March 26, 2002 (Slightly altered)
Never one to quit while he's behind, "John" has since tried to rewrite history in order to cast his comments on this point in a less absurd light. You've seen the commentary leading up to this page for yourself. The gentleman tried to portray it as an attempt to argue that he was crazy for saying that the Greeks and Romans couldn't pronounce the "correct names" of the netjeru (ie. the Egyptian deities, or aspects of God, as your theological preferences may run). As you can see for yourself, such a subject wasn't even alluded to in my commentary. However, if he wants to bring this up, let us respond. The criticism is both anachronistic and ethnocentric.
The ethnocentricity should be old news to the reader, by now. The man has talked about the Greeks destroying Egyptian culture by speaking a non-Egyptian language which, even by Victorian standards, would have to be considered an extreme point of view. The fact that his ethnocentricism is based in a culture in which he has no roots may add a humorous edge to his ethnocentricism, but it does not transmute that ethnocentricism into a more enlightened viewpoint. Even this, he does in a flawed manner, however - the attitude that loanwords are to be pronounced in the manner they would be in their 'original' (read: immediately previous) languages, is a late 20th century AD attitude, with so little tradition behind it, that it raises eyebrows even among our parent's generation. (There is more than a little logic in our elders' position on this. Were our predecessors to have carried over the spellings, pronunciations, and forms of each loanword that they adopted, as fashion today dictates, our present day languages would have become unlearnable, incomprehensible messes in which every usage would be an exception, to the increasingly irrelevant rules, English being the worst mess of all). How strange, then, even to project this attitude onto the Romans of the fifth century AD, who lived at the very end of what we would term "Antiquity".
Curiously, as he made this commentary, he seemed untroubled by the fact that neither the Greeks nor the Romans ever referred to themselves as "Greeks" or "Romans". These are words in English, not in any of the dialects of Ancient Greek or in Latin. Apparently, "correct pronunciation", is something that only the Greeks and Romans may be criticised for not using, according to his point of view.
What he seems even less troubled by, is the fact that the notion that there is such a thing as the correct pronunciation of a word is peculiar, not only to our time, but, to a large extent, our place as well. Ancient Greek was, as one might expect of the language of a country made up of a collection of independent city-states, one in which many dialects were to be found. Each dialect of a language will have its own vocabulary, its own grammar, pronunciation, etc. One doesn't begin to see the appearance of single, preferred dialects in the languages of Europe, until the rise of strong, centralized monarchies which sought to suppress regional identities, the speaking of those regional dialects being an important part of those regional identities, much as the speaking of French is an integral part of what makes France French, as opposed to being English or Italian. The coming of linguistic uniformity in the countries of Western Europe, then, far from being a triumph of learning, was nothing more than a part of the consolidation of power, in the interests of maintaining colonial acquisitions. (Eg. the unsuccessful 20th century attempts on the part of the Soviet Union to Russify the non-Russian republics, or the more successful 18th and 19th century efforts on the part of the British crown to impose English on their unwilling Celtic subjects). To then project the products of second millenium political ambitions on the world of the first millenium BC (that of the Classical Greeks) is anachronistic indeed, and radically out of place in the context of a collection of city-states which passionately defended their own independence. In the absence of the curious 20th century notion that such a thing as the correct way to speak a language exists, the very rationale for carrying pronunciations (or other aspects of the languages from which loanwords come) vanishes.
Via private e-mail to me, however, "John" would, in early 2002, take a different tack, smugly referring to the 'nisut' (Tamara Siuda) teaching that we should communicate with Netjer, "the REAL names of Netjer", as he put it.
John, at this point, had failed to make a fundamental distinction. In Egyptian mythology, one may find the concept of the hidden, true name of a deity. Consider, for example, the story in which, after Ra has grown feeble with age, Aset (Isis) fashions a snake out of his drool, which then bites him. Because Ra, apparently deep in senility, doesn't know the cause of his injury, he is unable to heal it himself, and must turn to Aset for help. Aset agrees, but only on the condition that Ra give her his true, hidden name. He yields, and in this manner, she gains power over him, thus becoming "a goddess like unto Ra".
As this story should make clear, while, in the context of this mythos, there may be such a thing as an absolute, "real" name of a deity, "Name of Netjer", or a netjer as one prefers, this is not to be mistaken for the 'names' by which the netjeru (plural of netjer) are known. Every peasant plowing a field in ancient Egypt knew the name "Ra", and presumably the priesthood would be displeased at the thought of every such peasant having such power over the netjeru. Yet they saw no objection to sharing these 'names' that have come down to us. Also, how meaningful would Aset's knowledge of this name be meaningful, under the circumstance, if it were nothing more than a piece of information in the hands of the entire mortal population of Egypt, and thus, surely in the hands of all of the netjeru ?
Even on the House of Netjer website (the homepage of an organization which this individual had, in the past, expressed a desire to join), etymologies have been suggested for the names of the various "Names of Netjer", ie. Egyptian deities, or aspects of God, as the House believes (1). "Sekhmet", for example, derives from the words for "powerful female". These names we see, aren't the true names of the netjeru (ie. "Names"), but merely derivates of descriptive titles.
Let us add that in the case of the story just mentioned, no reason is given to even suspect that the true name of Ra is something that can be uttered. It is said to have passed from his breast to that of Aset. Ie. from his heart to hers, the heart being thought of as the seat of the intellect in ancient Egypt? Is this even speech, as we understand it? One may well wonder, assuming that such things as "true names" even exist, whether such a name would even be utterable, much less one familiar to us. (2)
Put in this context, the absurdity of Kheru's commentary becomes even clearer. He is complaining about the destruction of Egyptian culture, through the translation of composites of common nouns. To object to this, as a general practice, is tantamount to asserting the existence of an 'uncorrupted language'. No such thing could possibly exist.
Every language is, itself, a corruption of the languages it grew out of, even Old Egyptian. (The ancients might have been under the illusion that the world was created miraculously in relatively recent times, but we know better today. Obviously, the ancestors of the subjects of the early pharoahs had languages of their own, leading back into the time when our species emerged, gradually, over hundreds of millenia). So, if the Greeks should have added a corruption of their own, as "Sekhmet" in Egyptian became the root for "Sachmis" in Greek, they did nothing that the Egyptians themselves hadn't done, many, many times before.
As for the imagined absolute nature of the common deity names in Ancient Egypt, the arguments may be slightly more involved, but they are trivial to follow, and the conclusion is, inescapably, the same.
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