Adolf Erman
Encyclopedia
Johann Peter Adolf Erman (31 October 1854 – 26 June 1937) was a renowned Egyptologist and lexicographer.
, he was the son of Georg Adolf Erman
and grandson of Paul Erman
.
Educated at Leipzig
and Berlin, he became associate professor of Egyptology
at the University of Berlin in 1883 and full professor in 1892. In 1885 he was appointed director of the Egyptian department at the royal museum.
Erman and his school at Berlin had the difficult task of recovering the grammar of the Egyptian language
and spent thirty years of special study on it. The greater part of Egyptian texts after the Middle Kingdom
having been written in what was even then practically a dead language, as dead as Latin was to the medieval monks in Italy
who wrote and spoke it, Erman selected for special investigation those texts which really represented the growth of the language at different periods, and, as he passed from one epoch to another, compared and consolidated his results.
The Neuägyptische Grammatik (1880) dealt with texts written in the vulgar dialect of the New Kingdom
(Dyns. XVIII to XX). Next followed, in the Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Alterthumskunde, studies on the Old Kingdom
inscription of Unas
, and the Middle Kingdom contracts of Assiut, as well as on an Old Coptic
text of the 3rd century CE. At this point a papyrus
of stories written in the popular language of the Middle Kingdom provided Erman with a stepping-stone from Old Egyptian to the Late Egyptian of the Neuägyptische Grammatik, and gave the connections that would bind solidly together the whole structure of Egyptian grammar (see Sprache des Papyrus Westcar, 1889). The very archaic pyramid texts
enabled him to sketch the grammar of the earliest known form of Egyptian (Zeitschrift d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gesellschaft, 1892), and in 1894 he was able to write a little manual of Egyptian for beginners (Ägyptische Grammatik, 4th ed., 1928), centering on the language of the standard inscriptions of the Middle and New Kingdoms, but accompanying the main sketch with references to earlier and later forms.
Erman's pupils include James Henry Breasted
, America's first Professor of Egyptology with his numerous works including his History of Egypt from the Earliest Times Down to the Persian Conquest (1905) and Georg Steindorff
's little Koptische Grammatik (1894, ed. 1904), improving greatly on Stern's standard work in regard to phonology
and the relationship of Coptic forms to Egyptian, and Sethe
's Das Ägyptische Verbum (1899). The latter is an extensive monograph on the verb
in Egyptian and Coptic by a brilliant and laborious philologist. Owing to the very imperfect notation of sound in the writing, the highly important subject of the verbal roots and verbal forms was perhaps the obscurest branch of Egyptian grammar when Sethe first attacked it in 1895. The subject has been reviewed by Erman, Die Flexion des Aegyptischen Verbums in the Sitzungsberichte of the Berlin Academy, 1900. The Berlin school, having settled the main lines of the grammar, next turned its attention to lexicography
. It devised a scheme, founded on that for the Latin Thesaurus of the Berlin Academy, which almost mechanically sorts the whole number of occurrences of every word in any text examined. In 1897, Erman, working together with Sethe, Hermann Grapow
and other coworkers from all over the world, started to catalogue all the words from all the known Egyptian texts available; the result was an ensemble of about 1,500,000 datasheets that form the basis for the masterpiece of the ancient Egyptian lexicography, the famous Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache
, whose first five volumes were published between 1926 and 1931. The complete edition of this gigantic dictionary comprises a total of twelve volumes.
Egyptian is certainly related to Semitic
. Even before the triliterality of Old Egyptian was recognized, Erman showed that the so-called pseudo-participle
had been really in meaning and in form a precise analogue of the Semitic perfect, though its original employment was almost obsolete in the time of the earliest known texts. Triliteral
ism is considered the most essential and most peculiar feature of Semitic.
Life
Born in BerlinBerlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
, he was the son of Georg Adolf Erman
Georg Adolf Erman
Georg Adolf Erman was a German physicist.Erman was born in Berlin as the son of Paul Erman. He studied natural science at the universities of Berlin and Königsberg, spent from 1828 to 1830 in a journey round the world, an account of which he published in Reise um die Erde durch Nordasien und die...
and grandson of Paul Erman
Paul Erman
Paul Erman was a German physicist from Berlin, Brandenburg. He was the son of the historian Jean Pierre Erman , author of Histoire des refugis....
.
