Chapter Text
Oh, hey. This is a bit unexpected, odd, unnecessary or whatever; but hey -my mind asks only one question before attempting something, and that question is “why not?”
Welcome, my kind readers. Welcome to this thing.
This thing is a fic in progress in Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs.
I’m Sanity, was chatting with BSA as usual, they told me about an AU idea involving some Ancient Egyptian shit (Gears being a researcher, Iceberg being the mummy), and I thought, why not. And that fucking why not has caused me to learn a significant amount of hieroglyphs and the grammar and shit. Been working on this for a few days. Just filled the first page, I’m too excited, posting this as you can see.
Here you go.
The chapters with the title “English” will have the translation. The chapters with “Hieroglyph” will have the ancient stuff -but also the literal meanings are there too, so you will be able to understand it even though it sounds a bit broken.
Wanna hear the process and shit? To understand it better?
I used 7 sources. I will refer to them by their numbers from now on.
- Das Buch der Schrift enthaltend die Schriftzeichen und Alphabete aller Zeiten und aller Völker des Erdkreises”, Carl Faulmann
- Wikipedia’s list of Egyptian Hieroglyphs
- bibalex.org
- jimloy.com in webarchive
- “L’Écriture, mémoire des hommes” Georges Jean
- “Egypt and the Egyptians” Douglas Brewer, Emily Teeter
- “Ancient Egypt” Collins gem
Four of them were present as physical books in my hands (in my native or in English, wrote the original names in there). My primary sources were 1 and 2 while deciding on which hieroglyphs to use. 3 and 4 for grammar and some hieroglyphs too.
I am not an Egyptologist. Not a linguist. Just a crazy motherfucker who is interested in dead languages/scripts and shit.
So, let’s start.
First of all, one symbol can have many meanings. Something like a hand, for example. A fist symbol. It means “fist” and “hold” at the same time. How the fuck do we understand that it is “hold”, like when I wrote?
Add another sign, of course. That’s called “determinative”. Gears was holding the motherfucking rope, not fucking punching or doing anything to that shit. So that’s why I added a determinative of “force, effort”. Aaaand that also added the meaning of “holding with force”. How good is that shit?
And some symbols have really good meanings. Like damn. The one I used for “pit” actually has other meanings of “subterranean shrine”, like damn, how good is that shit?
Also, uh… Some of it ain’t easy. For the action “see”, we got a predetermined symbol. You don’t simply put an eye. You put some weird symbol and an eye under, and two birds next to it. But guess what? Not some random bird. If you use a random bird, you are fucked. There are 28 full-body birds in my primary source. 28 full-body birds. Accidentally made the beak a bit weird while trying to write “lot”? You fucked up, congrats, now it says “bad”. Like that shit. So you gotta be careful. And also countless half-birds too… Heads or wings or shit, I’m talking about.
Alright! After learning that Egyptians surely liked birds, we gotta talk about the alphabet. That’s right. Some of the symbols are not only symbols, they are letters. Good luck. That chick-lookin’ bird that I always manage to draw stupidly is the letter “u” or “w” or “v” that you’ll see. What the fuck? And that brings us to the subject of the motherfucking sounds.
Are you familiar with Hebrew or Arabic? Like that, okay? You got a vav/waw and that’s used for basically v/w/u as far as I know (in Arabic, I believe; but I don’t know Arabic, I just know the dead Ottoman Turkish script and that cool fucker uses waw for v/u/ü/o/ö, so good luck trying to know which is which, you are beyond fucked at this point). So, what I’m trying to say is, you simply don’t have E. You got I or some shit like that. And you got A (aleph/elif) or stuff. So I changed Gears into Girs, that’s how you’d be reading that. Also, you don’t have C. So you gotta use S or K, depending on how you read that. Good fucking luck.
Also… I think some shit changes in Late Egyptian but I was begging for mercy by that point so you’ll notice that some sentences or hieroglyph choices might be more ancient than the others.
I happened to learn passive voice, which fucked me up again and again as I got it wrong 3 times.
Ancient Egyptian sentence order is Verb-Subject-Object-Etc. My native language is Subject-Object-Verb. English is Subject-Verb-Object.
Also, adjectives come after the noun. Like Latin or French, if you are familiar with them. I don’t know about the other Romance languages well enough to speak for the others, though.
And I gotta say that I simply couldn’t find some words. I mean, I prepared myself a messy hieroglyph dictionary and it is 197 pages or something on Word, and there is no odd or surprised or some shit. So guess what? Simply changed the words.
Gotta talk about the determinatives again -there are some little sticks. Three sticks mean plural. One stick under the sign means “as scribed”, which I used while drawing Gears reaching for the coffin.
Any Egyptologists out there, sorry if I made any typos/scribos [goddamnit], but I believe that this should be at least largely accurate and a lucky Egyptian merchant would have been able to read some fic, eh?
I first outlined the fic in English. Translated it into Ancient Egyptian accordingly (removing out the words or adding some depending on the language). Then translated it back into English. [Insert “effort” determinative here.]
If you have any other dead language/script recommendations, I will try my best to check them. Gotta tell you, I had given up on Sumerian cuneiforms years ago when I failed to remember “water”, because cuneiforms, okay? They are sticks. I have some other dead language/scripts on my mind that I can use sometime. Maybe artificial languages as well. Shit’ll be fun.
Enjoy. You may ask me about anything -about the hieroglyphs and sentence structures or anything. Correct me if you spot any mistakes. I have huge respect for the ancient scribes. Like, no one said, “Damn, slow down pharaoh, can’t engrave like that, man.” That’s some real talent right there.
After all this, I think we all question my sanity.
Gifting this to also AO3_Support for actually taking the time to add unicode support so that I could update this fic in proper writing instead of pictures of handwritten scripts... Thank you, truly!