The ''Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache'' (''Dictionary of the Egyptian Language''), abbreviated ''Wb'' in bibliographic references, is a large

German-language German (, ) is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, mainly spoken in Western and Central Europe. It is the majority and official (or co-official) language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein. It is a ...

dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged Alphabetical order, alphabetically (or by Semitic root, consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical-and-stroke sorting, radical an ...

of the

Egyptian language The Egyptian language, or Ancient Egyptian (; ), is an extinct branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages 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 ...

published between 1926 and 1961 by Adolf Erman and Hermann Grapow. It is a comprehensive work encompassing 3000 years of linguistic history, including Old, Middle, and

Late Late or LATE may refer to: Everyday usage * Tardy, or late, not being on time * Late (or the late) may refer to a person who is dead Music * ''Late'' (The 77s album), 2000 * Late (Alvin Batiste album), 1993 * Late!, a pseudonym used by Dave Groh ...

Egyptian as well as

hieroglyphic Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs ( ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters. ...

inscriptions of the Classical Greco-Roman period. The dictionary contains approximately 16,000

headword In morphology and lexicography, a lemma (: lemmas or lemmata) is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. In English, for example, ''break'', ''breaks'', ''broke'', ''broken'' and ''breaking'' are forms of the s ...

s in five main volumes, two secondary volumes, and five volumes of

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

references. It is therefore the largest and most complete printed dictionary of Ancient Egyptian in existence. The work begun in 1897 as a research project at the

Prussian Academy of Sciences The Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences () 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 Academy" may also refer. In the 18th century, when Frenc ...

Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...

. The dictionary is also known as the "Berlin Dictionary". Interrupted by both

World War I World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...

and

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

, the first volumes were published in 1926 and the final volume released in 1961. Today the dictionary forms the basis of the new '' Altägyptisches Wörterbuch'' (''Dictionary of Ancient Egyptian''), a comprehensive update of the original and an online digitization project being conducted under the auspices of the

Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (), abbreviated BBAW, is the official academic society for the natural sciences and humanities for the German states of Berlin and Brandenburg. Housed in three locations in and around Ber ...

since 1993.

History

The project was launched in 1897 by Adolf Erman during the reign of

Wilhelm II Wilhelm II (Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert; 27 January 18594 June 1941) was the last German Emperor and King of Prussia from 1888 until Abdication of Wilhelm II, his abdication in 1918, which marked the end of the German Empire as well as th ...

and supported with 120,000

Reichsmark The (; sign: ℛ︁ℳ︁; abbreviation: RM) was the currency of Germany from 1924 until the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945, and in the American, British and French occupied zones of Germany, until 20 June 1948. The Reichsmark was then replace ...

. The project was undertaken at scientific Academies in Berlin, Göttingen, Leipzig and Munich elected by a Commission. Although cooperative international work was interrupted by

, the number of archived source texts had grown to 1,374,806 by 1918. Erman and Grapow published an intermediate result of the work as the "Egyptian Concise Dictionary" in 1921. In 1926 the five main volumes, financed by John Davison Rockefeller Jr. and autographed by the Danish Egyptologist Wolja Erichsen, were published. Ancient Egyptian Dictionary Project website, ''The "Vormanuskript" (preliminary manuscript) of the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache''
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References

Literature

* Adolf Erman, Hermann Grapow (ed.): ''Wörterbuch der Aegyptischen Sprache''. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1926–1961. * Adolf Erman, Hermann Grapow: ''Das Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache. Zur Geschichte eines großen wissenschaftlichen Unternehmens der Akademie''. Berlin 1953. * Wolfgang Kosack: ''Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache.'' Herausgegeben von Adolf Erman und Hermann Grapow. Erweitert, korrigiert und ergänzt von Wolfgang Kosack. 5 Bände, 5644 Seiten. Christoph Brunner, Nunningen 2018, .

External links

(in German and Russian)
Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae
(in German)

from the Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften {{DEFAULTSORT:Worterbuch Der Agyptischen Sprache Egyptian dictionaries German dictionaries