Footnote 2 – You Too Can Read Hieroglyphics

A word of qualification is in order here. For the Egyptian scribe engaged in international correspondence, foreign words and, especially, foreign personal and place names—be they Hamitic, Semitic, or non-Semitic—posed a serious problem, namely, how to represent in Egyptian their approximate pronunciation. His solution was the development of an Egyptian syllabic orthography (Egyptian signs which would represent both a consonant and a vowel, for example, ta, ti, tu, etc.). Among the many important scholarly contributions of the great W. F. Albright was a monograph on this subject, The Vocalization of the Egyptian Syllabic Orthography, American Oriental Series 5 (1934).