Egyptian Gematria

          Yes, I know: the Egyptians did not have a system of gematria. What I would like to do, however, is to explore the possibilities of an Egyptian gematria based on correspondences with languages that have a tradition of numerical mysticism. Any of the ancient languages that used their letters as numerals might suffice, but two candidates stand out: Hebrew and Arabic. Both languages share etymological roots with the ancient Egyptian language and have a similar range of sound values.

        Besides the genetic and phonetic similarity of both languages, I find Hebrew more promising for several reasons. First, there is the mytho-historical link between the Jews and Egypt. Some alternative historians have even proposed that Moses was himself a member of Egyptian royalty in the person of the heretical monotheist Pharaoh Akhenaten. Second, in a purely academic sense, Hebrew is "closer" to Egyptian writing than is Arabic. The current scholarly theory is that Hebrew is derived from Phoenician, which is derived from a select few Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Arabic alphabet is a much later development, deriving through many generations from early Aramaic writing.

            Although the Egyptians had no "alphabet" as we currently understand that term, their writing system contained 24 signs that stood for single sound values. These 24 symbols were the basis of the Hieratic and Demotic writing systems and are currently used by Egyptologists as a kind of Egyptian alphabet (for example, in Egyptian dictionaries). In the table below, I have placed these hieroglyphs and their modern transliteration with their Hebrew analogues and corresponding number values. Most of these assignments should be self-evident to anyone familiar with the respective alphabets, but a few are idiosyncratic. Those marked in the right-most column are commented upon below the table. An excellent resource for understanding the pronunciation of ancient Egyptian can be found here.

 

Hebrew
Hieroglyph
Transliteration
Value
1
2
3
4
5
1
6
7
2
8
3
9
4
10
20
 
30
5
40
50
60
6
70
80
7
90
8
100
200
300
400

 

(1) There are more "h" sounds in Egyptian than there are in Hebrew. The first hieroglyphic "h" is more or less the same as the Hebrew Hé. The second, denoted by a subscript dot, is a slightly "rougher" breathing that might be somewhere between Hebrew Hé and Cheth. The decision to assign this Egyptian sound the value of 5 rather than 8 is primarily based on the fact that there are two more sounds in Egyptian that are even closer to the Cheth sound. A relativistic decision, certainly, but a moderate one.

(2) This hieroglyph represented the sound of z in Early Egyptian, but it became interchangeable with the hieroglyph for s (analogous to Samekh) by the Middle Kingdom. Some transliteration schemes make no distinction between these two hieroglyphs. Whether this letter is counted as 7 or 60 is a matter of personal preference in my opinion. Since many sources do not make a distinction, it is certainly easier to count it as 60. A possible solution would be to use Arabic as an anlogue since it has more S sounds than Hebrew; the difficulty here would be in distinguishing the sounds of Sin and Saad.

(3) The first hieroglyph in this pair was a rough sound that is often transliterated as "kh," as in akh, Khonsu, and ankh. The second is a softer sound made further forward in the mouth. There is no analogous sound in English, but it is believed to have been very close to the "ch" sound in the German "Ich."

(4) This, it must be admitted, is more of an intuitive assignment than a linguistic one. The image of the serpent is the connecting idea. The sound represeted by the hieroglyph was originally similar to the j sound in English and is sometimes transcribed as "dj." In later Egyptian, it became interchangeable with the simple "d" sound; occasionally it became a t. In any case, there is no analogous sound in Hebrew.

(5) There is no L sound in Egyptian. In some cases (as in the name "Ptolemy" from the Rosetta Stone), L's from foreign words and names were transcribed into hieroglyphs using the rw hieroglyph (the recumbent lion). This leaves any construction of Egyptian gematria based on Hebrew without a 30.

(6) See note (2) above.

(7) These are quite distinct sounds, of course, but they are symbolized by the same letter in Hebrew. A similar problem exists in Arabic, which has no P sound.

(8) The Egyptian sound represented by this hieroglyph is often transliterated as "tsh," "tch," or "tj," as in netjer. It became interchangeable with T in later Egyptian, and a case could be made for counting it as an analogue of Teth instead of Tzaddi.