Dr. Aaron Ember of Baltimore has been named to fill the newly created chair of Egyptology at John Hopkins University. The appointment of Dr. Ember was in recognition of his research work establishing that the Egyptians spoke a language of Semitic origin.
Dr. Ember, who formerly was associate professor of Semitics, is credited by leading Egyptologists of the world as the discoverer of the phonetic laws showing that Tut-ankh-American’s people and the Israelites spoke languages of common origin. While suggestions as to the Semitic character of Egyptian have been made by Egyptologists, Dr. Ember was the first to discover the phonetic laws which govern the relationship between Egyptian and Semitic. In order to accomplish this he was obliged to determine the exact phonetic equivalents of the Egyptian alphabetic symbols, which in many cases formerly had been given inaccurate and arbitrary values.
A careful study of the lexicographical material of Egyptian and Coptic formed the basis of Dr. Ember’s investigations, for which he was peculiarly fitted by reason of his native control of Hebrew and his acquaintance with Arabic.
The first part of Dr. Ember’s work, in which he describes the similarities of the two languages, soon will be ready for publication.
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