Kurt Heinrich Sethe (30 September 1869 – 6 July 1934) was a noted
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ger ...
Egyptologist
Egyptology (from ''Egypt'' and Greek , '' -logia''; ar, علم المصريات) is the study of ancient Egyptian history, language, literature, religion, architecture and art from the 5th millennium BC until the end of its native religious ...
and
philologist
Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined as th ...
from
Berlin
Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...
. He was a student of
Adolf Erman
Johann Peter Adolf Erman (; 31 October 185426 June 1937) was a renowned German Egyptologist and lexicographer.
Life
Born in Berlin, he was the son of Georg Adolf Erman and grandson of Paul Erman and Friedrich Bessel.
Educated at Leipzig and Ber ...
. Sethe collected numerous texts from
Egypt
Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediter ...
during his visits there and edited the ''
Urkunden des ægyptischen Altertums'' which is a standard catalogue of Ancient Egyptian literature and text.
Among Sethe's many contributions to Egyptology, two are singled out by Gardiner (p. 433): "...the pronunciation of Middle Egyptian... The chief authorities to be consulted are Sethe's great work on the Egyptian verb, and a much later brilliant article entitled ''Die Vokalisation des Ägyptischen'' in ''Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft''"" (1923). Actually, Sethe was the first one to put forth a systematic theory of the
Egyptian verb
The Egyptian language or Ancient Egyptian ( ) is a dead Afro-Asiatic language that was spoken in ancient Egypt. It is known today from a large corpus
Corpus is Latin for "body". It may refer to:
Linguistics
* Text corpus, in linguistics, ...
; it was no easy accomplishment, since the
inflection
In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and defin ...
of the Egyptian verb was done mainly by changing the vowels, and the Egyptians only wrote consonants.
Among Sethe's students were
Hans Jakob Polotsky
Hans Jakob Polotsky ( he, הנס יעקב פולוצקי; also Hans Jacob Polotsky, Hans Jakob Polotzky; 13 September 1905 – 10 August 1991) was an Israeli orientalist, linguist, and professor of Semitic languages and Egyptology at the Hebrew U ...
and
Alan Gardiner
Sir Alan Henderson Gardiner, (29 March 1879 – 19 December 1963) was an English Egyptologist, linguist, philologist, and independent scholar. He is regarded as one of the premier Egyptologists of the early and mid-20th century.
Personal life
G ...
. Sethe's anthology, ''Aegyptische Lesestuecke,'' is still doing sterling service to the beginners in the study of the language. Sethe also published a comprehensive collection of Egyptian
epigraphy
Epigraphy () is the study of inscriptions, or epigraphs, as writing; it is the science of identifying graphemes, clarifying their meanings, classifying their uses according to dates and cultural contexts, and drawing conclusions about the wr ...
, which he called ''Urkunden der Aegyptologie.''
References
* Kurt Sethe: ''Das aegyptische verbum im altaegyptischen, neuaegyptischen und koptischen'', Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1902.
* Kurt Sethe: ''Urkunden des Alten Reichs'' (= ''Urkunden des ägyptischen Altertums.'' Abteilung 1). 1. Band, 4. Heft. 2., augmented edition, Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, Leipzig 1933
available online
* at 2terres.hautesavoie.net
*
Gardiner, Alan. ''Egyptian Grammar. Being an Introduction to the Study of Hieroglyphs''. 3rd Ed., Rev. London: Oxford University Press, 1957 (1st ed. 1927).
1869 births
1934 deaths
German Egyptologists
German lexicographers
Members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences
Archaeologists from Berlin
People from the Province of Brandenburg
University of Tübingen alumni
Humboldt University of Berlin alumni
Humboldt University of Berlin faculty
University of Göttingen faculty
Members of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences
German male non-fiction writers
{{Egyptologist-stub