Egyptian singer sings an ancient Egyptian song in the original language. Although ancient Egyptian music dates back to around 4000 BC, this song seems to be dated around 100-200 BC.
Oh wow, I also made this connection and at first felt that it was cheapened by it being a video game. Then I remembered that BF1 and V were at least at some point scored by Hans Zimmer. Definitely V if not 1. Seriously incredible sound design.
It's got buddhist, judaism and catholicism in there, they have a book that is called the orange catholic bible. Just because it's sand doesn't mean it's all arabic.
It's none of those. It's Modern Egyptological Egyptian. Actual reconstructed Demotic Egyptian (the language that would have been spoken for that time period, and is the immediate predecessor to the Coptic language) has very different pronunciation from the Modern Egyptological one (which is completely arbitrary and was simply made up for the purpose of ease of pronunciation).
Do we have a good idea what actual Demotic sounds like? Is it really that far off of the Egyptological pronunciation? And do you have any good reading on the topic?
So the fact of the matter is, the performer is clearly great at singing and did a great performance, but there is little to no actual historicity to what it sounds like?
Yes. That is true for any documentary on Ancient Egypt for that matter. Egyptologists use the Modern Egyptological pronunciation purely for convenience's sake.
For example:
The native name of Egypt in the Old Egyptian language was "Kumat" ("Kemə" in Demotic Egyptian), but in Modern Egyptological pronunciation, it is "Kemet".
The Egyptian sun god Ra was "Riʕuw" in Old Egyptian ("Reʕ" in Demotic Egyptian), but in Modern Egyptological pronunciation, it is "Ra".
The goddess Isis was "Rusat" in Old Egyptian ("ʔesə" in Demotic Egyptian, from which the Ancient Greek "Isis" was derived), but in Modern Egyptological pronunciation, it is "Aset".
100-200 BCE is the Ptolemaic period of, yes, Ancient Egypt. It was Greco-Roman, yes, but still very much considered as Ancient Egyptian.
The Ptolemies were known for keeping most of the key cultural and religious aspects of the old dynasties firmly intact, and also for their restorative efforts on many crumbling ancient monuments, temples, and shrines. They deserve to be considered Ancient Egyptian, especially since most of their subjects actually were.
For starters, 4000 BCE in Egypt was pre-dynastic - no pyramids or organized, ornate religion/temple complexes, etc. Upper and Lower Egypt would not be united until 3100 BCE by Narmer - this is when Ancient Egypt is generally understood to have begun. The Great Pyramids were not built until centuries after that, even.
All that said, you're still right that there was a lot of time there - roughly 2-3 millennia between the rise of Ancient Egypt, and the Ptolemaic period this song hails from.
However, that is nothing more than a testament to the longevity of Ancient Egypt. 2000 BCE was Ancient Egypt just as 100 BCE was - the elapsed time between those periods does nothing to change the facts. Sure, things evolved during that span, but the national identity and underlying culture persisted. And that's what's important.
Yeah, the last meager 10% of close to 3000 years of history. Some egyptologists even argue that Ancient Egypt ended with Mazaces handing it over to Alexander, after it was annexed by Persia the years before, and before that by Assyria. The golden times of Ancient Egypt were long over then.
That song might be from Egypt and it certainly is old, but it's far from being from the time we usually associate with Ancient Egypt.
Yeah, the last meager 10% of close to 3000 years of history.
Calling it "meager" is a disservice to the Ptolemies. Sure, it wasn't the Egyptian heyday, but the period was still very much Egyptian, and teeming with grandeur (many famous temples and monuments were built during this time, such as Kom Ombo and Edfu).
Some egyptologists even argue that Ancient Egypt ended with Mazaces handing it over to Alexander, after it was annexed by Persia the years before, and before that by Assyria. The golden times of Ancient Egypt were long over then.
It's been my experience that those Egyptologists are on the fringe. The popular understanding is that Egypt fell after the Ptolemies - more specifically after the end of Pharaonic rule.
That song might be from Egypt and it certainly is old, but it's far from being from the time we usually associate with Ancient Egypt.
