That Other Late Antique Egyptian Language: Demotic
There is currently the major stirring around a Coptic fragment of an ancient Gospel (see my posts here , here , and here ). But most have overlooked another report that came out this week on a major undertaking of compiling a 2000-page dictionary of the other late-antique Egyptian language: Demotic (from the Greek "Demos" meaning "of the people" or the "common speech"). I only saw it because my spouse pointed it out (in the Science Section of the New York Times). The New York Times reports here : Demotic was one of the three scripts inscribed on the Rosetta stone, along with Greek and hieroglyphs, enabling European scholars to decipher the royal language in the early 19th century and thus read the top-down version of a great civilization’s long history. Now, scholars at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago have completed almost 40 years of research and published online the final entries of a 2,000-page dictionary that more ...