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ava-does-dumbassery · 10 months

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Translating Nyarlathotep’s names, titles, and epithets into Middle Egyptian for funsies

Middle Egyptian is the version of the Ancient Egyptian language that was spoken from about 2000 BCE (4000 years ago) to 1300 BCE (3300 years ago). I’ve been learning it for several months now, but since I am still learning there are many epithets I just do not know how to translate yet (and I could be wrong even about the ones I think I do know how to translate). Also, I’m pretty sure that the lore around Nyarlathotep is that he was in Egypt in the Old Kingdom, when they spoke Old Egyptian not Middle Egyptian, but I don’t know Old Egyptian so fuck it, we ball.

All the hieroglyphs I’m going to show here should be read left to right, top to bottom. If you want to change them to be read right to left (which is how hieroglyphs were usually read), you just have to mirror reverse them so they face the other way. Hieroglyphs can’t be read bottom to top, however, so you can’t change that. Some formatting changes would be required to change the ones that are primarily horizontal to being primarily vertical, and vice versa.

First off: His name.

Originally, I was going to start this post with a punishingly long explanation of exactly what all this means and why I have all these different variations of the name. I think an explanation like that is necessary to put somewhere on this post, but I don’t want to force people who just do not care to read all that, so I’ve put it at the very end beneath a “keep reading.”

Now for (some) epithets and titles:

“Mighty Messenger:”

Transliteration: wpwty wsr. A way to pronounce it: Weputy weser or uputy user.

“Great Messenger:”

Transliteration: wpwty wr. A way to pronounce it: Weputy wer or Uputy ur.

The “Black Pharaoh:”

There are two ways to write this one. The first is this:

Transliteration: nsw km. A way to pronounce it: Nesu kem.

It means “black king” not “black pharaoh,” but I think it might make more sense to say it this way. The way you’d say “black pharaoh” is like this:

Transliteration: pr-ʿȝ km. A way to pronounce it: Per a’a kem.

This literally means “the black Great House,” since the word “pharaoh” literally means “Great House.” This would be sort of like if Nyarlathotep appeared on earth today in the form of a United States president and we called him “the black White House,” or if he appeared as a Russian president and we called him “the black Kremlin.” The problem with this one is that I’m not so clear on if the rules for stacking adjectives would even allow for you to say this.

Also, fun fact, Ancient Egyptians considered black to be a good colour, since they associated it with the fertile soil beside the Nile. So this title would not be sinister to them. Like if Nyarlathotep appeared as a US president and we called him “the cool awesome White House.”

“Soul (of the Other Gods):”

Transliteration: kȝ kywy nṯrw. A way to pronounce it: Ka keywey netcheru.

It’s hard to just translate “soul” directly into Egyptian because the Ancient Egyptians didn’t just believe in “a soul,” they believed in a bunch of different parts of a soul that all did different things. The part I’ve used for this translation is the ka, because I think it’s the closest to what we might think of when we hear the word “soul.” I think you could make an argument that since Nyarlathotep’s job is to go and enact the Other God’s will for them, he could be considered their akh, but the akh is a very distinctly Egyptian concept and has lot to do with being dead and getting to the Egyptian afterlife, so I don’t think it works well here. You might also argue that he could be their heart (ib) since the Egyptians thought that you did your thinking with your heart instead of your brain, and Nyarlathotep seems to be a lot more capable of thought than the rest of the “blind, voiceless, mindless” Other Gods, but hearts don’t go out and do things for you so I don’t think that one works either.

“Soul and messenger (of the Other Gods):”

Transliteration: kȝ wpwty kywy nṯrw. A way to pronounce it: Ka weputy keywey netcheru.

“God of a Thousand Forms:”

Transliteration: nṯr ḫprw ḫȝ. A way to pronounce it: Netcher kheperu kha.

Also, as a bonus, I noticed while I was looking for epithets to translate that Fungi From Yuggoth calls Azathoth the “Lord of All.” That’s an Azathoth epithet, so I don’t really have an excuse to translate it into Egyptian, but “Lord of All” is also a common epithet for the Egyptian god Horus. If I ever write that thing about Egyptian gods fighting Nyarlathotep then I will find a way to exploit this. Anyway, here’s how you can say “Lord of All:”

Transliteration: nb tm. A way to pronounce it: Neb tem.

