These Brazilians Use the Pharaohs' as Their Second Language
Written by Isaura Daniel
Tuesday, 08 January 2008
To a specific group of Brazilians, the signs and drawings on limestone
and papyruses of Ancient Egypt are not just signs and drawings. Half a dozen
scholars in Brazil, most connected to the academic world, understand the
language of the pharaohs very well.
They are researchers and professors like Ciro Flamarion Santana Cardoso,
Antonio Brancaglion Junior and Moacir Elias Santos who know and even teach the
Egyptian language around Brazil. The knowledge is used by the specialists, and
also by their apprentices, to decipher original documents from Ancient Egypt.
Egyptian is considered a dead language as it is no longer spoken. The
language is currently only used in rituals in the Coptic Church, explains
Cardoso. What the church uses is, in reality, the last unfolding of the
original Egyptian language, officially called Coptic.
The first registry of the Egyptian language is from around 3,000 years
before Christ. The language of the time is called Archaic or Ancient Egyptian.
After that the language evolved to Old, Middle and Late Egyptian, Demotic and
then Coptic. Coptic is already based on the Greek alphabet, but it also uses
Egyptian characters.
Cardoso, an Ancient History professor at the Fluminense Federal
University (UFF), learnt the Egyptian language at the time of his doctor's
degree at the University of Paris, in France. While preparing his doctorate, he
took Egyptian classes at the Louvre School.
When he returned to Brazil, after 12 years in Europe, Costa Rica and
Mexico, Cardoso entered the UFF to teach History of the Americas, the area of
his Master's degree. A few years later he opted for Ancient History. At the
time, the end of the 1980s, the Ancient and Medieval History department was set
up in the Post-Graduate History Program at the UFF and Cardoso started teaching
Egyptian to Master's and Doctoral students.
The discipline is opened when there are students researching Egyptology.
Last year, for example, there were three regular students and another seven
sitting in. The course lasts one term and gives basic notions of how Middle
Egyptian works. To have total domination, explained Cardoso, it is necessary to
continue researching alone.
The professor believes that Ancient Egypt generates great interest in
people due to the art of the period and also due to the belief in eternity of
the ancient Egyptian civilization. "People are interested in the aesthetics of
the civilization," stated the professor, explaining why the Egyptian lessons
attract so many student listeners, who are normally not academic researchers of
the matter.
Moacir Elias Santos was one of Cardoso's students of Egyptian language.
He is currently a professor in the History course at the Campos de Andrade
University Center (Uniandrade), in Curitiba, Paraná, having learnt Egyptian
when he took his Master's degree in archaeology at UFF.
Now Santos also teaches the language of the pharaohs. He has already
given courses in the area at Uniandrade and this year the Egyptian Language
discipline will be introduced in the specialization in Ancient and Medieval
History at the university. The program will be run by the professor.
There are also other masters in Egyptian language in Brazil, like
researcher Antonio Brancaglion Junior, connected to the Federal University of
Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and to the University of São Paulo (USP), and historian
Margaret Bakos, of the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC) of Porto Alegre.
In total, according to estimates by the researchers, there are less than
ten people that dominate Ancient Egyptian in Brazil. In Ancient Egypt, those
who knew how to read and write worked directly in the area and were called
scribes. According to Santos, there was no grammar. The learning was through
practice.
Anba - www.anba.com.br
http://www.brazzilmag.com/content/view/9034/1/
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