Читать книгу Treasury of Egyptian Mythology: Classic Stories of Gods, Goddesses, Monsters & Mortals - Christina Balit - Страница 8

PREFACE

History of Egyptian Names

It’s hard to know what ancient Egyptians called their gods because they wrote names differently at different times and left out important information. For example, in the earliest hieroglyphs the god Tehuti’s name was:

The first symbol, the ibis, is Tehuti’s sacred bird. The second is a symbol for the first sound of “top”: This shows us that his name started with a t. Under that is a symbol for the first sound of “yet.” The last is a symbol showing this is a god’s name.

By the time of the Old Kingdom (2575–2125 B.C.), the ibis was often replaced by three symbols:

The “snake” stands for the first sound of “June.” The “twisted flax” stands for a harsh h sound like the one we make when we exhale on glasses before cleaning them, and the “quail chick” stands for the sound(s) following l in “glue.”

By the Middle Kingdom (2010–1630 B.C.), the first symbol was often replaced with , representing the first sound of “dog.” And in the late period (664–332 B.C.) the first symbol was often , perhaps representing the first and maybe second sounds of “tell.”

So the initial sound of Tehuti’s name changed three times. And linguists argue over what the rest of the sounds in his name were.

When the Greeks invaded, they recorded myths using their alphabet. But Egyptian and Greek did not have exactly the same sounds, so transcribing from one alphabet to the other was only approximate. In addition, Greek spellings were based on more modern pronunciations than those of early Egypt.

For the names in this book, I chose to use the older Egyptian names, not filtered through Greek: hence Tehuti. Nevertheless, I call the country “Egypt” instead of the hardly known ancient name Kemet. And since the Greek names are more familiar, I provide a reference chart below and list the gods’ and goddesses’ names both ways in the Table of Contents and on the opening pages of each chapter.

Egyptian Name	Greek Name
Ra	Helios
Set	Seth
Aset	Isis
Usir	Osiris
Nebet Hut	Nephthys
Heru Sa Aset	Horus the Younger
Inpu	Anubis
Tefnut	Tphenis
Tehuti	Thoth
Heru Wer	Horus the Elder
Hut Heru	Hathor
Sekhmet	Sachmis
Nit	Neith
Khnum	Chnoumis
Sobek	Souchos
Bastet	Bast
Imhotep	Imuthes