Egyptian Scribes writing Greek

Clarysse, Willy

doi:10.1484/j.cde.2.308932

Cited by 16 publications

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“…A Greek writing Greek would generally use a pen made of reed while an Egyptian writing Egyptian would use a pen made of rush. Although the differences between these two pens have been described already in detail by Tait (1998) and Clarysse (1993), it is worth giving a quick overview again here.…”

Section: The Materiality Of Writing Greek and Egyptianmentioning

confidence: 94%

Written Greek but Drawn Egyptian: Script changes in a bilingual dream papyrus

Kidd¹

2013

Writing as Material Practice: Substance, Surface and Medium

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In a 3 rd -century bce Greco-Egyptian letter inscribed on papyrus, a man writes to his friend about a recent dream. He is writing in Greek, but in order to describe his dream accurately, he says, he must write the dream itself in Egyptian; after saying his Greek farewell, he recounts the dream and begins writing in a Demotic hand. This shift in languages entails a number of transitions: a new vocabulary, a wildly different grammar, but also one very important change -a change of script. In this chapter, I will explore the conceptual background between shifting from Greek to Demotic in this letter -not in linguistic or socio-political terms, but in terms of the actual practice of writing and the ideological trappings that accompany each writing-system. I will argue that the two scripts (not just the two languages) inform the letter-writer's decision to choose and elevate Demotic as the proper vehicle for recounting his dream.I will make this argument in three parts: first, by examining the different ways that these two languages were physically written; second, by 'getting inside' the process of writing an alphabetic (Greek) versus a logographic (Demotic) script; and third, by recreating the subjective experience of the alphabetic -logographic shift through comparative evidence (English and Chinese). Although I do not argue that there is something objectively more lofty or mystical in a logographic script, I do argue that when two cultures come into contact (Greek and Egyptian, English and Chinese) the opportunity is available to compare scripts and to create a hierarchy of uses for them.This papyrus -a product of Greco-Egyptian cultural contact in 3 rd -century Egypt -exhibits such a hierarchy in that these different scripts, Greek and Egyptian, appropriate their own registers and purposes. It is possible to see (after examining a) the materiality, b) the writing process and c) the subjective experience) an entire matrix of scriptorial ideology behind this language shift -an ideology which helps to explain why this Greco-Egyptian man, Ptolemaios, chooses Egyptian for his dream content. After all, he is making the transition from every-day affairs to

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Section: The Materiality Of Writing Greek and Egyptianmentioning

confidence: 94%

Written Greek but Drawn Egyptian: Script changes in a bilingual dream papyrus

Kidd¹

2013

Writing as Material Practice: Substance, Surface and Medium

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“…For the Egyptian scribe, however, the process of writing is closer to our associations not of writing, but of painting -especially watercolour painting. For one, the brush-like rush was not used with an inkwell, but a palette (Figure 3), which held a cake of black, carbon-based 'watercolour' in one oval (a mixture of black pigment from charred organic materials and a gum arabic binding) and a cake of red 'watercolour' in the other (red pigment from iron oxide; see Nicholson andShaw 2000: 238, andClarysse 1993: 189 for the differences between Greek metallic based ink versus Egyptian carbon-based ink). The writer then applied water with the brush to the 'watercolour' , and then proceeded to apply this ink to the surface (papyrus, ostracon, etc.…”

Section: The Materiality Of Writing Greek and Egyptianmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Would such practice have seemed strange to him? During this same period when Ptolemaios was writing this letter with a reed pen, Egyptian scribes elsewhere were just beginning to abandon the rush pen and adopt the reed for writing Greek, the language of the new ruling class (although Egyptian documents still were written with the rush); gradually, the reed pen came to dominate more generally (by the 2 nd century ce, both Greek and Egyptian were written with the reed pen; Clarysse 1993;Depauw 1997: 83;Tait 1988: 481). But in Ptolemaios' day, there was still a fairly strict division between writing Egyptian with a rush and Greek with a reed.…”

Section: The Materiality Of Writing Greek and Egyptianmentioning

confidence: 99%

Writing as Material Practice: Substance, surface and medium

Matthews¹

2013

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“…Interaction between the two languages has been studied for the Ptolemaic period in contracts (Vierros 2007;Vierros 2012), texts written with a rush, an Egyptian school tradition (Clarysse 1993), and the correspondence of two successive engineers (Clarysse 2010a); the same is true for the Roman period Narmouthis ostraca (Bagnall 2007;Leiwo 2003;Rutherford 2010). However, the early Byzantine period has often been left aside perhaps because of its transitional nature (historically speaking) (Keenan 2007;Kiss 2007;van Minnen 2007) or because no literary source comparable to the New Testament for earlier periods is readily available to compare our documentary texts to.…”

Section: Introduction and Outlinementioning

confidence: 99%

Papers on Ancient Greek Linguistics. Proceedings of the Ninth International Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics (ICAGL9) 30 August – 1 September 2018, Helsinki

Vierros¹,

Leiwo²,

Dahlgren³

2021

Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum

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This volume is a collection of twenty-nine papers that had their preliminary presentation at the 9th International Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics (ICAGL9) that took place in Helsinki 28 August – 1 September, 2018. Thus they show exciting new lines of research in the field of Ancient Greek linguistics, where many approaches take advantage of current linguistic methods and theories. The Helsinki colloquium had two themes: 1) Language contact between Greek and other languages and 2) Linguistic research on original documents and manuscripts. The majority of the papers in this volume focus on these themes, many of them on both. However, Ancient Greek linguistic research from all angles, synchronically as well as diachronically studied, was welcomed. Consequently, all levels and many topics regarding language analysis – morphology, syntax, modality discourse analysis, semantics as well as pragmatics - were presented in the contributions by scholars ranging from those beginning their academic careers ro those with already well established names in the field.

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Egyptian Scribes writing Greek

Cited by 16 publications

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Written Greek but Drawn Egyptian: Script changes in a bilingual dream papyrus

Written Greek but Drawn Egyptian: Script changes in a bilingual dream papyrus

Writing as Material Practice: Substance, surface and medium

Papers on Ancient Greek Linguistics. Proceedings of the Ninth International Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics (ICAGL9) 30 August – 1 September 2018, Helsinki

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