Why?

January 2, 2005

Once upon a time, there were four little rabbits and their names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail and Peter...

Peter Rabbit is being translated into hieroglyphics.

Peter Rabbit becomes a square, a semi-circle, an ellipse and a rabbit image....

First page  of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The British Museum.

 They had to overcome limited modern knowledge of the language and different literary traditions between ancient Egypt and England a century ago.

Potter's landscape and wildlife would also have been unfamiliar to ancient Egyptians - who had no words for things like blackberry, gooseberry, blackcurrant and potato.

"Beatrix Potter's words sometimes do not readily fall into ancient Egyptian," they wrote in the foreword.

"The surviving texts provide no easy model for such colloquial phrases as 'Now run along, and don't get into mischief.'"

No kidding.  The hieroglyphic text inscribed on the famous Rosetta Stone describes pharaonic amnesties and benefits for the favored temple caste. A hunk of basalt with inscriptions was discovered near Alexandria by Napoleonic soldiers in 1799, and the script was deciphered 1802-22 by Weston, deSacey, Young, and Champollion, unlocking the enigma. Parallel texts were inscribed in three languages, two of them Egyptian, hieroglyphics and demotic Egyptian.  The latter, similar to modern Coptic, was the everyday dialect, with hieroglyphics the formal and ritual language. I imagine rather like, in European Jewry, the difference between Yiddish and Hebrew.

The third language on the stone was Greek, the language of the Ptolemaic ruling party in 196 B.C./BCE when the stone was inscribed.

It appears this hieroglyphic edition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit is the 36th language in which Peter and his floppy-eared sisters ravage Farmer MacGregor's agricultural demesne in the timeless dewy English morning.  Does the story make local adaptations to Egypt? Readers of the Pentateuch might expect leeks, garlic, and onions to supplement lettuces and carrots. As it is, fantasy at the pace of pursuing chariots threatens to overtake the narrative, Peter & Co. fleeing hennaed farmers past pyramids into the Sinai for 40 years, learning many valuable lessons and establishing profound maxims of Leporine Law to serve millennia to come....

Link via Croanaca.