In the movie The Mummy, what language are the characters Evelyn and Jonathan speaking when they read the Book of the Dead and the Book of Amen-Ra? Is it demotic?
   Ashley, Web Post

Dr. dig responds:
Demotic is not actually a language, but a script (a different form of handwriting) that was used to write the ancient Egyptian language at the very end of the pharaonic age. The Book of the Dead is a well-known ancient Egyptian text, while the Book of Amen-Ra was made up for the film. And, of course, books in ancient Egypt were quite different from today. They were written on papyrus rolls, or the texts were inscribed on tomb walls and furnishings. Film producers, with the aid of Egyptologist Stuart Smith, have attempted to have their characters speak and read ancient Egyptian. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of guesswork involved in this, as we have no idea how ancient Egyptian sounded. The Egyptians did not write any vowels in their words. The reader supplied the vowels as he or she read the text. While it made perfect sense to the Egyptians, it is very confusing to modern readers. For example, our word "dig" would be written "dg," and archaeologists of the future would wonder whether this was pronounced Dag, Deg, Dig, Dog, or Dug!