Budge's Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary
Sample entry of Budge's Dictionary Two years ago, in one of my posts I mentioned my desire to acquire a copy of Budge’s Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary in two volumes.
Apparently, despite of Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis Thompson Budge’s notorious reputation in the Egyptology circle, thanks to its expired copyright, many of his books are still in print, and a copy of this dictionary ended up in Kinokuniya at KLCC.
I had seen this dictionary available there for many years, even before I started to self study Egyptian, and it was still there when I last went to Kinokuniya. I had been thinking hard to buy this obsolete, inaccurate dictionary or not, and now thanks to archive.org, I do not have to pay a single buck to Dover Publications.
Initially, I was looking for some materials on the Vietnamese language, then it came to my mind that probably I can get Budge’s pdf e-books there, and then voilà, a list of Budge’s books, including his massive Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, showed up in the search result, available free to download.
Budge’s books on Egypt are deservedly labeled as obsolete and error filled, and in fact his books were already out-dated when they were first published in early last century. The Berlin School, even during Budge’s time, had made great advancement in Egyptology, yet Budge chose to ignore this, preferring adapting the older transliteration system of Samuel Birch. The transliteration of Budge often gives uninitiates a false impression that this is the actual pronunciation of the word. The truth is, not only the transliteration system is out-dated; modern scholars might give different readings to some of the glyphs. For instance, the Budge gave the Egyptian word for scribe the sound value of sesh, and in fact, later Egyptologist including the imminent Sir Allen Gardiner and many modern books give the reading as sS, however this is actually based on rare instances in the Old Kingdom reading, the actual sound value would be zXA.w, reconstructed based on the Coptic word (as given by Budge) sxai, the Middle Egyptian pronunciation of the word would be probably something like *zakh’âw (â being aleph).
One also needs to notice that, Budge’s dictionary contains considerably much more words than many modern dictionaries. This is mainly because many modern dictionaries, like Faulkner’s, contains mostly Middle Egyptian words, whereas Budge’s dictionary contains every possible words from Old Egyptian to Late Egyptian (without distinguishing them) and in every possible form of spellings. This actually can be helpful if you were to look for the variants of a word, but also can be potentially confusing for an uninitiate.
Budge’s dictionary also provides, whenever possible, the cognate of words in “Coptic, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, Amharic and Persian cuneiform”, this can be a very useful supplement for modern dictionaries, especially for comparative linguistics, but always remember reading it with the sense of caveat lector.
An interesting feature of the dictionary is in its introduction, Budge gave the readers a lengthy history of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Egyptian language dictionary. Again, like his other book The Rosetta Stone, he credited the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs to his countryman Thomas Young instead of the French scholar Jean-François Champollion, all probably because of his English pride. All of the wordlists and dictionaries mentioned by Budge, at his time, are already obsolete, and ironically Budge’s own dictionary itself is obsolete as well, even in his own time.
Budge’s dictionary is indeed woefully out-dated; his books will forever be jokes among Egyptologists. He is sometimes unjustly vilified though, partly because of his works, and party because of the way he obtained artifacts for the British Museum. I still have my respect on this man, for the sake of his eruditeness.
So, is this dictionary still usable? Yes, if you are looking materials for history of Egyptology, perhaps for spelling variants of some words (but ignore the translations and the transliterations), or it can be fun just browse through the dictionary, but of course always remember the maxim, caveat lector.
Apparently, despite of Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis Thompson Budge’s notorious reputation in the Egyptology circle, thanks to its expired copyright, many of his books are still in print, and a copy of this dictionary ended up in Kinokuniya at KLCC.
I had seen this dictionary available there for many years, even before I started to self study Egyptian, and it was still there when I last went to Kinokuniya. I had been thinking hard to buy this obsolete, inaccurate dictionary or not, and now thanks to archive.org, I do not have to pay a single buck to Dover Publications.
Initially, I was looking for some materials on the Vietnamese language, then it came to my mind that probably I can get Budge’s pdf e-books there, and then voilà, a list of Budge’s books, including his massive Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, showed up in the search result, available free to download.
Budge’s books on Egypt are deservedly labeled as obsolete and error filled, and in fact his books were already out-dated when they were first published in early last century. The Berlin School, even during Budge’s time, had made great advancement in Egyptology, yet Budge chose to ignore this, preferring adapting the older transliteration system of Samuel Birch. The transliteration of Budge often gives uninitiates a false impression that this is the actual pronunciation of the word. The truth is, not only the transliteration system is out-dated; modern scholars might give different readings to some of the glyphs. For instance, the Budge gave the Egyptian word for scribe the sound value of sesh, and in fact, later Egyptologist including the imminent Sir Allen Gardiner and many modern books give the reading as sS, however this is actually based on rare instances in the Old Kingdom reading, the actual sound value would be zXA.w, reconstructed based on the Coptic word (as given by Budge) sxai, the Middle Egyptian pronunciation of the word would be probably something like *zakh’âw (â being aleph).
One also needs to notice that, Budge’s dictionary contains considerably much more words than many modern dictionaries. This is mainly because many modern dictionaries, like Faulkner’s, contains mostly Middle Egyptian words, whereas Budge’s dictionary contains every possible words from Old Egyptian to Late Egyptian (without distinguishing them) and in every possible form of spellings. This actually can be helpful if you were to look for the variants of a word, but also can be potentially confusing for an uninitiate.
Budge’s dictionary also provides, whenever possible, the cognate of words in “Coptic, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, Amharic and Persian cuneiform”, this can be a very useful supplement for modern dictionaries, especially for comparative linguistics, but always remember reading it with the sense of caveat lector.
An interesting feature of the dictionary is in its introduction, Budge gave the readers a lengthy history of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Egyptian language dictionary. Again, like his other book The Rosetta Stone, he credited the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs to his countryman Thomas Young instead of the French scholar Jean-François Champollion, all probably because of his English pride. All of the wordlists and dictionaries mentioned by Budge, at his time, are already obsolete, and ironically Budge’s own dictionary itself is obsolete as well, even in his own time.
Budge’s dictionary is indeed woefully out-dated; his books will forever be jokes among Egyptologists. He is sometimes unjustly vilified though, partly because of his works, and party because of the way he obtained artifacts for the British Museum. I still have my respect on this man, for the sake of his eruditeness.
So, is this dictionary still usable? Yes, if you are looking materials for history of Egyptology, perhaps for spelling variants of some words (but ignore the translations and the transliterations), or it can be fun just browse through the dictionary, but of course always remember the maxim, caveat lector.
posted by Nishiki at
12:40 AM
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