Adolf Erman

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Johann Peter Adolf Erman (October 31, 1854 – 1937) was a renowned Egyptologist and lexicographer; born in Berlin, the son of Georg Adolf Erman and grandson of Paul Erman.

Educated at Leipzig and Berlin, he became extraordinary professor in 1883 and ordinary professor in 1892 of Egyptology in the University of Berlin, and in 1885 he was appointed director of the Egyptian department of the royal museum.

Erman and his school at Berlin had the difficult task of recovering the grammar of the Egyptian language and spent thirty years of special study on it. The greater part of Egyptian texts after the Middle Kingdom having been written in what was even then practically a dead language, as dead as Latin was to the medieval monks in Italy who wrote and spoke it, Erman selected for special investigation those texts which really represented the growth of the language at different periods, and, as he passed from one epoch to another, compared and consolidated his results.

The Neuägyptische Grammatik (1880) dealt with texts written in the vulgar dialect of the New Kingdom (Dyns. XVIII to XX). Next followed, in the Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Alterthumskunde, studies on the Old Kingdom inscription of Una, and the Middle Kingdom contracts of Assiut, as well as on an Old Coptic text of the 3rd century CE. At this point a papyrus of stories written in the popular language of the Middle Kingdom provided Erman with a stepping-stone from Old Egyptian to the Late Egyptian of the Neuägyptische Grammatik, and gave the connections that would bind solidly together the whole structure of Egyptian grammar (see Sprache des Papyrus Westcar, 1889). The very archaic pyramid texts enabled him to sketch the grammar of the earliest known form of Egyptian (Zeitschrift d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gesellschaft, 1892), and in 1894 he was able to write a little manual of Egyptian for beginners (Ägyptische Grammatik, 4th ed., 1928), centering on the language of the standard inscriptions of the Middle and New Kingdoms, but accompanying the main sketch with references to earlier and later forms.

Of the work of Erman's pupils we may mention G. Steindorff's little Koptische Grammatik (1894, ed 1904), improving greatly on Stern's standard work in regard to phonology and the relationship of Coptic forms to Egyptian, and Kurt Sethe's Das Agyptische Verbum (1899). The latter is an extensive monograph on the verb in Egyptian and Coptic by a brilliant and laborious philologist. Owing to the very imperfect notation of sound in the writing, the highly important subject of the verbal roots and verbal forms was perhaps the obscurest branch of Egyptian grammar when Sethe first attacked it in 1895. The subject has been reviewed by Erman, Die Flexion des Aegyptischen Verbums in the Sitzungsberichte of the Berlin Academy, 1900. The Berlin school, having settled the main lines of the grammar, next turned its attention to lexicography. It devised a scheme, founded on that for the Latin Thesaurus of the Berlin Academy, which almost mechanically sorts the whole number of occurrences of every word in any text examined. In 1897, Erman, working together with Sethe, Hermann Grapow and other coworkers from all over the world, started to catalogue all the words from all the known Egyptian texts available; the result was an ensemble of about 1,500,000 datasheets that form the basis for the masterpiece of the ancient Egyptian lexicography, the famous Woerterbuch der aegyptischen Sprache, whose first five volumes were published between 1926 and 1931. The complete edition of this gigantic dictionary comprises a total of twelve volumes.

Egyptian is certainly related to Semitic. Even before the triliterality of Old Egyptian was recognized, Erman showed that the so-called pseudo-participle had been really in meaning and in form a precise analogue of the Semitic perfect, though its original employment was almost obsolete in the time of the earliest known texts. Triliteralism is considered the most essential and most peculiar feature of Semitic.

[edit] Works

Life in Ancient Egypt, translated by H. M. Tirard (London, 1894), (the original Agypten und agyptisches Leben in, Altertum, 2 vols., was published in 1885 at Tubingen
Neuägyptische Grammatik (1880)
Sprache des Papyrus Westcar, 1889
Zeitschrift d. Deutsch. Morgeni. Gesellschaft, 1892
Agyplische Grammatik, 2nd ed., 1902
Die Flexion des ägyptischen Verbums in the Sitzungsberichte
Die aegyptische Religion (Berlin, 1905);
A curious book published by Erman contains spells to be used by mothers for the protection of their children
Das Verhältnis d. ägyptischen zu d. semitischen Sprachen (Zeitschrift d. deutschen morgenl. Gesellschaft, 1892); Zimmern, Vergi. Gram., 1898;
Erman, Flexion d. Aegyptischen Verbums (Sitzungsberichte d. Ben. Akad., 1900).