Names and determinatives in ancient Egypt
Interesting facts about hieroglyphic writing
Hieroglyphic writing has no spaces between elements and no punctuation marks. In addition, hieroglyphs can be read as both phonetic and symbolic signs. For example, the hieroglyph "ankh" can be read either as "the vital spirit" or be used to render its sound if one wanted to translate the name Giancarlo into hieroglyphic!
To make sense of it, the Egyptians had invented a suffix, the determinative, which clarified the meaning of the previous hieroglyphs. Every element of writing had its own determinative: from house to city, from animals to things, from the functions exercised (scribe, priest, official, etc.) to the gender of proper names and so on.
There were determinatives for abstract concepts (a papyrus scroll) and even for foreigners (represented with beards) and pregnant women! Since then proper names did not have a masculine or feminine gender, there was a need for a determinative to determine the gender of the named person.
Some examples:
Interesting facts about hieroglyphic writing
As can be seen, the name of a people (and, to this day, even a surname) was determined by the union of the symbol of man and woman and the number three, with the meaning of "many."
When tourists in Egypt buy T-shirts or cartouches to hang on their necklaces with their names on them, the hieroglyphs that are used, for obvious reasons of simplicity, are only single-letter ones and always lack the determinative.
In hieroglyphic writing, in fact, there are many other signs that have bi-, tri- and even four-phonetic readings (see the ankh mentioned above), but using them for these tourist gadgets would be too complicated and uneconomical.
So, let's create some!
Those who wanted a correct determinative for their names today, besides "man," "woman," and a few others, would not have many options. Determinatives for "lawyer," "cyclist," "politician," "showman," "aviator," etc., do not exist. New ones would have to be created. Something the ancient Egyptians were quite open about. Suffice it to say that before the Ptolemies, the letter "L" did not exist. They had to create it (the crouching lion). If not, how could they have written "Ptolemaios" and "Qleopatras"?
So, I took the liberty of inventing some: for a web designer, for an archaeologist and also for an old man and an advertiser. I put a megaphone in front of the last one, but I am open to suggestions!
