The ''Altägyptisches Wörterbuch'' (English: ''Ancient Egyptian Dictionary'') is a dictionary of the

Egyptian language 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 of surviving texts which were made accessible to the modern world following the decipher ...

developed by the Research Centre for Primary Sources of the Ancient World at the

Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (german: Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften), abbreviated BBAW, is the official academic society for the natural sciences and humanities for the German states of Berlin a ...

(BBAW) in

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

. Intended to be a complete documentation of the Egyptian lexicon, it encompasses varied meanings of words in different texts over 3000 years of linguistic history. The dictionary is entirely based on

primary source In the study of history as an academic discipline, a primary source (also called an original source) is an artifact, document, diary, manuscript, autobiography, recording, or any other source of information that was created at the time under ...

material, including inscriptions from temple walls, roads, tombs, papyri, and potsherds from religious, legal, administrative, and literary texts. The ''Altägyptisches Wörterbuch'' is publicly available on the internet and is a current project continuously updated by the BBAW.

History

Today's ''Altägyptisches Wörterbuch'' is built upon the ''

Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache The ''Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache'' (''Dictionary of the Egyptian Language''), abbreviated ''Wb'' in bibliographic references, is a large German-language dictionary of the Egyptian language published between 1926 and 1961 by Adolf Erman ...

'' (English: ''Dictionary of the Egyptian Language'') begun by

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 ...

in 1897 at the

Prussian Academy of Sciences The Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences (german: Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften) was an academy established in Berlin, Germany on 11 July 1700, four years after the Prussian Academy of Arts, or "Arts Academy," to which "Berlin ...

. His novel approach was to first create a comprehensive index of all

materials then available, rather than to start a dictionary on selected excerpts. This method built an Ancient Egyptian lexicography that is still important today. Between 1897-1940, with the participation of more than 80 domestic and foreign Egyptologists, the majority of known Egyptian texts was recorded and archived. The first published ''Dictionary of the Egyptian Language'' (13 volumes, Leipzig-Berlin) appeared between 1926 and 1931, with revised editions until 1963. Other notable Egyptologists who contributed to the dictionary include

Kurt Heinrich Sethe Kurt Heinrich Sethe (30 September 1869 – 6 July 1934) was a noted German Egyptologist and philologist from Berlin. He was a student of Adolf Erman. Sethe collected numerous texts from Egypt during his visits there and edited the '' Urkunde ...

(1869–1934) and

Hermann Grapow Hermann Grapow (1 September 1885 in Rostock – 24 August 1967 in Berlin) was a German Egyptologist. Works *Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache The ''Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache'' (''Dictionary of the Egyptian Language''), abbrevia ...

(1885–1967). At over 16,000 entries and over 1.5 million words, this monumental work remains the largest printed dictionary of Ancient Egyptian in existence. By 1940 work on the ''Dictionary of the Egyptian Language'' was largely complete and work concentrated on research of the word files and indexes over the next 50 years. Since then, the amount of known texts discovered in pharaonic Egypt more than doubled and neither the dictionary nor the text files it was built upon represented the current state of research. The resumption of work on a new ancient Egyptian dictionary therefore became a priority among international Egyptologists. In 1993, a project to update the dictionary began at the

and became today’s ''Altägyptisches Wörterbuch''.Stephan J. Seidlmayer: Brochure on the ''Altägyptisches Wörterbuch'
online
Berlin: Heckmann-Wentzel-Stiftung, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, 1999

External links

''Altägyptisches Wörterbuch'' Online

Research Centre for Primary Sources of the Ancient World
Official Web Site

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Altagyptisches Worterbuch Translation dictionaries German dictionaries Ancient Egyptian language