Egyptology and the modern world without time

So I've been obsessed with Egyptian for a while, noticing some interesting things about how the Egyptians represented words. It's not as simple as it first looks. Basically, Ancient Egyptians used pictographic symbols to spell out sounds like 's' or 'm', to represent entire words as a whole, and to signal what kind of word something is (ie. as 'determinatives'). So the word 'sun' can be spelled out as [rˁ] (for actual *rīʕa) with an accompanying determinative symbol to both describe the word (and perhaps also to delimit one word from the next somewhat), or it can be conveyed with the sun symbol itself followed by a single stroke to tell the reader that the symbol is to be read as a full word instead of a sound.

At first it all appears simple enough until you realize that Egyptian scribes were sometimes so ingeniously creative in exploring multiple ways of writing the same word that it's hard to tell sometimes whether a particular symbol in a particular sentence was really meant as a sound, an entire word or just a type of word.

To illustrate, take the word for 'father'. Sometimes people will tell you it was spelled [ỉtf] and sometimes [ỉt]. The later forms of this word in Coptic dialects show no trace of the supposed 'f' (Sahidic eiwt; see A Coptic Dictionary by Walter Crum, p.86). The sound 'f' in Ancient Egyptian is written as a horned viper. It turns out that since 'fathers' in the plural is also written out simply as three horned vipers, and since it's clear that the word is not really *[fff], we should probably understand the trailing 'f' not as a sound, but as a determinative conveying fatherhood somehow. Thus the true word for 'father' should be understood as simply [ỉt] despite the occasionally added horned viper glyph, thereby corresponding to both Coptic and Old Egyptian representations of the word lacking the 'f'. Anyone who continues to say that the word is really [ỉtf] should be slapped with a salami sandwich on rye.

Egyptian hieroglyphs never cease to fascinate me but all of these interesting cases of misreadings make me ponder more on how deceiving outdated books are, such as that of Sir Wallis Budge called An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary. You can see the various Egyptian representations of the word 'father' here as it was represented in a similarly ancient book by Erman and Grapow called Ägyptisches Handwörterbuch. As you can see, the word is often spelled various ways without 't' making it clear that the word couldn't in reality have contained the sound 'f'. There are many misreadings like these commited eons ago that deserve a footnote commentary yet are absent in these republished books, whether online or in print. Yet it seems to me that it's this up-to-date information like the above factoid that is more educational to the general public than continually dishing out outdated sources for empty profit.

At that thought, my cynical mind starts analysing what "Information Age" really implies and its relationship to the concept briefly mentioned in the movie Matrix, that of a world without time. In some ways perhaps, it's a world of misinformation, previously four-dimensional, flattened into a three-dimensional one that pales in comparison, a universe that no longer distributes what is currently known to the general public because the masses no longer care about truth.

And then I chuckle at my internal, nihilistic musings while sitting in the café as usual, sipping my coffee, in solitude and deep reflection.