On the value of some hieroglyphic signs

[imhotep06]

Your analysis is in no way what I’m saying at all. This is not an elaborate thesis so your are missing some very fundamental details. Let’s deal with one thing at a time as not to confuse the issues at hand so we can bring clarity to this situation. To start I will ask you a series of questions so we can all operate from the same foundation. To start:

1. When the Egyptologists, the ones you respect, came to their conclusions on what a word meant, what was the method used to determine the meaning of the words?

2. In this process, what were the methods used to determine the “range” of meaning for these terms?

3. When they came to the final conclusion of what the terms mean, what paradigm and modern social practices did they use to confirm major terms like “nTr”? Under what social conditions reinforced the notion that they were correct?

4. What living traditions did they observe to confirm their conceptualizations of Egyptian religious concepts and practices?

5. If it was an Asian or European based culture (s), which cultures were observed?

6. If African based, what culture and practices were observed?

7. Is the Egyptian language(s) agglutinative or inflectional? How does this affect word creation?

8. How does the pluri-root system work? Was this system derived from an inflectional process, or through a process of agglutination? How can we prove it?

These questions are critical to the understanding and moving forward on this discussion. The argument now is method and before we can delve any deeper, we must understand the strengths and limitations of the methods used to determine meanings of terms, range of meaning within given root systems, and how these processes were utilized in Egyptian, as well other African systems. I look forward to your reply.

[imhotep06]

While we are waiting on his answers, let’s delve partially into my method for ascertaining the validity of spiritual concepts in Egyptian. As a rule of thumb, the first thing I do is think like an African. The way African word-smiths approach language is quite different than our brothers and sisters in Europe. This is a known fact and with this known fact, when European people, under a European lens, attempt to define African concepts, we always have to do some more work to get a better understanding of the terms. It is just a result of two different approaches to knowledge and cultural experiences.

Often, even our best African Egyptologists, fall victim of trying to approach Egypt through an academic western lens and they miss opportunities to gain deeper knowledge of a concept. This is primarily because African scholars are often not practitioners of their own traditions. They “study” them from the outside instead of living practices that enhance their lives. They use Africa as a reference, and not as a resource to find solutions to modern problems. Therefore their contributions are limited to what Europeans wrote in dictionaries and anthropology journals: never penetrating the core of the culture.

I try my best not to fall victim of this practice. Therefore, as a rule, I always keep in mind what Leopold Sedar Senghor stated in his “Prose & Poetry” translated by John Reed and Clive Wakei, pages 84-85. The title of the excerpt I will quote below is entitled Speech and Image: An African Tradition of the Surreal. I will quote at length:

The African languages are characterized first of all by the richness of
their vocabulary. There are sometimes twenty different words for an object
according to its form, weight, volume and colour, and as many for an action
according to whether it is single or repeated, weakly or intensely
performed, just beginning or coming to an end. In Fulani, nouns are divided
into twenty-one genders which are not related to sex. The classification is
based sometimes on the meaning of the words or the phonetic qualities and
sometimes on the grammatical category to which they belong. Most
significant in this respect is the verb. On the same root in Wolof can be
constructed more than twenty Verbs expressing different shades of meaning,
and at least as many derivative nouns. While modern Indo-European languages
emphasize the abstract notion of time, African languages emphasize the
aspect, the concrete way in which the action of the verb takes place. These
are essentially concrete languages. In them words are always pregnant with
images. Under their value as signs, their sense value shows through.

The African image is not then an image by equation but an image by
analogy, a surrealist image. Africans do not like straight lines and false
mots justes. Two and two do not make four, but five, as Aime Cesaire has
told us. The object does not mean what it represents but what it suggests,
what it creates. The Elephant is Strength, the Spider is Prudence; Horns
are the Moon and the Moon is Fecundity. Every representation is an image,
and the image, I repeat, is not an equation but a symbol, an ideogramme.
Not only the figuration of the image but also its material…stone, earth,
copper, gold, fibre—and also its line and colour. All language which does
not tell a story bores them, or rather, Africans do not understand such
language. The astonishment of the first Europeans when they found that the
“natives” did not understand their pictures or even the logic of their
arguments!

