Early Numbers

(c) 2007 David Grant Stewart, Sr.

The complete set of early Egyptian numbers is claimed by Joseph Smith’s Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language to be 1. EH, 2. NI, 3. ZE, 4. TEH, 5. VEH, 6. PSI, 7. PSA, 8. A, 9. NA, and 10. TAH.  Egyptologists have them respectively as 1. WA, 2. SENWI or SENI, 3. HEMET, 4. FEDEW, 5. DIW, 6. SERESEW, 7. SEFEKH, 8. HEMEN, 9. PESEJ, 10. MEJ.

1. EH

The hieroglyph for 1 is D which is the same hieroglyph we see in KGD, PHA RA OH, “king by royal blood.” There it has the sound OH. So who is right, Egyptologists with their WA or the GAEL with its EH?  This would be impossible for anyone but a multilingual translator to figure out. It is perfectly obvious. Russian, which is the descendant of Egyptian through Assyrian cuneiform has рука, RUKA for exactly the same thing and there it is used in precisely the same way as it is in Egyptian hieroglyphic. It can mean the arm and the hand, the arm, or the hand. The equivalent expression in Assyrian cuneiform as well as Sumerian, is i the hand (representing the five fingers). It also is well documented to mean ANY VOWEL, but usually I. So by this information, none of the readings WA [Champollion has OUA, only two vowels short of having them all], OH, I, EH is incorrect. I can safely put my money on EH.

2. NI

The hieroglyph for 2 all Egyptologists have as PJB, SNI.  However, Champollion has P, S, as a number sign itself which therefore would not be pronounced. But this is not sufficient proof. The greatest Egyptologist lexicographer in the world, Adolf Erman, settles the matter: on the bottom of page 192 of his M-N volume, he has as JB, NI, as the sign of  both, dual, two, but he adds this precaution: “Nur in ältesten Sprache.” - “Only in the oldest language.” Well, isn’t that what we are talking about?

By the way, this is preserved in Chinese. The second person pronoun is 你, NI. Also in Swedish. And NI is the word for 2 in Japanese.

3. ZE

Champollion has womnt, SHOMNT for 3. The hieroglyphs read NW. The N has an aspirate sound, H, and Egyptologists are assuming that W has an M sound. Yet Y is given as the pronunciation by modern Egyptologists for W in the word Y1VW.[1] Hannig is taking  W as determinative and Y1V as the way W should be pronounced. So the pronunciation of the hieroglyph W is the same as Y. Egyptologists have called this Y everything from  DJ to J. I discovered many years ago that it has the sound of J and Z. J as in YPK JOSEPH, and Z as in YJM44.  What do you suppose YJM44 means? It is the prophet Zenock, a great grandson of Joseph, who was stoned by the Israelites, thus postponing their freedom from bondage until the days of Moses.  So what is the pronunciation of the Egyptian word for three, NW? ZE.

This is preserved in the Persian word for three, SE.  But what about N? In this case, this is a determinative to establish that the hieroglyph W is not to be taken literally but is used for its Z sound. But why is N used as a determinative for the number three? Modern Egyptologists speculate that it represents a placenta, but even Gardiner admits he is not sure.[2] It does not. It represents the total eclipse of a planet or star or sun [GAEL]. Where does the notion of three come in? It takes three planets to form an eclipse. One to be eclipsed, one to do the eclipsing, and one to furnish the light.

4. TEH

The hieroglyphs for “four” are variously cited as BHX1111, [Budge, op. cit., p. 44], HXE1111, [Budge, p. 263].

Is 4 TEH or FEDEW? Champollion has ftoou., FTOOU [Champ., op. cit., p. 209] for the reading in 198 B.C. This would be HV in hieroglyphs, but we already know that H was often silent or a determinative in Old Kingdom hieroglyphs, so that leaves us with a bare  V, T. So the correct sound is TEH.

5. VEH

Is 5 VEH or DIW? This number is rarely spelled out. Budge admits he frankly does not know its pronunciation [Budge, dictionary, p.868]. But it was VEH and I will show you why. In Phoenician, stick figure hieroglyphs, they instituted the figure V both for the number 5 and for its sound, VEH. As you know, this was later borrowed by the Romans for its meaning as a numeral but for its sound as the letters U and V exactly as the Hebrew ו, VAV. Standing alone, the V meant 5; rotated  45° as L it meant ten times that value, 5 x 10 = 50; rotated 180° Λ, it still meant 50, but with a line under it, its value was increased ten times, 50 X 10 = 500 and was written Δ by the Greeks and D by the later Romans. Its original sound is preserved in Finnish to this day with a grammatical suffix as in Greek, viisi.

