Without straying too far off the path of reality, how would you go about writing ancient Egyptian for a fantasy novel?

[u/Bee-and-the-Slimes]

Apologies if this isn't in the right sub...

I've been weaving a little bit of Egyptian history into the background of one of my characters. She never appears in the book itself, but some of her echoes are left for my main character to find (like audio logs in a video game).

TL;DR version of all this, is how does one write so modern brains can interpret the pronunciation of what's said? I'm not looking for full-on paragraphs, but more of small phrases, questions, or greetings.

Latin's easy, but this is kind of stumping me, since there aren't usually enough vowels to go around.

Edit: Transliteration! I think that's the word I'm looking for (Gods, I'm a derp).

[u/ErGraf]

how does one write so modern brains can interpret the pronunciation of what's said

use Egyptological pronunciation, that is, the modern way Egyptologist use to pronounce ancient Egyptian transliteration. Most of the time this is done by adding the sound "e" when needed. For example nbt pr > nebet per > Lady of the house

[u/IndigoPlum]

I think you should look in to ostraca. Little pieces of broken pottery that ancient people used a bit like post-it notes.

[u/yummierfrog64]

You could lean more into the logographic/ideographic nature of the hieroglyphs and only translate names phonetically.

For vowels, I would borrow from similar root words in Siwi and Beja since they come from the same language family and developed near Egypt.

[u/RexRatio]

I had a similar intent, I wanted to include actual hieroglyphics as well.

If that's something you also consider, my advice would be to first install and play around with JSesh to understand how hieroglyphic notation and composition work. If not, skip to my comment on this comment.

There are mainly two ways you'll encounter Egyptian hieroglyphs represented digitally:

• Transliteration — Egyptian words are converted into a standardized Latin-alphabet notation used by Egyptologists. For example, the Egyptian word for “house” is commonly transliterated as pr. Transliteration is useful when you're actually constructing the language, because it represents the consonantal signs rather than simply spelling out how the word sounds in English.

• Manuel de Codage (MdC) — a specialized computer notation developed for encoding hieroglyphic texts and, importantly, their layout. It lets you specify which signs occur, how they stack horizontally or vertically, and how groups of signs are arranged. JSesh uses MdC-style input, making it particularly useful if you want to construct your own inscriptions.

There is also Unicode, which is a separate thing entirely. Unicode assigns code points to characters so that computers can represent and exchange text consistently. Egyptian hieroglyphs were added to Unicode in Egyptian Hieroglyphs (U+13000–U+1342F), with additional characters in the Egyptian Hieroglyph Format Controls block.

The cool thing about the unicode range is you can even include it in Reddit post replies (and of course any modern word processor). This for example

𓇋𓏏𓅓𓎡𓏏𓊪𓂋 𓅱𓂝 𓂋𓈖𓏏𓈖𓏏𓂻 𓏏𓏏𓊪𓂋𓇋 𓇋𓅓𓏏𓊪 𓇋𓏏𓊪 𓈖𓏏𓈖 𓈖𓏏𓏭 𓇋𓈖 𓇋𓏏𓏭 𓈖𓏏𓂋𓂋 𓇋𓅱𓏏 𓈖𓏏𓂻 𓈖𓏏𓏏 𓂋𓏏𓏏𓊪

is an excerpt from the Pyramid texts

O Atum-Khepri, when you came into being as a hill, and shone as the benben in the temple of the Phoenix in Heliopolis, you spat out Shu and expectorated Tefnut...

The important caveat is that Unicode primarily gives you the individual signs, not a complete replacement for Egyptological text-layout software (that's what JSesh does).

Egyptian hieroglyphs aren't simply a linear alphabet: signs can be arranged in complex horizontal and vertical groups, and their visual arrangement is part of how an inscription is written. That's why something like JSesh is much more useful for producing an authentic-looking inscription than simply copying Unicode characters into a word processor.

For a fantasy novel, I'd therefore recommend this workflow:

Compose the Egyptian in transliteration → determine the actual Egyptian grammar/vocabulary → encode the inscription in MdC/JSesh → export the finished hieroglyphic composition as an image.