I have spoken of the surrealist image. But as you would suppose, African
surrealism is different from European surrealism. European surrealism is
empirical, African surrealism is mystical and metaphysical. Andre Breton
writes in Signe Ascendant: “The poetic analogy (meaning the European
surrealist analogy) differs functionally from the mystical analogy in that
it does not presuppose, beyond the visible world, an invisible world which
is striving to manifest itself. It proceeds in a completely empirical way.”
In contrast, the African surrealist analogy presupposes and manifest the
hierarchized universe of life-forces. – emphasis mine

This is vitally important to understand when attempting to determine meaning of major African concepts. You have to think like an African who is trying to exhaust a concept: to maximize the efficiency of conveying a concept by approaching it from multiple angles. African languages are “theme” based. This means that a series of terms are formed, that when examined together, convey the greater message or theme. In essence, one term builds off of another. If you don’t understand this, then one will never understand the African approach to God as it/she/him is approached by the same convention. This is why Western trained academics label African spiritual systems, like Egyptian, as “poly-theistic” because they don’t understand the African approach for trying to understand the “theme” which is “God.” This is very relevant to our term under examination nTr. But we’ll get to that later.

[imhotep06]

Now let’s continue along this train of thought. For example, has anyone ever been curious as to why the ancient Egyptians used a bird to represent spirit, the sun and god? What correlation does the sun have with a bird? That is because the terms for each are similar in African languages and remember what Serge Sauneron said in the excerpt I quoted earlier. Not only that, it is because a bird is significant in African priestly traditions and its symbolism operates within the framework established by Senghor in the quote given above. Let’s examine an excerpt from a modern practitioner in the Yoruba system of Ifa.

In Yorùbá symbolic language, eiye ororo (the bird of descent) represents individual capacity for astral travel. Placed atop the king’s crown, it communicates female spiritual authority, organized around what might be termed the birds’ society. Similarly, the bird that tops the staff of the divinity of herbal wisdom, Osanyin, denotes medicinal potency. Likewise, ilé orí, the shrine dedicated to the divinity within, is completely covered in bird symbolism. Covered in cowries, and topped with a bird, ilé orí “conceals an allusion to a certain bird, whose white feathers are suggested by the overlapping cowries.” (Thompson Page 11) In this instance, the bird symbolizes the emblem of the mind that God places in the head of every human being at the time of birth. Everywhere this mystic bird appears in Yorùbá sacred arts, it seems to signify spiritual elevation and divine consciousness.

obafemio.wordpress.com/category/yoruba/

In other words, the symbol of a bird in Yoruba spiritual iconography has nothing to do with a bird, but represents other concepts which are not visible, but can be explained by studying the bird’s characteristics that can shed light on the invisible phenomenon being referred to. This supports the framework established by Senghor. Let’s see if African languages can shed light on Hrw (the hawk, sun-god).

Egyptian sign = G, G40
KU (Bird Linear A writing Crete) = *ku (proto-Niger-Kongo) "parrot" (bird), Ewe a-ko "parrot", Tschi a-ko "parrot", Ga a-ko "parrot", Guang a-ko "parrot", Igbo a-ku "parrot", Djarawa a-ku "parrot", Proto-Western-Sudanic kuki "fowl", but Gwun/Gwyun "bird". Compare ku "cry", ku "die" (birds = spirits of the dead). Koelle has Kabanga kuno "bird", also Bornu ngudo "bird"; Igbira inumi etc are due to the n-prefix modifying the root consonant. Proto-Mande *kuni (Dwyer in Bendor-Samuel 1989:55) would reduce to ku with initial accentuation. Ku "Papegei", kuku "Taube (Dove)", kua "Perlhuhn (guinea-fowl)" in Westermann's Deutsch-Sudan Index. Bantu (Meeussen) has kumbi "hawk", kucu "parrot," kunda, kuti “pigeon.” Songhai has k’uro “bird.” Khoisan language name !kû. Sumerian also has hu “bird” k > h.

