Our August ’25 meeting featured a talk by Dr Brian French on Ancient Egyptian Literature: a personal journey of discovery.
From the moment his talk began, it was hard to resist Dr French’s boyish enthusiasm for his subject. On more than one occasion he insisted that he was making no claims to scholarly expertise — yet whenever a series of Egyptian hieroglyphics popped up on his screen, he seemed to have no trouble in casually deciphering them. He was, it was clear, by now very far from being a novice.
He told us how he’d begun to get excited by Ancient Egypt in early youth, as a result of encountering the scarabs and ‘shadoufs’ in the University of Sydney’s Nicholson Museum; but then, most engagingly, he referred us to the 1954 Hollywood film ‘The Egyptian’, which was based, somewhat tenuously, on the Finnish author Mika Waltari’s novel of the same name — and to Nat King Cole’s song ‘You Belong to Me’, which contains the line “See the Pyramids across the Nile”.
Since then he’d been to Egypt more than once in the company of fully paid-up and scholarly Egyptologists, and was looking forward to going again in a year or so.
With reference to the long history of awe, bafflement and highly inventive guesswork (many thanks, Athanasius Kircher) that preceded the actual decipherment (by Champollion and others) of Egyptian hieroglyphics in the 1820s, largely thanks to our own British Museum’s Rosetta Stone (a small-scale replica of which Dr French had brought along for us to see), Dr French then went on divide the Egyptian script into the following four categories: hieroglyphics proper, the hieratic script that followed, a later ‘demotic’ variant, and finally the Coptic alphabet (which owes almost everything to Greek and very little to hieroglyphics).
We were helpfully reminded of the three main ancient Egyptian Kingdoms: Old, Middle and New. Each of them spanned several centuries: the Old, from 2686 to 2181 BCE, the Middle from 2055 to 1650 BCE, and the New from 1550 to 1070 BCE. In between came two ‘Intermediate Periods’; a third such period followed the end of the New Kingdom.
Egyptian tribal cultures with distinctive pottery and stone tools had begun as early as 5500 BCE; these were followed by an ‘Early Dynastic Period’, which lasted from c. 3150 to 2686 BCE.
As for the ‘Literature’ part of his talk’s title, he demonstrated that this didn’t just comprise narrative genres, such as autobiographical writing: there were also funerary and didactic texts, letters, hymns and poems.
We are grateful to Dr French for this fascinating introduction to a topic that is almost as popular among people of all ages as are dinosaurs and the exploration of outer space, but which few of us have ever bothered to investigate in as much depth and with as great a degree of long-term commitment as he has done over the years.
Our thanks to Kevin Maynard for the above notes.