There was this story in “The Tracer of Lost Persons” (by Robert W. Chambers), chapter 17 to 20, about an Egyptian girl being put into suspend animation. Much of the story revolves around the deciphering of an ancient Egyptian scroll (something like “The Gold Bug” by Poe).
At the end of the story, to cut it short, the hero woke up the sleeping Egyptian girl. The girl said, “Ari un aha, O Entuk sen” (I omitted the accent on the characters because I have no idea how to put it in). From the story, I know that “entuk” means “you”, but what is the meaning of the rest of the sentence?
Did anyone ever answer this question for you? I just read that story, and even with today’s computers I can’t get a translation! Is it Egyptian or Arabic or what? To end a story like that is really annoying. Thanks.
Is it possible that the sentence actually doesn’t mean anything, but is merely gibberish made up by the author? The novel in question was published in 1906, when people were, shall we say, not always conscientious about getting the details of foreign cultures perfectly correct.
Which god does that correspond to? My knowledge of Egyptian religion does not even rise to the level of patchy.
Always a possibility— Gardiner’s textbook was only published in 1927— but we would have to rule it out. Was the author known to be any sort of Egyptologist?
The version of the story that appeared in The Idler Magazine in 1906 includes both the hieroglyphs and transliterations for some words and phrases, unlike the version found on Project Gutenberg which has only the transliterations. Unfortunately the mysterious final sentence is only given in transliteration. That makes it hard to decipher because Egyptian had a lot of homophones, with different meanings and spelling (in the original language) but the same transliteration.
I expect Chambers was using some book about Egyptian language published before 1906. Budge’s First Steps in Egyptian Hieroglyphics (1895) is a contender. I haven’t gone through the whole book, but I can verify that it lists “entuk” as a pronoun of some sort (p. 23). Budge’s works on Egyptian were once considered accurate, but they have been superseded by new research on the language.
Getting back to this, let us examine the second sentence: “O entuk sen”. Such a short utterance, but what is it supposed to mean?? Not sure what “o” means, but let’s ignore it for now. We know “entuk”
means “you” and “sen”
means “brother”, but “entuk sen” cannot mean “you are my brother”; that would be “(e)nt(u)k s(e)n.i”
, with the suffix.
Well, the probable reason this has not been answered— I am increasingly convinced this is “Romanes eunt domus” style Egyptian. For example, paging through @bibliophage 's link, at one point it describes “the ancient Egyptian word for ‘little,’ ‘ket.’ The next… the name of a woman.” However, Allen’s textbook states that “The rule that adjectives must follow their noun is invariable.”
Maybe it’s a deliberate part of the story that the detective simply does not know Egyptian, as much as he thinks he does? Or maybe that is true of Chambers.