From this it is clear that at the heart of words dealing with birds, the root is *ku. Now the same word for bird is the same word for death: *ku (proto-niger-kongo) “die”, Yoruba aiku “never die, immortality”, i-ku “spirit of death”, ku "to die", Bwiti = kouck, kouk, or ku “die, blessed ancestors”, Mbochi le-ku, okue, ikue “die, blessed ancestors”; Ancient Egyptian akh, akhw “blessed dead.” Tschi ku-m, ku "to kill", Afema ku "to kill", Mekabo ku "to kill", Gwa ku "to die", Kyama ku "to die", Newole ku "to die", Grebo ku "demon, departed spirit", ku tu "dead body", kw-e "to die", Okpoto ku "to die", Igara ku "to die", Nupe eku "carcass", Igbo ku "to die", Edo ku "to kill", Dujku ki "death", Bowili eku "death", Kpossi iku "death", Lefana kpi "to kill", Santrokofi kpi "to kill", Akpafu kpi "to kill", Mossi kia "to die", Dagomba kpi "to kill", Dagarti, Birifo, Gba, Lobi, Djan k'i (< kui) "to die", Tobote kpi "to kill", Gurma ukpi "death".

To understand why this is so, you have to understand a common theme in African conceptualization of evolution. A few great case-studies are with the Dogon, Dagara and Zulu. Like the ancient Egyptian, the mentioned traditions have this belief that the soul goes through evolutionary stages of development and starts off as gross matter, then works its way up to plants, animals, reptiles, birds, humans and then stars. The Zulu order however is grass phase, tree, beast, human, reptile, bird and then star phase (Credo Mutwa, Indaba My Children 1964:590). One unifying point between all of them is the last two phases: bird then star. In the Egyptian, the ba (symbolized by a bird) is seen being judged pleading to be one of the blessed dead among the “stars” in the Tuat/Duat.

The reason why the bird is used is because a bird, as mentioned before, symbolizes “interplanetary space travel.” Credo Mutwa in an interview discusses the priestly understanding of the meaning and usage of the term ZULU. He states:

Credo Mutwa: The Zulu people, who are famous as a warrior people, the people to whom King Shaka Zulu, of the last century, belonged. When you ask a South African White anthropologist what the name of Zulu means, he will say it means “the sky” (laughter), and therefore the Zulu call themselves “people of the sky”. That, sir, is non-sense. In the Zulu language, our name for the sky, the blue sky, is sibakabaka. Our name for inter-planetary space, however, is izulu and the weduzulu, which means “inter-planetary space, the dark sky that you see with stars in it every night”, also has to do with traveling, sir. The Zulu word for traveling at random, like a nomad or a gypsy, is izula. Now, you can see that the Zulu people in South Africa were aware of the fact that you can travel through space-not through the sky like a bird-but you can travel through space, and the Zulus claim that many, many thousands of years ago there arrived, out of the skies, a race of people who were like lizards, people who could change shape at will. And people who married their daughters to a walking (extraterrestrial), and produced a power race of Kings and tribal Chiefs, there are hundreds of fairy-tales, sir, in which a lizard female assumes the identity of a human princess and poses as her, and gets married to a Zulu Prince.

www.metatech.org/credo_mutwa.html

Did the ancient man have spaceships as a reference to to convey “interplanetary space travel?” No! They used the symbol of the bird and thus why it was used in ancient Egyptian iconography to discuss the travel of the soul “through space” to become a “star” in Ta nTr/Ta Akhw. The word HRW is the ciLuba word KULU. KULU was palatalized to become OSORO in Twi and ZULU in Bantu. When they say KULU in reference to HRW “the hawk” it is two words KU + LU: KU “bird” and LU “top, head, sky” = the bird in the sky” or the “spirit in the sky” as KU can mean spirit. In ciLuba you have Nkole, Nkulu, Ngole, Ngal, Cyala, Kyala which means “bird, hawk, raven.” These terms can also mean “god, spirit, ancestors” and the word KULU can also mean “sun.” What penatrates interplanetary space? Sun light, stars, Sun, Birds and it is believed that dead spirits travel through space to the stars. That is why KU/KULU/HRW, etc. all represent "spirit, the sun, the ancestors, and light." So by the common usage, KU/HU in essence means "space travel" and all those things attached are just symbols for the theme.

