Adolf Erman | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | (1854-10-31)October 31, 1854 |
| Died | June 26, 1937(1937-06-26) (aged 82) Berlin, Germany |
| Father | Georg Adolf Erman |
| Relatives | Paul Erman (grandfather) Friedrich Bessel (grandfather) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Egyptology |
| Institutions | Humboldt University of Berlin |
| Notable students | Hermann Grapow James Henry Breasted Hedwig Fechheimer |
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Johann Peter Adolf Erman (German:[ɛɐ̯ˈmãː]; 31 October 1854 – 26 June 1937) was a GermanEgyptologist andlexicographer.
Born inBerlin, he was the son of the physicistGeorg Adolf Erman and grandson of the physicistPaul Erman and the astronomerFriedrich Wilhelm Bessel.
Educated atLeipzig and Berlin, he became associate professor ofEgyptology at theUniversity of Berlin in 1883 and full professor in 1892. In 1885 he was appointed director of the Egyptian department at the royal museum.[1] In 1934 he was excluded from the faculty of the university because he was, according to theNazi ideology, one quarterJewish. As his family had converted toProtestantism in 1902, he and his family were not persecuted by theNazi Party, but they all lost their positions.
Erman and his school at Berlin had the difficult task of recovering the grammar of theEgyptian language and spent thirty years of special study on it. The greater part of Egyptian texts after theMiddle Kingdom having been written in what was even then practically a dead language, as dead asLatin was to themedieval monks inItaly who wrote and spoke it, Erman selected for special investigation those texts which really represented the growth of the language at different periods, and, as he passed from one epoch to another, compared and consolidated his results.
TheNeuägyptische Grammatik (1880) dealt with texts written in the vulgar dialect of theNew Kingdom (Dyns. XVIII to XX). Next followed, in theZeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Alterthumskunde, studies on theOld Kingdom inscription ofUnas, and the Middle Kingdom contracts ofAssiut, as well as on anOld Coptic text of the 3rd century CE. At this point apapyrus of stories written in the popular language of the Middle Kingdom provided Erman with a stepping-stone from Old Egyptian to the Late Egyptian of theNeuägyptische Grammatik, and gave the connections that would bind solidly together the whole structure of Egyptian grammar (seeSprache desPapyrus Westcar, 1889). The very archaicpyramid texts enabled him to sketch the grammar of the earliest known form of Egyptian (Zeitschrift d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gesellschaft, 1892), and in 1894 he was able to write a little manual of Egyptian for beginners (Ägyptische Grammatik, 4th ed., 1928), centering on the language of the standard inscriptions of the Middle andNew Kingdoms, but accompanying the main sketch with references to earlier and later forms.
Erman's pupils includeJames Henry Breasted, America's first Professor of Egyptology with his numerous works including hisHistory of Egypt from the Earliest Times Down to the Persian Conquest (1905) andGeorg Steindorff's littleKoptische Grammatik (1894, ed. 1904), improving greatly onStern's standard work in regard tophonology and the relationship of Coptic forms to Egyptian, andSethe'sDas Ägyptische Verbum (1899). The latter is an extensive monograph on theverb in Egyptian and Coptic by a brilliant and laborious philologist. Owing to the very imperfect notation of sound in the writing, the highly important subject of the verbal roots and verbal forms was perhaps the obscurest branch of Egyptian grammar when Sethe first attacked it in 1895. The subject has been reviewed by Erman,Die Flexion des Aegyptischen Verbums in theSitzungsberichte of theBerlin Academy, 1900. The Berlin school, having settled the main lines of the grammar, next turned its attention tolexicography. It devised a scheme, founded on that for theLatin Thesaurus of the Berlin Academy, which almost mechanically sorts the whole number of occurrences of every word in any text examined. In 1897, Erman, working together with Sethe,Hermann Grapow and other coworkers from all over the world, started to catalogue all the words from all the known Egyptian texts available; the result was an ensemble of about 1,500,000 datasheets that form the basis for the masterpiece of the ancient Egyptian lexicography, the famousWörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache, whose first five volumes were published between 1926 and 1931. The complete edition of this gigantic dictionary comprises a total of twelve volumes.
Erman said that the so-called pseudo-participle(also known as old perfective or stative) had been, in meaning and in form, a rough analogue of the Semiticperfect, though the original employment of the pseudo-participle was almost obsolete in the time of the earliest known texts.
Erman died in Berlin.
One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Erman, Paul s.v. Johann Peter Adolf Erman".Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 9 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 749.