Nice news for enthusiasts of ancient languages: the final entries have been added to The Demotic Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CDD). Furthermore, to quote Memiyawanzi: “Best of all, as it is the case with all publications of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, the dictionary is freely available to use online from their website.” (Don’t miss the infographic reproduced by Memiyawanzi showing the evolution of the Egyptian words that gave us ebony and adobe.) John Noble Wilford has a pretty good write-up at the NY Times:
Demotic was one of the three scripts inscribed on the Rosetta stone, along with Greek and hieroglyphs, enabling European scholars to decipher the royal language in the early 19th century and thus read the top-down version of a great civilization’s long history.
Now, scholars at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago have completed almost 40 years of research and published online the final entries of a 2,000-page dictionary that more than doubles the thousands of known Demotic words. Egyptologists expect that the dictionary’s definitions and examples of how words were used in ancient texts will expedite translations of Demotic documents, more of which are unpublished than any other stage of early Egyptian writing.
A workshop for specialists in Demotic research was held at the university last month as the dictionary section for the letter S, the last of 25 chapters to be finished, is being posted on the Oriental Institute’s Web site, where the dictionary is available free. Eventually a printed edition will be produced, mainly for research libraries, the university said.
Janet H. Johnson, an Egyptologist at the university’s Oriental Institute who has devoted much of her career to editing the Chicago Demotic Dictionary, called it “an indispensable tool for reconstructing the social, political and cultural life of ancient Egypt during a fascinating period,” when the land was usually dominated by foreigners — first Persians, then Greeks and finally Romans.
“It’s really huge what a dictionary does for understanding an ancient society,” said Gil Stein, director of the institute. “This will lead to mastering texts from the Egyptians themselves, not their rulers, at a time the country was becoming absorbed increasingly into the Greco-Roman world.”
Unfortunately, Wilford goes on to make the silly statement that “Egyptians abandoned Demotic more than 1,500 years ago, taking up Coptic and eventually Arabic,” which is like saying the English abandoned Old English to take up Middle English—Coptic is just a later form of the language represented by Demotic (the term technically refers to the script, though it is convenient to use it for the language as well). But all newspaper reporting on language must contain at least one inaccuracy, or they wouldn’t let it go to print. [John Cowan says "I take that to mean that Egyptians abandoned Demotic script, replacing it with Coptic script and then (with a change of language) Arabic script," which is generous and may well be true. If so, my apologies, JNW!] Anyway, check out the website, and if you’re truly interested you’ll want to tackle Johnson’s Thus Wrote ‘Onchsheshonqy – An Introductory Grammar of Demotic, also freely available online (pdf); all praise to the internet and the Oriental Institute. (Thanks, Eric!)