Educated at Leipzig
Leipzig
Leipzig Leipzig has always been a trade city, situated during the time of the Holy Roman Empire at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii, two important trade routes. At one time, Leipzig was one of the major European centres of learning and culture in fields such as music and publishing...
and Berlin, he became associate professor of Egyptology
Egyptology
Egyptology is the study of ancient Egyptian history, language, literature, religion, and art from the 5th millennium BC until the end of its native religious practices in the AD 4th century. A practitioner of the discipline is an “Egyptologist”...
at the University of Berlin in 1883 and full professor in 1892. In 1885 he was appointed director of the Egyptian department at the royal museum.
Erman and his school at Berlin had the difficult task of recovering the grammar of the Egyptian language
Egyptian language
Egyptian is the oldest known indigenous language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known. Egyptian was spoken until the late 17th century AD in the...
and spent thirty years of special study on it. The greater part of Egyptian texts after the Middle Kingdom
Middle Kingdom of Egypt
The Middle Kingdom of Egypt is the period in the history of ancient Egypt stretching from the establishment of the Eleventh Dynasty to the end of the Fourteenth Dynasty, between 2055 BC and 1650 BC, although some writers include the Thirteenth and Fourteenth dynasties in the Second Intermediate...
having been written in what was even then practically a dead language, as dead as Latin was to the medieval monks in Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
who wrote and spoke it, Erman selected for special investigation those texts which really represented the growth of the language at different periods, and, as he passed from one epoch to another, compared and consolidated his results.
The Neuägyptische Grammatik (1880) dealt with texts written in the vulgar dialect of the New Kingdom
New Kingdom
The New Kingdom of Egypt, also referred to as the Egyptian Empire is the period in ancient Egyptian history between the 16th century BC and the 11th century BC, covering the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Dynasties of Egypt....
(Dyns. XVIII to XX). Next followed, in the Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Alterthumskunde, studies on the Old Kingdom
Old Kingdom
Old Kingdom is the name given to the period in the 3rd millennium BC when Egypt attained its first continuous peak of civilization in complexity and achievement – the first of three so-called "Kingdom" periods, which mark the high points of civilization in the lower Nile Valley .The term itself was...
inscription of Unas
Unas
Unas was a Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt, and the last ruler of the Fifth dynasty from the Old Kingdom. His reign has been dated as falling between 2375 BC and 2345 BC...
, and the Middle Kingdom contracts of Assiut, as well as on an Old Coptic
Coptic language
Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the current stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the 1st century...
text of the 3rd century CE. At this point a papyrus
Papyrus
Papyrus is a thick paper-like material produced from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus, a wetland sedge that was once abundant in the Nile Delta of Egypt....
of stories written in the popular language of the Middle Kingdom provided Erman with a stepping-stone from Old Egyptian to the Late Egyptian of the Neuägyptische Grammatik, and gave the connections that would bind solidly together the whole structure of Egyptian grammar (see Sprache des Papyrus Westcar, 1889). The very archaic pyramid texts
Pyramid Texts
The Pyramid Texts are a collection of ancient Egyptian religious texts from the time of the Old Kingdom. The pyramid texts are possibly the oldest known religious texts in the world. Written in Old Egyptian, the pyramid texts were carved on the walls and sarcophagi of the pyramids at Saqqara during...
enabled him to sketch the grammar of the earliest known form of Egyptian (Zeitschrift d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gesellschaft, 1892), and in 1894 he was able to write a little manual of Egyptian for beginners (Ägyptische Grammatik, 4th ed., 1928), centering on the language of the standard inscriptions of the Middle and New Kingdoms, but accompanying the main sketch with references to earlier and later forms.
Erman's pupils include James Henry Breasted
James Henry Breasted
James Henry Breasted was an American archaeologist and historian. After completing his PhD at the University of Berlin in 1894, he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. In 1901 he became director of the Haskell Oriental Museum at the University of Chicago, where he continued to...
, America's first Professor of Egyptology with his numerous works including his History of Egypt from the Earliest Times Down to the Persian Conquest (1905) and Georg Steindorff
Georg Steindorff
Georg Steindorff was a German Egyptologist.-Life:Georg Steindorff was a graduate of the Egyptology seminars of the University of Göttingen. He earned a doctorate in 1884 with a linguistic dissertation on Coptic noun forms...