6. PSI

Is 6 pronounced PSI or SERESEW? The hieroglyphs for SRS are PKP, but the characters are often used for determinatives of numbers which seems to be the case here. With the alternate (and in fact more common) sound of K as P in the Old Kingdom (although Champollion admits this sound even in Ptolemaic times), we have KP, PSI.

7. PSA

The JS GAEL claims that the Egyptian word for “seven” is pronounced “PSA.” But Egyptologists will tell you that it is pronounced SEFEKH. Shall we go back to the original hieroglyphs and see for ourselves?  The Egyptian hieroglyphs for “seven” spelled out are PHN but usually written HPN or HP.  

There is no F in early Egyptian, nor in any other contemporary ancient language. F is a relatively recent invention. In the old languages there is only hard and soft P, i.e. P and PH. That’s why none of the words we borrow from Greek have any Fs in them. F was at its birth christened digamma, because it was gamma with an extra member. Anciently - and this includes all of the earliest languages - P and PH were the same character and you had to know from context which sound to use.  The correct pronunciation of the word “seven” in Egyptian hieroglyphs is PSA. You can write it PSAH if it makes you feel better to accommodate the N that is sometimes there.

8. A

In Budge’s dictionary he lists the number 8 with NM as the root but with PP as an equivalent [p. 547]. The basic sound of N is simply AH which I think already proves the point. In the original language, all basic words, numbers included, were monosyllabic, all other syllables having been added by later degenerate languages.

9. NA

Nine is listed in Budge’s dictionary as GP PS which I already demonstrated in 6 and 7 (PSI and PSA). When we look at the shape of the characters, we see that JS GAEL 7 is almost identical to and easily mistaken for 9. Likewise, our own 6 is nothing more nor less than an upside down 9.  Throughout Egyptian to Sanskrit to Arabic we see several obvious transpositions. The point is not that PS somehow is or ever was NA, but rather that, on the one hand, that sound really does belong to 6 and 7 but not to 9, and on the other hand, a very high percentage of all the languages in the world call their number 9 with a name that starts with N and some vowel (see chart below). I think the point is made that the correct sound was originally NA.

10. TAH

Is 10 TAH or MEJ? The hieroglyph for 10 is W .  As noted above for number three, “the pronunciation of the hieroglyph W is the same as Y”  which can be soft as in J or hard as in D or T. TAH is the more accurate of the two. But the JS GAEL gives the hieroglyph or hieratic representation of 10 as ;, exactly as the Coptic letter ; which represents the sound TI. I submit that two thousand years earlier the sound was TAH. Either of these sounds is preserved in Swedish TIO, ten, and in Persian دح DAH, ten.

Numbers and Language Affinity

A reader question has arisen with regard to the validity of Arabic being involved in ancient language studies. Let’s do a comparison with all major languages and see what we get.

I have selected numbers from one to ten as being the part of any language that is most likely to reflect the affinity of any language with any other.  The reason for this criterion is the result of time and experience. English numbers were essentially unaffected by the Norman conquest, even though the entire language underwent a complete overhaul in every aspect of its grammar and vocabulary. Practically the only thing that escaped was the small numbers. All the massive changes in the English language have left the small numbers essentially unchanged, even to the point that the orthography of our most common numbers one and two has still not caught up with the way we pronounce them.

Higher numbers are not a valid criterion because in all primitive cultures, all the higher numbers have had to be imported from higher civilizations. For example, our word “million” is not English at all, but the Latin mille with the Latin augmentative suffix -on (as also for example cane, a tube; cannon, a big tube). But cheer up - in some aboriginal cultures all the numbers above three have had to be imported. English has kept all its original numbers up to but not including one million. That says a lot for our sustained level of civilization.

I have devised my own metric for determining the proximity of any of these languages to the original one:

If a professional translator of many languages would recognize the same number in two different languages as identical within dialectical tolerances, I assigned that word a score of 2.

If a professional translator could see a phonemic similarity such that the word could reasonably have evolved from the original language word within the tolerances of known orthographic mutations caused by regional differences in dialectical pronunciation, I assigned that word a score of 1.

If no similarity was obvious to a translator of many languages, I assigned the word a score of 0.

I provided the translator.

As a control of the validity of this criterion, we should expect languages of the same family to have similar scores. They do.

As an additional control, we should expect parent languages to have at least an equal score if not a higher score than their descendant languages in all cases. In all cases, they do.

Here’s one thing you need to know: the original language was monosyllabic. Any language having a name of any number which has more than one syllable, has added the second because of other factors. This fact needs to be taken into account in making these comparisons. It has been.

Now here are the results of our experiment. The second and third lines have the numbers given in Joseph Smith’s Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (JS GAEL).  At that early stage, before the confounding of tongues, the early Egyptian numbers were identical to those of the original language.

For each language, the upper line gives the approximate phonic spelling of the name of the number in that language. The lower line gives the score I assigned to each number according to its similarity with the JS GAEL numbers.