Adolf Erman

Johann Peter Adolf Erman (German: [ɛʀˈmɑ̃]; 31 October 1854 – 26 June 1937) was a renowned German Egyptologist and lexicographer.

Born in Berlin, he was the son of Georg Adolf Erman and grandson of Paul Erman and Friedrich Bessel.

Educated at Leipzig and Berlin, he became associate professor of Egyptology at the University of Berlin in 1883 and full professor in 1892. In 1885 he was appointed director of the Egyptian department at the royal museum. In 1934 he was excluded from the faculty of the university because he was, according to the Nazi ideology, one quarter Jewish. As his family had converted to Protestantism in 1802 he and his family were not persecuted by the Nazis, but they all lost their positions.

Erman and his school at Berlin had the difficult task of recovering the grammar of the Egyptian language and spent thirty years of special study on it. The greater part of Egyptian texts after the Middle Kingdom having been written in what was even then practically a dead language, as dead as Latin was to the medieval monks in Italy 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.

The Neuägyptische Grammatik (1880) dealt with texts written in the vulgar dialect of the New Kingdom (Dyns. XVIII to XX). Next followed, in the Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Alterthumskunde, studies on the Old Kingdom inscription of Unas, and the Middle Kingdom contracts of Assiut, as well as on an Old Coptic text of the 3rd century CE. At this point a papyrus 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 the Neuägyptische Grammatik, and gave the connections that would bind solidly together the whole structure of Egyptian grammar (see Sprache des Papyrus Westcar, 1889). The very archaic pyramid 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 and New Kingdoms, but accompanying the main sketch with references to earlier and later forms.

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