How Ancient Egyptians Sounded

I didn't expect my takeaway to be regarding the positive historical accuracy of the mummy movies.

The Mummy was such a banger. Prime Brenden Fraser and Racheal Weisz 💪🏽

Imhotep was one of the first artists in history whose name we still have today. It's simply the coolest thing ever to me to hear what ancient people called themselves, and to know he was so important too

I worked for an IT company...there was a SQL job named Imhotep that would move files to their afterlife after a set time in storage.

Imagine being one of the best architects in human history and becoming the standard villain of every Egyptian mummy movie thousands of years in the future.

The mummy was such a legendary movie fr

The mummy single-handedly made me want to be an archaeologist as a kid 😭 later on Indiana Jones as well. I love the mummy so much and still I’m so fascinated by ancient Egypt.

I wish this was around when I was in elementary school. Covering ancient Egypt was my favorite back then

That one line “Hieroglyphics don’t make sound” is hilarious because neither do letters. They’re just supposed to be transcriptions of our speech Edit: I don’t think some of y’all know how to read. Some of y’all are just looking at the letters without comprehending what they mean

I think people forget that ancient Egypt lasted a long time. Like REEEEAAALLYYYYY long. The pyramids were as ancient to Cleopatra as she is to us.

The Mummy was one of my mom's favorite movies. Probably watched it on VHS together more times than I can count as a kid. Ironically, it came on during one of my last few hospital visits. We watched it together, and even though she wasn't doing all that great, I'm glad we watched it one more time. I'm sure she'd be really happy to know the Egyptian was accurate.

I have *always* wondered if films like 'The Mummy' & 'Stargate's' Egyptian was gibberish, or there was linguists working on them...

Coptic Orthodox Christian here. Thanks for the shout out. Not only have we preserved and perform parts of our liturgy in Coptic, but the hymns we sing have similar rhythm and melody as the pharaonic songs.

I don't know who this woman is but I really admire her passion for ancient Egypt!

I need a full 2 hours with this lady on this topic

Gonna need 700 shorts on this please

I am a Christain Egyptian and can speak Coptic as it is still taught in churches. It is so cool that Christains managed to preserve such an acncient language.

Only thing I would add is that Coptic is indeed the FINAL stage and so we can reconstruct it. However, Egypt existed for millenia... The chance of the language never undergoing extreme changes in pronunciation is practically 0. Moreover, we probably don't even know just how severely or how often these changes occured. Ancient egyptian might have been pretty stable in its pronunciation, or it might have changed drastically every few centuries, which wouldn't be noticable through the writing (unless new combinations pop up or old ones vanish etc)

i've been telling people about Coptic for the last 30 years. i've been obsessed with egypt since i was 8 years old

An Egyptian Christian confirms that this is very true + we still pray in Coptic and Arabic in church✝️☦️✝️