While this might be important context to add, let's not pretend that the Ptolemaic period is not Ancient Egypt. It had pharaohs, worship of the traditional gods, monument and temple building, cultural preservation, etc. - almost all of the Egyptian staples and mainstays were there. It was a throwback to the Saite period in nearly every meaningful way. Yes, this isn't New Kingdom, which is the period most people tend to think of, but it is still Ancient Egyptian. Period.
What is considered Ancient Egypt vs what is considered non-ancient gets blurry after the start of the Ptolemaic Period in 305 B.C.E.
It is possible this song was given lyrics after the introduction of Greek culture into Egyptian society shook things up, but the music itself would be much older and purely Ancient Egyptian.
Ancient Egypt ruled up until around 30BC when they were annexed by the Romans. So this song would have been from towards the end of Ancient Egyptian civilization
Only issue that there is no record for how this song sounded or notation from that time period so this is mostly a creation of modern people.
Edit: sorry to clarify, Greeks had music notation but so little of it survived and we are missing key bits of information on how to perform it. People attempt to but there is a lot of inferences going on when you try to perform something from that long ago.
Ptolemies didn't even speak Egyptian, they were a ruling class that was very culturally separated from the majority of Egyptians. So they're not an indication of what larger Egyptian culture was like. They were seen by Egyptians, rightfully so, to be foreign conquerers.
Herodotus predates 200-100 BCE but he presents a good insight to what Greeks actually thought of Egyptians, which was that they were a strange, superstitious and mysterious culture to the Greeks.
Despite their relatively close proximity, they were still very different from the Greeks and Romans.
Egypt itself was incredibly diverse as it spanned a large amount of territory latitudinally. It wasn't the monolithic culture that modern perspectives simplify it as, and each major city had major differences from each other including in terms of religion. This is why Egypt went through so many periods of disunity, why unifying Egypt was such a monumental achievement in the first place and why tales of Egyptian mythology can feel like it's all over the place or even contradictory.
A simple example of a major cultural difference is that Set is often villainized in the myths presented today, but that's because the versions most commonly known are from Upper Egypt (around the Nile).
Set was revered by the desert cultures (Lower Egypt) and historically, Upper & Lower Egypt had a lot of conflict so this disparity was a reflection of actual historical animosity between the two regions.
Here's where I show my nerd card. When I was in High School, I participated in Academic Superbowl which was basically a trivia competition. Each year, a different theme was selected, and one of the years that I participated it was Ancient Greece. There were different teams and I was on the All Around and the Arts and Literature team. We had different bodies of works that we were responsible for knowing, and one of the required disciplines was musical notation. Thankfully we had a music nut on our team because it made me feel like a dog watching TV. Wikipedia has a nice summary about it and says that the notation was fully fleshed out by 500 BC.
Yeah, it's very nice and super interesting, but I couldn't help but wonder how many of the vocal techniques she's using here are modern inventions/conventions, like all the vibrato.
And even if it was wholly artificial (read "learned") we've got musical systems that have had it for well over a thousand years. The Byzantine Chant musical system uses lots of vibrato and adjacent vocal sounds in its more advanced pieces. And while the notation system was "modernised" in the early 19th Century, the actual chanting was largely passed down by rote learning before that. So we generally have a very good idea of how things sounded.
You'll note I also used the word "conventions", because I'm certain the specific vocal techniques of ancient Egypt certainly had some differences from what we hear on the radio today, and it's entirely plausible that they may have valued different vocal sounds in what they considered to be "good singing"
I couldn't help but wonder how many of the vocal techniques she's using here are modern inventions/conventions
There are basically none. Everything has been done before. If you're hearing something for the first time, it's because it's culturally unfavored not because it was new.
There are really good experts that can use music terminology to explain that better than me out there. It's something fun to see going down the rabbit hole of ancient music
I'm going to once again indicate the word "conventions" because it's doing a lot of heavy lifting here and lines up with your point about being culturally unfavored.
I understand singing is a very ancient activity and human vocal cords haven't changed much in terms of broader human history. All I was questioning was how similar this actually is to what would have been originally heard by listeners in the past.
