Some elements in the translation of hieroglyphs are simply not knowable. They are a matter of opinion. For example, there is nothing to suggest the use of the imperative or the future in the first verse. The Russian Egyptologist Alexandre Piankoff, working in the 1960s, differs from James Allen on vocabulary, parts of speech, and his interpretation of the sense and arrangement of the text: Allen sees the beginning as what Piankoff understands is the end, the west wall above the sarcophagus, which they believe is covered with magic spells to protect the mummy from snakebite. But there are numerous misrepresentations of things throughout their interpretations that are perfectly knowable. Distortions of well-known words in the original hieroglyphs and pervasive grammatical inaccuracies distort the sense of the passage and turn the translation into something that is neither Egyptian nor English. Some simple details in the passage quoted on pages 29ff illustrate the confusion:
1. “You” does not occur with “door.”
2. Netherw is translated as “gods.”
3. Qhr is translated not as “falcon” but as the god Horus.
4. The word sbn, translated here as “glide,” in verse 2 as “crawl,” does not occur in the same column as the word “path” and does not modify it.
5. Blast of heat where the gods scoop water unnecessarily exaggerates the word for “fire” and ignores the preposition “beneath.”
6. They will make a path that Unis may pass on it does not acknowledge the double use of the word path, and instead turns the simple verb from path, s (causative prefix) + wa, into translationese, that Unis may pass on it, further clouding the obvious meaning.
7. The hieroglyphic hapax legomenon at the end of the first verse, with its triangle, is ignored.
The translation of the second verse continues in the same vein, rendering this concise, well-constructed poetic line into garbled English:
Get back gored longhorn... Fall down. Crawl away.
Here neg nega becomes “gored longhorn.”
Why would the bull, who is the one with the horns, be gored?
The assumption in the translation is that this is a monster that has shown up in the myth for no apparent reason, rather than an accurate description of something in the real world. In the translation of the third verse:
1. Htt is translated as “screeching,” although the pictorial determinative of the mountain landscape for this word in the parallel text of Senwosret-Ankh marks the word unquestionably as the description of an actual place.
2. Ptt is translated as “howling,” again a wild guess.
3. Anus on his back is taken from ‘rt, the participle for the verb meaning “to rise,” with a circle as a determinative.
4. Imakh, the hidden, internal spinal cord, a religious word and concept in Egypt, is translated as “back-ridge,” in keeping with this violent description of a baboon.
The assumption that this is a primitive text about African animals as monsters and gods continues in the same spirit, and is now firmly in the realm of misrepresentation. One could ignore this if there was not so much at stake. This is one of the most influential traditions in the development of world religion, and it has been grotesquely misrepresented, and hence written off as devoid of content or relevance. The defense of the kind of virtually unreadable translation above has long been “philology,” as though there were a special expertise in understanding the words that are hieroglyphs. But the simplicity of the words themselves has been aggressively distorted, and the grammatical structure, as it is well understood in Egyptology, is ignored whenever it suits the translator. It is important to look at this, because this really is why so few people have read Egyptian literature. Mistakes are inevitable. Some things cannot be known. But the important thing is that more people look at the original.
Left to the field of Egyptology, hieroglyphs have been dismissed as lacking in anything other than historical value. This position has led to unchecked mistranslation like the above. The succession of quotes below illustrate the dismissal of the literary or cultural value of hieroglyphs by Sir Alan Gardiner, who in 1927 wrote Egyptian Grammar, the standard work on hieroglyphs to this day.
Despite the reputation for philosophic wisdom attributed to the Egyptians by the Greeks, no people has ever shown itself more averse from speculation or more wholeheartedly devoted to material interests; and if they paid an exaggerated attention to funerary observances, it was because the continuance of earthly pursuits and pleasures was felt to be at stake, assuredly not out of any curiosity as to the why and whither of human life.
—Sir Alan Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar: Being an Introduction to the Study of Hieroglyphs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), 4
Egyptian shares the principal peculiarity of Semitic in that its word-stems consist of combinations of consonants, as a rule three in number, which are theoretically at least unchangeable... The Egyptian scribes ignored the vowels in writing... Such a variability of the vowels could not fail to engender the feeling that the consonants were all that mattered... [thus] it often devolves upon the translator to supply the implicit logical nexus... The only basis we have for preferring one rendering to another is an intuitive appreciation of the trend of the ancient writer’s mind.
—Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar, 2, 9, 439
After a century of informed observation the vocabulary and structure of the language of hieroglyphs are well-known. This is a written language that is organized around a well-defined, easily translatable system of root cores made of hard consonants in a phonetic alphabet much like our own. The fluid vowels that move like space or breath between these consonants define the use of the root as a word, as a noun or a verb. The vowels are inferred, as in Arabic, by the placement of the word in the sentence, an easily recognizable pattern of verb-subject-object, and by external signals such as prefixes and suffixes. Far from rendering the language inert, or primitive and limited in any sense, the invisibility and changeability of the vowels give it a dynamic, fluid quality, making possible fine shadings of meaning and a crystalline sense of the interrelationship of words. The language is patterned, much like music.
Hieroglyphs are simple. The multiplicity unfolds in the meaning. Egyptology has reversed this, making it seem as though hieroglyphs themselves are alien, hence complicated and inaccessible, and the meaning flat, hence lifeless and irrelevant. Sarcophagus (flesh eater), Sphinx (the strangler), Coffin Texts, Cannibal Hymn, Book of the Dead, mummy are not Egyptian words or ideas; they come out of the realm of European death-cult kitsch, where the interpretation of Egyptian philosophy has been mired for a long time. This accounts for the apparent lifelessness, the alien and airless quality of “ancient Egypt.” People are both attracted to this cultural dust heap and repelled by it. But this inert interpretive framework is the dust heap itself. What has been missed is that hieroglyphs are based on astute readings of the physical world. They have the timeless shine of the real.