Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #124846 in Books
• Published on: 1978-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 748 pages

Customer Reviews

Buyer Beware!
This two book set has some merits as an extensive base of heiroglyphic information. It is put together in a fairly easy to use format. HOWEVER!

Please be wary that this is the second half of the complete book. The first volume, or the first half of the dictionary, is not available for purchase. Before you think of purchasing this title, be sure that you have found the first volume, otherwise the back half is more than useless. I purchased this thinking I would easily find the first half, but was proved wrong.

Due to the outdated nature of this material, I recommend you find a more contemporary dictionary of Ancient Egyptian that is in its entirety.

Beware of Budge!
This book contains many hieroglyphs, and offers translation keys, but...

Let me just warn people that real archaeologists, real Egyptologists don't have a whole lot of respect for the author of this book anymore. A lot of conventions in translation have sort of moved on since his time. In the movie "Stargate," they make fun of him a little. They do this because, in the 21st century, people don't really use his writings anymore. You need to be very careful of anything Budge says.

Look for "Egyptian Grammar" by Sir Alan Gardiner. That's the standard textbook, used by real Egyptologists. The magazine KMT is good to know about, too. It's all about ancient Egypt, and is easy to find online.

If you enjoy this type of puzzle-solving, let me recommend a few titles. "The Decipherment of Linear B," by John Chadwick, "Breaking the Maya Code" by Michael Coe, and "The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries" by David Ulansey are all still in print. "Forgotten Scripts" by Cyrus Gordon, and "Voices in Stone" by Ernst Doblhofer are harder to find, but if you ask your local librarian to search for them using interlibrary loan services, he or she will probably find them. It's really worth it... Also, there are still a few ancient scripts out there that no one has deciphered yet. The Indus Valley Script, the Easter Island Script, and the Meroitic script are three of them. The Meroitic script could shed light someday on the issue of how much contact there was between Ancient Egypt and pre-historic Africa. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, at ..., has the best collection around on Meroe, and Meroitic, if anyone's interested. A good book for that script is "Ancient African Civilizations," edited by Stanley Burstein, which contains several useful chapters.

Well, happy deciphering to you!

Beware! This work is out of date!
This book is very, very old. There's nothing wrong with the scholarship in this book - Budge was no nut case - but about 10% of what's in here is flat wrong because it is outdated. We've learned a considerable amount since the days of Budge. Use Gardiner's Middle Egyptian Grammar, E. O. Faulkner's Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian, and/or Allen's grammar. Budge is still useful, but only for advanced students who know enough to know which parts are wrong. For heaven's sake, if you're just starting out, avoid this book!