Hello, I am working on a project where I need to know how to say the names of a couple leaders from ancient Egypt and I was wondering if anyone could help out. I haven't been able to find much on the internet so I thought I would try here! Here we go:
Thanks in advance.
They're pronounced as follows (in IPA): [puimre], [rexmire].
Most Ancient Egyptian names that we have are based off of a transliteration of heiroglyphs where we use latin letters to stand in for Egyptian symbols. This means that words aren't written as they were pronounced, but as they were spelled. Heiroglyphics, however, didn't contain vowels (this is kind of simplifying but close enough). The vowels you see in Egyptian names usually either stand in for consonants (like "u", a "w" sound, and "a" which stands for two consonants in Egyptian, one of which is like the t in Batman and the other of which is kind of like an American saying "l" without touching their tongue to their teeth or roof of the mouth). Sometimes the sequence of letters is unpronounceable so we add an "e" in there. For example, Tutankhamen is t-w-t a-n-kh a-m-n.
Puimre and Rekhmire looked to me like transliterations of this sort and I looked it up and that is indeed the case.
The heiroglyphs for Puimre were p-w-i-m-r and Rekhmire is something like r-kh-m-i-r (though, like you, I'm having trouble finding Rekhmire in heiroglyphs so I can't be sure of the specifics of that one). We just plain can't know what the vowels were.
As such, we can't, and don't, pronounce Egyptian words as the Egyptians did. You can probably do with just pronouncing them poo-eem-ray and wreck-meer-ay, though that's not how the Egyptians would say them.