Understanding this helps us to see why the Egyptians used the words they used and why they used the symbols they used. If your method does not incorporate all of this, you will never penetrate the essence of the culture.

Egyptologists miss subtleties in the language and don’t pay attention to the story-lines and what the story is trying to tell the reader. For instance, ISFT shouldn’t be seen primarily as “evil.” That is a western, academic, Christian perspective. What makes more sense is the Amazulu term UZIBUTHE (isft) which means “the spirit of conflict.” The Zulu have a whole paradigm on uzibuthe and developed a technique for the rationalization of conflict which they gave the name UKUQATHA “to manipulate conflict in order to serve ends dictated by reason.” Is this not what the ancient Egyptians were trying to convey with the story of Set and Heru? The lesson was Ukuqatha which is demonstrated by Set steering the boat of Ra and fighting Apep. The personification of Uzibuthe (isft) “Set” served logic and order in the end. The story clarifies the meaning.

Bantu explains another phenomenon with Apep, the snake. The word in use for the snake has nothing to do with the snake, but the snake symbolizes “wind” or “change” that “pushes” something to its next location. Thus why Apep is always depicted as a “sine wave.” Apep comes from the Niger-Congo Terms:

BLOW/WINGS/FLY
Pte =*pep “wind”, PWN phet “Blow”, phuph “wind, blow”, phup “pigeon, dove” (flap wings), Yoruba a-fefe “wind”, Lefana o-fe-fe “wind”, Temne a-fef “wind”, Mende fefe “wind, breeze”, Bantu pepo “wind”, PWN piap “wind”, Bantu (Meeussen) peep “blow”, Fula fulfude “blow” (forge). PHUP “pigeon” is significant here.

Dr. Mubabinge Bilolo in his latest book on Imn (2010) discusses how this term *pep is used in ciLuba in regards to the Beetle and how it informs us on how to properly interpret Khepra of Egypt.

In my book Meta-Ontology of Egyptian Third millennium, published in 2008, I went by the name of the Luba word "beetle" in order to understand the uses of [Egyptian] xpr:

xprr
kapepu, kapepwela, kapepula, kapulupulu, kaholoholo, kampulu
cipepu, cipepwela, cipepula, ciholoholo, cipulupulu; cimpulu

The following passage can help you capture the consequences of this starting point. It should be noted that the commentary refers to xpr-ra which represents only "a corner in the field uses of xpr:

"The image presents Ra pushed, raised (shu-la), blown (pupa, peeps, pepula, pupwila), drawn by the beetle, a type of beetle. In Luba Cipepu or Cipepwela, come ku-ku-Pepa or pepula = "Blow", "being carried by the wind", "hover". The beetle (Cipepu, cipepwela, ciholoholo, cipulupulu) casts and drag Ra by his Breath: Ku-/Ka-Ci-Pepe-La. Note that Cipepe-La appoints a "strong wind", "Breath-bearer-of-Ra". The keywords are: "Pa" to give, sponsor, award; blow "Pe / Pa" wind "(also cipepa, cipepela) and Pela-Ditem = friction or making fire by rubbing with stone or wooden flint '34.

Note 34: Mr. Bilolo, Meta-Ontology of the Egyptian-third millennium. Meta-Untu Mr ADW: Tum-Nunu or Sha-Ntu (APA. I, 8), Kinshasa-Munich-Paris, 2008, p. 201.

In other words, the p-p root is used to convey something being pushed, movement, something being helped forward. That’s the exact function of APEP in the Egyptian myth and why the sine wave of the snake depiction is used to represent “wind” not a snake or “chaos.” APEP serves the same function as OYA in the Yoruba tradition. Her physical trait is “wind” but her purpose is “change.” Wind is highly destructive, but it is what causes new things to come into being. If you were looking for “snake” to understand APEP, you would have totally missed the point. This also further demonstrates that the x-p-r root is in fact three separate (monosyllabic) words conveniently agglutinated to convey a term (including a Niger-Congo noun class prefix). So when you see KH-P instead of KH-P-R in Egyptian, it is not a mistake. It is a different concept which doesn’t refer to the carrying of light from the sun.

