"Hootash im Amenophis !"

Words from the front of the Golden Book which enables Jonathan to finally get control of those awkward soldier mummies.

And they don't mean a thing ...!

While some of the Ancient Egyptian written and spoken in the film does make some sense,

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there is just as much which doesn't make any sense at all and may well be the people involved with the film playing games with us. There seems to be a lot of rubbish with some choice words for places in Egyptian history (Kadesh, Kargemish, Asyria) thrown in and also the name of a king.

This of course is Amenophis, used to take control of the soldier mummies and its not actually even Egyptian.  Its Greek, the form used when the Ptolemies (of whom Cleopatra was the last) ruled the country in its sunset years and ordered a history of Egypt to be written. The king's real name was Amenhotep which when written in Egyptian looks like this:

The name means "Amen is satisfied". There were actually four Amenhoteps in the 18th Dynasty and our chap was the very last. Mind you, after what he did, as I will explain, it is not very suprising the name was not used again. Amenhotep IV was the father of Tut-ankh-amen and Ankh-es-en-amun. Amenophis IV tried to bring monotheism into Egypt by banning all the many gods who were worshipped in the temples all over the country, even going to the lengths of knocking their names off temple walls. This included Amen-Ra the greatest of the neteru (gods) in Egypt.

The religious fanatic pharaoh replaced everything with the worship of the sun disc,

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to see the picture of Pharaoh Akhenaten (he changed his name, it means 'The glory of the Aten') with Nefertiti his wife and several of his daughters including Ankhenesamen sitting under the beneficent rays of the Aten disc.

The name Amenophis turns up in the 1999 remake (I think) because of mistake made in the original 1932 film...

In this film when the box containing the Scroll of Thoth, their version of the Book of the Dead, is opened we see the seal on the box bearing a cartouche.  The characters of the film identify as belonging to 'Amenophis the Magnificent'. This is not quite correct, while Amenophis III had the title 'The Magnificient'  the cartouche on the box is that of  Akhenaten (Amenophis IV), which looks like this:

What was written in that cartouch set me thinking, when Jonathan is having problems reading the inscription on the front of the Book of Amen Ra and Evy asks him what it looks like he says, 'A bird, a stork'. If you look at the cartouche you will see that is exactly what is in there, and Akh bird or stork. This rather neatly explains that whoever was writing the script for the remake film did a reasonable amount of research when they were doing it although as they could not read hieroglyphs that made mistakes possible.

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