Rather than wait for you to dare a step, I'll just move on to illustrate a few things about the ancient Egyptian language. I marked with numbers some things of interest.





1) This verb construction, "hr sekhat" is called a pseudo-verbal construction. The number "4" marks the added "t" which turns the verb stem "think" into an infinitive "to think". So literally "upon to think". The use of this pseudo-verbal construction begins in the Fifth Dynasty at the time the pyramid texts would have been composed. For a certain time period this was used to express the imperfect aspect of an action...in this case "is thinking". And that dates the phrase to a time before the New Kingdom, probably to an Old Kingdom medical text copied over to the Ebers Papyrus. In the New Kingdom this phrase would have been written as "m skhat" instead of "hr sekhat".


2) This is the geminated (double consonant) version of "maah", i.e. "maahh". In this particular setting, the meaning of it remains a mystery. However, in other settings gemination creates an imperfect-like sense, i.e. an action which is ongoing or repeated or usual (as in "I used to drag stones up ramps until I saw a geyser spouting"). My personal opinion is that gemination in this setting denotes the imperfect just as does the pseudo-verbal construct further down in this sentence.

3) "Irj" is a preposition turned into an adjective...."as for" "with respect to"

5) This is the letter "f" which marks person and gender...singular masculine. Here, therefore "his heart" in both postions

Few other comments:

Note the interesting phonetic similarity between flooding and forgetting.

The Egyptian believed that thoughts came from the heart. So the context of "heart" is what we relate to the "mind".

Look at the interesting way the word think is put together: "cause to appear".."s-kha". This suggests that the word relates to the visuals of thinking, but it also carries another meaning...that this could be made to happen. So to the ancient Egyptians thinking was a willed action in the heart involving appearing images.

The grammar: This is a complex nominal predicate sentence. It is complex because the usual nouns are replaced by noun phrases. At the end is an adverbial phrase which qualifies the main clause: "...like one who is thinking about another matter"

The entire sentence reads as follows (my own interpretation):

"With respect to "a flooded mind" [the symptom], he [ie the patient] is forgetting as if he is preoccupied."

Jim Allen:
"As for "his mind is flooded", it means that his mind forgets, like one who is thinking of another matter"

Note that Allen is not translating "is forgetting" but "forgets" because he does not believe gemination in an unmarked noun clause indicates aspect, but could just be a stylistic feature of speech.

I think gemination, here as in other settings, indicates the imperfect aspect. The imperfect aspect brings an action to the foreground of the listeners' attention. By making an action incomplete, the listener or reader feels it is ongoing as they hear or read the words. This is a dramatizing effect. We do this in English too independent of tense:
"He made a ramp to pull stones up the pyramid"..it's done in other words.
"He was making a ramp to pull stones up the pyramid"....it makes you feel something should come after this. It hold your attention.

In the Old Kingdom, this dramatizing effect was achieved with the Subject-sdm.f construction, the true way to mark imperfect aspect before the pseud-verbal construct came in the Fifth Dynasty.

This might make for a nice project: Look in the Pyramid Texts to see which parts of it use the Subject-sdm.f construct and which the pseudo-verbal construct to date them.



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 27-Nov-18 00:30 by Manu.