Nyarlathotep’s name is kind of a nightmare to try and spell with the Ancient Egyptian alphabet (good for him, he’d probably want it that way). Here’s my long ass explanation of why I chose to write it the ways I did in this post:

Why is his name spelled without vowels?:

In Ancient Egyptian writing, the vowels are usually left out and only the consonant sounds in words are written down (it’s a lot like Hebrew in this way). The Egyptians eventually did create a system for writing vowels, and that was used for words that Egyptian readers wouldn’t already know how to pronounce, like foreign names. Nyarlathotep, coming from outer space, would be pretty foreign to them, but the earliest vocalic writing is from the end of the Old Kingdom. I’m going to use that as an excuse to say it didn’t exist when he was around and just not bother with it, because there is no way to spell his name in any vocalic writing system that isn’t incomplete and/or confusing (there are two A’s in there and one of them is right next to an L and that is An Issue). The Is in the spellings of his names with the eye symbol in them do not count as vowels, because they are actually transliteration symbols for a consonant sound.

The L sound:

The L sound in his name is an issue because Ancient Egyptian languages might have had an L sound in them, at some point, but they might’ve not. Basically: If you’ve ever done one of those things that will tell you how to write your name in hieroglyphs, you’ve probably been told that this vulture glyph 𓄿 makes an A sound. That is only true in certain types of vocalic writing. The rest of the time it made a consonant sound. We don’t know what consonant sound, though, because the Egyptians stopped pronouncing it in the New Kingdom. Our best guess (based on it being used to transcribe words from other languages that we know had L and R sounds) is that it made a sound like L or R, which is why I’ve used it here for the L sound.

Why are there all those variations around the TH sound?:

Ancient Egyptian languages did not have a TH sound, and the Egyptian letter T and the Egyptian letter H did not combine to make a new sound like they do in English. They did have an F sound, so you could just spell it Nyarlafotep instead. However, “hotep” (transliteration: ḥtp) is an actual Ancient Egyptian word. It means “peace.” Many Ancient Egyptian names are the name of a god + ḥtp, for example “Amenhotep” which means “Amen is at peace.” That the Ancient Egyptians would have thought Nyarlathotep’s name meant that someone called Nyarlat was at peace is too deliciously ironic to ignore, and that meaning is lost if you spell it NYRLFTP. The two options to preserve that meaning are to make the T the bread loaf glyph 𓏏 (this would change the pronunciation to Nyarlat-hotep) or to try and keep the TH sound somewhat by putting the horned viper glyph 𓆑 in there (this would change the pronunciation to Nyarlaf-hotep).

What do the variations with the eye sign in them mean?:

The eye sign is a hieroglyph that makes two consonant sounds. These sounds are transliterated ir, but that i does not represent an actual I sound (except in vocalic writing). Usually, i made a glottal stop sound, but sometimes it made a Y sound. This means you could use the eye glyph for the consonants YR in his name (and this is cosmic horror, where we like eyeballs and put them on everything wherever we can). However, this might make the name even more confusing to read, because it makes it easy to mistake the Y in the name for a glottal stop.

Why is his name in a cartouche?:

The names of pharaohs (and only pharaohs) were written inside cartouches. And not just any of the pharaoh’s names. Pharaohs had several different types of names, and only the throne name and birth name were written in cartouches. This means it could be debated wether or not it would be proper for his name to be written in a cartouche. However, Nyarlathotep is not actually from Egypt, he’s from space, and at least one of the stories he’s in portrays him as a showman who uses aesthetic connections to Ancient Egypt as a gimmick to get people to come see his brainwashing prophecies of doom, so I feel like he would not care if it was proper or not and would use it anyway because it’s a very recognizable piece of iconography. But if we found hieroglyphic carvings by Ancient Egyptians that warned of the evils of the god Nyarlathotep, his name might not be written in a cartouche and instead be written with the determinative for god 𓀭 after it.

#nyarlathotep #cthulhu mythos #lovecraft #ancient egypt #lovecraftian horror #cosmic horror #lovecraftian #ancient egypt stuff #ava has thoughts #id in alt #tw caps

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