 
  Lina

  My colleague, who is an actual Egyptologist says, this dictionary is very outdated, full of mistakes, and can't be used today in all seriousness. There are other modern dictionaries which are very good. But this one is hilarious to explore, I enjoy it.
• 
  Kim

  I avoided Budge for years because of Daniel Jackson, yes the fictional character, disparaging him in Stargate. No joke :)
  
  Eventually, though, I wanted easy access to the actual arrangement (a wild mess of art over form or form over art but ha ha which one is in use at any given moment doesn't have a determinative to guide us!) of long-form Egyptian prose, and Budge's public domain stuff is great for that... and then I discovered his translations are actually pretty good. It was still early after the initial decipherment and he was so obviously an enthusiastic and sometimes fanciful learner, kind of like Sir Arthur Evans is in the Minoan domain. I like reading Budge's work, and comparing it with more modern interpretation. There's big and little phonetic variants, but a lot of the lexical stuff is reasonably sound, inasmuch as we'll ever read ancient Egyptian - especially hapax legomenon or rarely used configurations - with confidence.
• 
  Jenny

  It takes a while for the new coming reader to get used to the way the dictionary is laid out because it's chronicled using the Ancient Egyptian alphabetic chart (according to Champollion and other sources, namely the author: Budge). It has helped me out in sticky spots where I didn't know a word (sometimes it seemed like it was a hapax Legomenon, but proved not to be).
• 
  Omowale Jabali

  The most comprehensive book on this area of study that I have read to date. Budge did a good job explaining in plain English the meaning of personal and place names which can be used to interpret sacred texts such as the Pert em Hru and the Pyramid Texts.
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  Meltha

  Bought this today for $2 in a close-out pile. Had a big red sticker on it, so I didn't realize it's volume 1 of 2. Oops. My bad.
• 
  saïd

  Originally read for university.
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  Nada Mohammed

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