Dictionary of the Egyptian language

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The Dictionary of the Egyptian Language ( Wb ) is a comprehensive dictionary of ancient , central and new Egyptian as well as hieroglyphic inscriptions from the Greco-Roman period , edited by Adolf Erman and Hermann Grapow , which was mainly held at the then Prussian Academy of Sciences from 1897 to 1961 was created in Berlin, which is why it is also known as the “Berlin dictionary”. With around 16,000 words and five main volumes, two secondary volumes and five reference volumes, it is the most complete printed dictionary of Egyptian to date.

history

The project was launched in 1897 by Adolf Erman and supported by Wilhelm II with 120,000 Reichsmarks . The project was led by a commission elected by the academies in Berlin, Göttingen, Leipzig and Munich. In order to record the words and their references, the Egyptian texts were systematically bogged down from 1898 onwards. The not yet published or only inadequately published texts had to be recorded in Egypt and European museums from 1898 to 1914 and then wasted. The inscriptions from Lower Nubia, threatened by the first Aswan Dam , were also saved. In 1906 Adolf Erman and Kurt Sethe began working on the manuscript. It turned out that the planned concept required far too many pages, which is why it was not necessary to specify the references within the main volumes.

During the First World War, the despatch had to be broken off, but the number of papers had increased to 1,374,806 by 1918. In 1921 Erman and Grapow published an Egyptian concise dictionary as an interim result of their work . In 1926, work began on the five main volumes, which, financed by John D. Rockefeller II , were autographed by the Danish Egyptologist Wolja Erichsen and published from 1926 to 1931 by the Leipzig publisher JC Hinrichs. After that, the voucher volumes were drawn up. Her first volume appeared in 1935, the second in 1940, then work was completely interrupted by the outbreak of World War II from 1943 to 1945. The remaining three reference volumes could finally be presented in 1951 and 1953. In 1950 Volume VI was also published with a German-Egyptian dictionary (alphabetically and in subject groups) as well as a list of the Semitic, Greek and Coptic words in the main volumes; Volume VII followed in 1961 with a declining dictionary. The work was thus completed after 64 years.

However, since the number of known texts has increased significantly since the end of the scrapping and even the texts known at the time could not be fully utilized, a revision became more and more urgent over time. On the one hand, it was presented in the form of the online thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae as a large-scale collaborative project between several academies of science, and on the other hand, the printed Hannig Lexica , which appeared in the Cultural History of the Ancient World series from 1995 to 2003 , can be seen as a revision of the old dictionary.

Correspondence with Adolf Erman, Kurt Sethe and Hermann Grapow with reference to the dictionary is in the holdings of JC Hinrichs Verlag, Leipzig in the Saxon State Archives, Leipzig State Archives.

literature

  • Adolf Erman, Hermann Grapow (Hrsg.): Dictionary of the Egyptian language. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1926–1961.
  • Adolf Erman, Hermann Grapow: The dictionary of the Egyptian language. On the history of a large scientific company at the academy. Berlin 1953.
  • Wolfgang Kosack: Dictionary of the Egyptian language. Edited by Adolf Erman and Hermann Grapow. Expanded, corrected and supplemented by Wolfgang Kosack. 5 volumes, 5644 pages. Christoph Brunner, Nunningen 2018, ISBN 978-3-906206-40-0 .

Web links

Wikisource: Ancient Egyptian Dictionary  - Sources and Full Texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Holdings 22228 from JC Hinrichs Verlag, Leipzig  ; From: archiv.sachsen.de , accessed on September 20, 2019.