thatlittleegyptologist:

Hi! Thanks for being brave!

You’re right, ‘crown bearer’ and 'crown prince’ are not terms that exist in Egyptian, mostly because the concept of such things doesn’t exist. Even Pharaoh can’t really be used before the end of the 18th Dynasty (that’s an Akhenaten thing!), because while it was part of the titles a King could have, it wasn’t the main term for them until that period. I think where we’re going to have an issue is with the fact that Ancient Egyptian doesn’t use have a single pithy word that sounds good when anglicised. Most Egyptian titles for royals/nobles are dated to the Old Kingdom in their first usage, and are compound phrases, rather than words, which you’ll see in the post below.

A crown prince would be referred to as 'Eldest Son of the body of the King’ like this:

Which, if you want a pronunciation, you get Sa-Nesut-en-Khetef-Shemesu. This title is dated to the Old Kingdom, but used later, and our knowledge of phonetics comes from Late Egyptian which occurs in the late New Kingdom. Most Egyptian words exist across each period and language stage (New Kingdom uses both Middle and Late Egyptian depending on the medium it’s being written on), it’s more that their pronunciation clearly changed in Late Egyptian, we just don’t know the original. But, for a story like this, it really doesn’t matter since we don’t know anyway. A more simplified 'Sa-Nesu’ 'King’s Son’ is more often used. They don’t tend to make a clear distinction in inscriptions since when they display the 'crown prince’ he’s stood right behind the King, thus doesn’t require a special title. Most Egyptians would infer that he was the eldest from his position rather than a title they couldn’t read anyway. In fact, in documents, if they’re referring to a Prince from a foreign land they use 'sA-nsw’ and then the country of the Prince, so for instance Kush is 'sA-nsw-kS’ King’s Son of Kush.

Wetu is also a term, but it’s mostly contained to the Pyramid Texts, so won’t be particularly useful in this context I don’t think.

Mehuty means 'son (heir)’, though the dictionary did not give me the context this is used in. I somehow doubt it’s royal/noble.

A couple of other non royal titles I think might be useful if you’re going to use them in a derogatory sense:

Iry-Pat, is mostly used for noblemen, so this would work for a dismissive title.

Tjaty is the title used for the second most powerful man in Egypt, the Vizier. Again a nice short, sharp, title that could be used dismissively.

Shepesu is the title used for all nobles in Egypt both living and dead

Haty-ah is the title used for the head of the local government of a particular city. Probably a bit too low ranking to be used dismissively.

Neb, would be quite good in this case. If you added the first person pronoun =i to nb to make it nb=i (Nebi) you’d get 'my lord’ which is a common phrase used in Ancient Egypt to refer to anyone ranging from the gods and the king, to simply someone who is your boss. It’s short, and easy to remember.

Finally, we have the word for 'ruler of a foreign land’:

Wer-ah-ah in it’s literal sense means 'great great’ which is hilarious and I’m so mad I’d forgotten this title. Again it’s mostly used for visiting Princes of neighbouring countries.

That’s as much as I can think to give you for titles that would be easily used for a dismissive or derogatory title for a protégé. There are other titles of powerful men like 'Overseer of Cattle’ or 'Scribe of the Silverhouse’, but these are compound titles and wouldn’t work as a pithy or dismissive word.