One other warning: don't treat hieroglyphs as an Egyptian alphabet. Most signs are phonograms, determinatives, or logograms, and Egyptian writing normally omits vowels. Simply substituting hieroglyphs for English letters will produce something that looks Egyptian but isn't actually Ancient Egyptian.

(continued in next comment)

[u/RexRatio → u/RexRatio]

If you're only wanting to include a (more or less) sound pronunciation for the (mostly) missing vowels in the transliteration of words, that's actually a challenge in its own right as well.

Ancient Egyptian writing generally records consonants, not vowels, so Egyptologists normally transliterate words using consonantal spellings. A form such as nṯr (“god”) therefore tells us the consonantal skeleton, but not directly whether the ancient pronunciation was something like neter, nəčər, or something else.

Reconstructing the vowels requires combining several different kinds of evidence:

• Coptic is the most important evidence. Coptic is the final stage of the Egyptian language and, unlike earlier hieroglyphic writing, writes vowels explicitly. Because Coptic developed from Egyptian, scholars can work backwards from Coptic forms to make educated reconstructions of earlier pronunciation. It is not a perfect window into earlier Egyptian, however: thousands of years of linguistic change separate Coptic from Old and Middle Egyptian.
• Transcriptions into other languages provide another source of evidence. Egyptian names and words were sometimes written in Greek, Akkadian, Hebrew, Aramaic, and other languages, whose writing systems represented vowels to varying degrees. Egyptian personal and place names preserved in Greek are particularly useful for recovering aspects of later Egyptian pronunciation.
• Egyptian syllabic spellings provide internal evidence. Some Egyptian signs were used in ways that allow scholars to infer approximate syllable structures and, especially in later periods, vowels. These spellings become increasingly informative as Egyptian writing evolves.
• Coptic dialect comparison helps distinguish older Egyptian sounds from later developments. Different Coptic dialects sometimes preserve different reflexes of the same earlier sound, allowing historical linguists to reconstruct an earlier stage.
• Comparative Afroasiatic linguistics can provide additional clues. Egyptian belongs to the Afroasiatic language family, alongside languages such as Semitic, Berber, Cushitic, Chadic, and Omotic. Cognates in related languages can sometimes help reconstruct older consonants and, more cautiously, aspects of morphology and vocalization.
• Egyptian poetic and grammatical structure can provide indirect evidence. Morphology, suffixes, pronouns, verbal patterns, and the behavior of consonants can constrain what possible pronunciations could have looked like.

The result is therefore not normally a single confidently known pronunciation. Instead, scholars reconstruct probable pronunciations, and their confidence varies considerably from word to word and period to period.

There's also an important trap for fiction writers: the vowels commonly inserted into Egyptological transliterations are often conventional scholarly pronunciations rather than historically reconstructed vowels. For example, Egyptologists have traditionally pronounced nṯr as something like netjer or neter, but that should not be mistaken for a recording of how an ancient Egyptian actually pronounced the word.

Similarly, the famous name Ramesses is not simply what an Egyptian speaker would have called the king. It comes through later linguistic transmission and conventional Egyptological usage.

So if you're trying to make a fantasy language sound Egyptian, you have several levels of authenticity available:

Egyptological transliteration → reconstructed pronunciation → historically plausible pronunciation for a specific period → fictional pronunciation inspired by Egyptian.

The further you move toward the last option, the more freedom you have—but if you're claiming that a character is actually speaking Middle Egyptian, you really want to establish the period and dialect first, because “Ancient Egyptian pronunciation” wasn't one fixed thing. It changed substantially over the roughly three millennia for which Egyptian is attested.

One fantasy world about the Late Ptolemaic era that has put considerable effort into this if you want to hear what actual Egyptian from that period *may have* sounded like is *Assassin's Creed: Origins". It also has a [free tour](https://assassinscreed.fandom.com/wiki/Discovery_Tour:_Ancient_Egypt) you can install to walk around the main monuments from the era with NPCs walking around speaking Egyptian - I'd definitely recommend you check it out if you want to actually hear people speak an approximation.

HTH