December-January is the time of the tiruvatira festival in Kerala. As I wrote in a previous article, in the old days, the festival commemorated the love story between Kama, the god of love, and his faithful wife, Rati. These days, it has morphed into the love story between Shiva and his divine consort Parvati, another divine couple in the Hindu pantheon. Tiruvatira celebrates the common strands in their tales: conjugal love, the staunch penance of the divine wife in search of her husband, and her joyous fulfillment when she attains her goal. As I wrote previously, this story and the festival rituals find an echo in the ancient Egyptian festival of Isis and Nephthys, which was celebrated in December-January, commemorating the eternal conjugal love between the divine goddess Isis and her consort Osiris.
December-January was the last month of the Egyptian season of flood.¹ This month was called Koiak or Choiak by Egyptologists, based on its Coptic pronunciation.² In Old Egyptian, it likely had a different pronunciation than in Coptic. It was written in hieroglyphs as 𓂓𓁷𓏤𓂓.³ Both the raised arm hieroglyph 𓂓 and the face hieroglyph 𓁷 were compound hieroglyphs, representing two sounds. The raised arm hieroglyph 𓂓 may have been pronounced as ker in Old Egyptian.⁴ The face hieroglyph 𓁷 had a sound that exists in modern Arabic today but is nonexistent in Indian languages: a voiceless pharyngeal fricative along with r and transliterated here for simplicity as her. Further, the sound [r] in Egyptian was pronounced as [d] in some words.⁵ Finally, [r] in word-final position tended to be lost (or not pronounced) in some words in Old Egyptian.⁶ Thus, according to at least one interpretation, the Old Egyptian pronunciation of this month could have been ker-hed-ke.
Egyptian ker-hed-ke may have had a correspondent in Malayalam. The voiceless pharyngeal fricative sound in Egyptian morphed in Malayalam to ka ക in some words, so that ker-hed-ke corresponds to Malayalam karkedaka. The Malayalam calendar indeed has a month named karkkadakam കർക്കടകം, falling in July-August. Like the Egyptian month of ker-hed-ke, it is the last month of the season of floods corresponding to the end of the monsoons. The name of this month is believed to have derived from Sanskrit karkataka कर्कटक, “crab” referring to the zodiac sign Cancer. Yet, as I show here, there is another possible root.⁷
These correspondences reveal an interesting pattern. The festival of the divine goddesses fell in December-January in both Egypt and Kerala; however, the last month of floods was in December-January in Egypt, whereas it fell in July-August in Kerala. This pattern follows from the respective basis of the festival and the name of the months: the ancient Egyptian festival calendar was based on lunar cycles, whereas the months were based on the seasons.⁸ The lunar calendar clearly did not change between Egypt and Kerala, so the festival timing stayed the same. However, the seasons certainly differed in the two lands. Thus, karkkadakam moved from December-January in Egypt to July-August in Kerala based on the difference in the timing of the monsoon floods in both lands.
Notes
[1] Egyptians divided their calendar into three agricultural seasons of four months each. The first season of flood was called elekh in Old Egyptian. 𓄿𓆷𓐍𓏏 https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/216. Egyptologists call this month akhet based on the Coptic pronunciation [a] of the vulture hieroglyph, which was [l] or [r] in Old Egyptian. This corresponds to Malayalam kol കോൾ “flooded.” https://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/gundert_query.py?page=321. The Malayalam word is a metathesis of the Egyptian word, with reversal of the sequence of sounds. The second season of growth was called pere (or peret) in Egyptian. 𓂋𓏏 https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/60300. This name corresponds to Malayalam per പെറ് “to bring forth.” https://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/gundert_query.py?page=702. The third season of dryness was called shum in Egyptian. 𓈙𓈗𓇳 https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/154850. This name corresponds to Malayalam chung ചുങ്ങ് “to grow dry and lean.” https://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/gundert_query.py?page=371.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koiak
[3] https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/163150
[4] In some words, it may have been pronounced as kel, alternatively. In later Egyptian, it became ka.
[5] similar to Hindi saari and saadi. Allen, James. 2013. The Ancient Egyptian Language: An Historical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The use of r for Semitic /d/ can be found in Old Egyptian dating to the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2000 BCE — 1800 BCE).
[6] Peust, Carsten. 1999. Egyptian Phonology: An Introduction to the Phonology of a Dead Language. Gottingen: Peust und Gutschmidt.
[7] Indeed, Egyptian is such an ancient language that Sanskrit may have derived from it by another linguistic route — through Greek. The Greek word for “crab” was karkinos and this may have entered Prakrit at a time of cultural exchange between Indians and Greeks in the Persian court. While we do not know the Old Egyptian word for “crab”, it is possible that the Greek word may have been influenced by it, considering the cultural exchange between Greeks and Egyptians predating Persian hegemony.
[8] Parker, Richard. 1950. The Calendars of Ancient Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
