Setepenrameriamun trait and native city names

Hello everyone -

The Ptolemaic trait "Setepenrameriamun" has egyptoligist-ese vocalization. May I humbly offer the following reconstructed vocalizations:

If stp-n-r' was lexicalized which I would consider likely: Antonio Loprieno in his book Ancient Egyptian reconstructs this title from the rendition of one of Ramses II's titles in cuneiform as /satepnari'a/ where /'/ is the voiced pharyngeal fricative.

mrj-jmn is a little bit trickier since the only vocalization he gives is of the participle and not the whole title. I think a reasonable approximation would be then to just put the two together and not worry about the effects of lexicaliation. Therefore, I suggest /marjiw?amun/ where /?/ is the glottal stop. Perhaps a late egyptain pronunciation would have been /meri?amun/, but this is just a guess on my part.

So together, I believe the trait should be Satepnari'a, Marjiw?amun instead of Setepenrameriamun. Also, I believe the translation is given as "chosen of amun, beloved of ra" when in fact it means "chosen of ra, beloved of amun."

One other thing, it might be interesting to squeeze in the native names of the cities to some description. Alexandria was /rakot(schwa)/, meaning "ra revoles" or something to that effect if I remember correctly. If the next one south (I can't remember the other city names) is supposed to be memphis, the coptic name is /menf(schwa)/, which at one time meant "stable of beauty" according to Loprieno, but which I would translate as "beautiful establishment". This originally referred to a pyramid there, but later on came to mean the nearby city.

Just a couple suggestions on my part.

The city and province names are *generally* spelled in the language that the rulers of the faction would use. That's why Alexandreia definitely remains thus, as the Greeks spelled it. If it's rebel, then it's more up in the air, and we would try to go with a more localized name for those places, but if we can't find it, we might revert to the Greek variant for some places that we have good information on in greek texts. For a faction like Pontos it's harder, as in 272 they start out using something other than Greek, but within a century Greek has become the language of choice for the court and decrees, etc. ("Greek became the official language." - B.C. McGing) We had a big argument about it for quite a while too, but eventually settled on Greek for them.

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Originally Posted by Teleklos Archelaou

The city and province names are *generally* spelled in the language that the rulers of the faction would use. That's why Alexandreia definitely remains thus, as the Greeks spelled it. If it's rebel, then it's more up in the air, and we would try to go with a more localized name for those places, but if we can't find it, we might revert to the Greek variant for some places that we have good information on in greek texts. For a faction like Pontos it's harder, as in 272 they start out using something other than Greek, but within a century Greek has become the language of choice for the court and decrees, etc. ("Greek became the official language." - B.C. McGing) We had a big argument about it for quite a while too, but eventually settled on Greek for them.

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I wasn't suggesting changing the names on the map, but perhaps adding the native egyptian names to some trait description or building description or something, just as an extra treat.

That would require unique buildings in each of such cities, and trust me when I say that whenever tasteful, we try and mention things like that.

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The Ptolemaic trait "Setepenrameriamun" has egyptoligist-ese vocalization.

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This spelling was mine - I don't quite understand what the advantage of the alternative would be. As you say, this is Egyptologist-y, and to my eye at least - easier to wrap one's mouth around.

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Originally Posted by VandalCarthage

This spelling was mine - I don't quite understand what the advantage of the alternative would be. As you say, this is Egyptologist-y, and to my eye at least - easier to wrap one's mouth around.

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Because the egyptologist-ese is an artificial rendering of the vowels, both in quality and location, whereas the reconstruction is an educated guess at how egypitan was actually spoken. I don't know how much you know about egyptian, so you'll excuse me if tell you something you already know, but egyptian wasn't written with vowels until it started being written in the more-or-less greek alphabet (i.e. coptic). Egyptologists get around the problem of pronouncing it by adding e's between consonants and a's and i's for certain signs which represented consonants. This is, of course, completely artificial and most of the time bears no resemblence to how we think egyptian was actually spoken. To my mind it's akin to having pereter in the game instead of praetor or beseles instead of basileus.

Since these aren't really native egyptian pharaohs, wouldn't it be most appropriate though if we have the name the way the greeks spelled or rendered or spoke it? I definitely understand your perspective, but we really don't have anything in the game that we are trying to actually render as the way native egyptians would have spoken it (nothing that I know of in the mod at least).

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Originally Posted by Teleklos Archelaou

Since these aren't really native egyptian pharaohs, wouldn't it be most appropriate though if we have the name the way the greeks spelled or rendered or spoke it? I definitely understand your perspective, but we really don't have anything in the game that we are trying to actually render as the way native egyptians would have spoken it (nothing that I know of in the mod at least).

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Well, a couple things:

1) Is Setepenrameriamun really how greeks rendered the titles? To me it looks like a modern vocalization. It certainly doesn't look like coptic vocalizations, well the setep part, at least.

2) From what I understand, the greeks did everything they could to convince the locals that they were just as egyptian as the guy next door. In such a case, I think an egyptian rendering of the two titles would be highly appropriate.

At the end of the day, though, it's really the most minor of issues. I would just rather not have egyptologist-ese when either greek or reconstructed egyptian is available.

I'm sorry to keep harping on this, but I'm going to do it anyway. So, I started a ptolemaic campaign last night and realized that Setepenrameriamun was being used as the faction leader trait. I would in fact humbly suggest a different name altogether. I referred to stp-n-r' and mry-?mn as titles before, but I think this being overly generous. stp-n-r' I believe is common in referring to the king and makes up part of the titles of certain kings (particularly in the ramesside period I believe), but it's not a real title. mry-jmn likewise was not a real title and was not an uncommon name of ordinary folks. The ptolemaics certainly took the full egyptian titulary, and so I would suggest njswt-bjtj as the title given to the faction leader. This was the title that preceded the most important part of the egyptian royal titulary, and seems to be the most official way of referring to the office of the king. pr-'3 (pharaoh, lit. "great house") would be another suggestion, but seems, from my experience, to have been used in exaclty the same way we use white house. That is, it was a totally valid, but less official way of referring to the king. As to how it's rendered in the game, if I remember correctly, Gardiner gave a vocalization of something like insibya, but to be honest I would just leave it unvowelled like much of saba is.

I should add that njswt-bjtj originally meant "(he) of the sedge (and) (he) of the bee", a reference to being lord of upper and lower egypt.