The point of this exercise is to demonstrate that it is in understanding the poetic nature of African languages, not just random entries in a dictionary, that will help you get to the core of what is being conveyed by the Egyptian icons and the personification of forces. So in regards to nTr, what method and paradigm are you using confirm the meaning of nTr? Is nTr one word or several words? Is your definition your definition because it is yours, or simply because it was in Faulkner (or some other source)? To get at the heart of nTr, you can only do it within a grand cosmological narrative. Without it, you are like a ship adrift at sea: you may or may not hit land.

All of this will come full circle when I hear your responses to my questions in the first post. Remember, this is a discussion of method. The comparative method can only take you so far. Now you have to dig into the culture to get at the heart of the various meanings of nTr.

[imhotep06]

Again, we will see the relevance of all of this when we examine the word nTr

[imhotep06]

I appreciate the link. I will review it soon.

My thesis and approach to this subject is based on these two notions: 1) That key words in African liturgical languages carry at least two levels of definition: one meaningful in common usage, and the other meaningful in its mythological usage; And 2) in many African priestly contexts, the similarity in the pronunciation of words, for them, invokes a relationship between them.

For the later, this can be seen among the Dogon according to Dieterlen. This is also expressed by Egyptologist Serge Sauneron who notes this practice among the Egyptians in his work The Priest of Ancient Egypt (2000) which I've already cited in a previous discussion.

But I think it is more than superficial resemblance. It is clear that the earliest human languages were monosyllabic and utilized an agglutinative word and sentence construction. As human beings began to migrate out of Africa the languages gradually lost their agglutinative character and grammatical fusion took place to the point where many words are no longer analysable in these languages. For instance, Indo-European can no longer de-agglutinate the word MAN. It is an ancient African word that consist of the prefix MA- and the root NI. MANI still means "man" in Niger-Congo languages.

It is my contention, based on my research, that words were deliberately constructed and this is why similar sounding words have similar or related meanings in many African languages: they were trying to exhaust meaning. The word Muntu is a good example.

An even better example is in the Proto-Western Sudanic *pia meaning "fire." The slash and burn technique for creating fertile soil allowed for this word to be associated with "fertile soil." Thus the Bantu words CIPYA(e), CIPIA, CIPYACIPYA (reduplication), TSHIOPIA. In ciLuba these variations have the following meanings:

(1) "Newness, Novelty, New Earth"
(2) "What is ripe, mature, grown, land of maturity (spiritual and human development),
(3) "What is well cooked, baked, done, burnt, stewed, baked, parched," and
(4) "Three Rope son/child, Land of the Trinity," which was for the Greeks – god’s Earth, the Kingdom of God?

These derive from Pya meaning:

(A) burn, burn

(B) be grilled, roasted

(C) be hot

(R) be mature, be developed

(E) be passionate, enthusiastic

(F) suffering from sharp pains resulting from a sting

(G) do commit, incurring

Shila-15 / 0 intransitive verb

(A) be burned, be consumed

(B) be used

We know this is an ancient term and has always had these applications as the root can be seen as far away as Papa new Guinea:

pwaypwaya
1. 'soil', 'earth'.
2. 'cultivable soil'.
3. 'terra firma'.
4. 'floor', 'bottom'.
5. 'economically appropriated land'
6. 'magically amenable soil'.

This is where you get the word Ethiopia from and it is not a made up word from the Greeks. The point is that the early compilers of language consciously sought out extended meanings for roots by observing peripheral effects of its essential meaning: thus FIRE makes things BURNT. BURNING makes the soil FERTILE. Also, observing volcanoes one can associate fire with fertile, new earth which those in Central Africa and Cameroon observed since time immemorial. FIRE brings about NEWNESS.

The words don't "sound similar," they are the same word said slightly different so it can be distinguished.