's little Koptische Grammatik (1894, ed. 1904), improving greatly on Stern's standard work in regard to phonology
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
and the relationship of Coptic forms to Egyptian, and Sethe
Kurt Heinrich Sethe
Kurt Heinrich Sethe was a noted German Egyptologist and philologist from Berlin. He was a student of Adolf Erman...
's Das Ägyptische Verbum (1899). The latter is an extensive monograph on the verb
Verb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
in Egyptian and Coptic by a brilliant and laborious philologist. Owing to the very imperfect notation of sound in the writing, the highly important subject of the verbal roots and verbal forms was perhaps the obscurest branch of Egyptian grammar when Sethe first attacked it in 1895. The subject has been reviewed by Erman, Die Flexion des Aegyptischen Verbums in the Sitzungsberichte of the Berlin Academy, 1900. The Berlin school, having settled the main lines of the grammar, next turned its attention to lexicography
Lexicography
Lexicography is divided into two related disciplines:*Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries....
. It devised a scheme, founded on that for the Latin Thesaurus of the Berlin Academy, which almost mechanically sorts the whole number of occurrences of every word in any text examined. In 1897, Erman, working together with Sethe, Hermann Grapow
Hermann Grapow
Hermann Grapow was a German Egyptologist.-Works:*Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache, 7 Bände, Berlin, 1925 ff.*Anatomie und Physiologie, Berlin, 1954...
and other coworkers from all over the world, started to catalogue all the words from all the known Egyptian texts available; the result was an ensemble of about 1,500,000 datasheets that form the basis for the masterpiece of the ancient Egyptian lexicography, the famous Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache
Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache
The Wörterbuch der äegyptischen Sprache was a project by Adolf Erman and Hermann Grapow to publish a comprehensive dictionary of Old, Middle, and Late Egyptian and the hieroglyphic inscriptions of the Greco-Roman period...
, whose first five volumes were published between 1926 and 1931. The complete edition of this gigantic dictionary comprises a total of twelve volumes.
Egyptian is certainly related to Semitic
Semitic languages
The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 270 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa...
. Even before the triliterality of Old Egyptian was recognized, Erman showed that the so-called pseudo-participle
Participle
In linguistics, a participle is a word that shares some characteristics of both verbs and adjectives. It can be used in compound verb tenses or voices , or as a modifier...
had been really in meaning and in form a precise analogue of the Semitic perfect, though its original employment was almost obsolete in the time of the earliest known texts. Triliteral
Triliteral
The roots of verbs and most nouns in the Semitic languages are characterized as a sequence of consonants or "radicals"...
ism is considered the most essential and most peculiar feature of Semitic.
Works
- Life in Ancient Egypt, translated by H. M. Tirard (London, 1894; online version at the Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
) (the original Agypten und agyptisches Leben in, Altertum, 2 vols., was published in 1885 at Tübingen) - Neuägyptische Grammatik (1880)
- Sprache des Papyrus Westcar, 1889
- Zeitschrift d. Deutsch. Morgeni. Gesellschaft, 1892
- Egyptian grammar : with table of signs, bibliography, exercises for reading and glossar, 1894 (online version at the Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
) - Agyptische Grammatik, 2nd ed., 1902
- Die Flexion des ägyptischen Verbums in the Sitzungsberichte
- Die aegyptische Religion (Berlin, 1905);
- Das Verhältnis d. ägyptischen zu d. semitischen Sprachen (Zeitschrift d. deutschen morgenl. Gesellschaft, 1892); Zimmern, Vergi. Gram., 1898;
- Erman, Flexion d. Aegyptischen Verbums (Sitzungsberichte d. Ben. Akad., 1900).
- Adolf Erman, Die Literatur der Aegypter, 1923. English translation by Aylward M. BlackmanAylward M. BlackmanAylward Manley Blackman was a British Egyptologist. Born in Dawlish, Devon, he was the leader of an excavation in Sesebi, Sudan under the Egypt Exploration Society in the mid-1930s. He was also the tutor of the Crown Prince of Ethiopia from 1937 to 1939. Blackman died in 1956 in...
published as The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians, London, Methuen & Co., 1927; reprinted as The Ancient Egyptians: A Sourcebook of their Writings, introduction to the Torchbook edition by William Kelly SimpsonWilliam Kelly SimpsonWilliam Kelly Simpson is an American professor emeritus of Egyptology, Archaeology, Ancient Egyptian literature, and Afro-Asiatic languages at Yale University....
, New York, Harper & Row, 1966.