The Eloquent Peasant

In relation to my previous post about the Egyptian polyseme šdi which means both ‘to suckle’ and ‘to educate’, I thought I’d look at another polyseme which ended up being extremely influential in Egyptian tomb decoration. And which is an excellent excuse to examine some of my favourite masterpieces of Egyptian art, the tomb paintings […]

I really love when a certain word has dual related meanings that reveal the way people understand certain concepts and make associations between them. I mean not just homonyms that sound the same, but ones that actually have a deeper connection between their different meanings. They’re called polysemes. An example in English would be ‘mole’, […]

To the Egyptians, ‘travel’ was synonymous with ‘water travel’, and the Nile acted as the country’s superhighway. Since Egypt was entirely strung out along the fertile riverbanks of the life-giving Nile that served as the country’s backbone, the majority of travel and transportation was north-south oriented and much time and energy was saved by using […]

I’ve decided that it might be interesting to share some of my favourite Egyptian words each week, so that even if you don’t read hieroglyphs, you can enjoy some of the flavour and character of the language that is often lost in translation.
The basis of certain words and the special ways in which they were […]