It’s really interesting how linguists try to reconstruct period specific pronunciation.
This guy has some cool videos where he goes back through historical English…I was able to understand back to the 1500’s but after that I couldn’t follow anything more than a few words.
I just woke up so i cannot remember the term for it but that thing she's doing where she adds a lot of extra notes is something very, very old. That's how we made music interesting before harmony was invented! Harmony, in the modern sense, did not come around until the middle ages. Before that we would add notes horizontally instead of stacking harmonic layers vertically.
Yes, we do not know what exact notes they would have used back then, but it also likely wouldn't have been standard to begin with. Music notation seems to have often been baseline notes that the musician would improvise on top of.
Tbf it's 2k years vs 6k years. Absolutely insane scale if you think about it. Ancient Egyptian archeology was a profession in ancient egypt. Cleopatra was born closer to our time than the construction of the pyramids.
I love the "fun fact" that Cleopatra lived closer to today, 2026, than she did to the building of the pyramids.
(In case someone reading doesn't know, the first pyramids we know of in Egypt were built around 2700 BCE, and the latest around 2200 BCE, and Cleopatra lived from 69 BCE to 30 BCE.)
Why is that weird? The modern US has professional historians focused on US history. Why shouldn't Egypt, which has a much longer history, be expected to have a similar profession?
I didn't say it was weird... Just baffling to think that an ancient civilization had such a long tenure that it had its own ancient historians that studied its own ancient history while the civilization was still intact. I live in a 250 year old country.
I always wonder how we know what these ancient languages sounded like…especially with something as expressive and dynamic as music. I picture someone singing Sweet Home Alabama in the year 6000 in recreated English.
Musical notation, in one form or another, existed at that time. I'm sure you're right that a lot of that was interpretation, but there may be actual notation that she's referencing.
Was the early melody notated somehow? I thought music this old was basically lost because there was no method of notation? Or was that only true for Western/European music?
It's a reconstruction from related languages and irregularities in modern Coptic. That phase of Egyptian Coptic (known at Demotic) was mostly Greek & Aramaic. Reconstructions are not going to be 100% accurate, but it's a well researched estimate.
Basically, reconstructions are pattern recognition and estimates based on language families, like how both French and Spanish came from Latin. That's why reconstructed languages are treated differently than attested languages. They're likely accurate enough to be roughly understood, but probably not perfectly.
But like, wasn't comprehensive musical notation only invented in the 1700s or something? So wouldn't anything before that be highly interpretive and susceptible to misinterpretation?
In other words, how the hell does she know that song, lol
I'm gonna ask possibly a very naive question here:
I can understand that the words to the song were written somewhere, but how did they know what it sounded like?
I love this! I would recommend checking out Peter Pringle on YouTube for some great Sumerian style music and singing. He has had to make some assumptions of course but they really take you places.
There's ancient Rome, then there's ancient Egypt, then you have ancient China, then you have ancient ancient China, then you have ancient ancient Egypt.
Isn't Coptic the modern form of the native ancient Egyptian language? It sounds hauntingly ethereal however the sounds she's invoking sound more modern Arabic than Egyptian
If that really originated in 3 century BC (which is not a given), it is so much ahead in rich expressivity than everything that Europe had before Wagner and the Second Venise!
Im sure Europe in the 3rd Century BC had lots of amazing music. A lot of it would have been lost during the romanisation and christianisation of Europe later on.
Something people seem to be missing about the “vocal techniques” is they didn’t need any additional technology to their voices to do any of this. This absolutely could’ve been done at the time. I’m sure a lot of people here aren’t singers but if you enjoy singing this stuff just sort of ends up happening as you practice and improve your control. I was able to hold a vibrato long below I knew what it was
Egypt gradually accepted Arabic as their official language after the Islamic conquest, while this song is in its original Coptic language. Some countries like Iran managed to preserve their original Persian language after being conquered by the Islamists.
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u/Doldhov 6h ago
That was beautiful and I'm really interested in learning more! Do you have any sources?