I was reading a bit on the Rosetta Stone this morning and learning about how Hieroglyphics were finally able to be translated after the works of Young and Champollion.
I started thinking about the silent P in Ptolemy, but all of my googling turned up answers saying that Ptolemy with the P is a carryover from Greek. However, I noticed that the hieroglyphs for Ptolemy include the P at the beginning, so it appears it was there from the start.
So, why? I understand it's difficult if not impossible to reconstruct pronunciations for Ancient Egyptian - do we know if or how they would pronounce the "Pt?" What about Ancient Greek?
I can't speak to the Egyptian, but Ancient Greek allowed words to start with two stops, as in khthon 'ground', or phthongos 'sound', or (exactly like Ptolemy) pteron 'wing'. It would have been pronounced basically as it was spelled: a p followed by a t, with nothing in between the two consonants. It's a strange structure for English speakers, but you see basically the same consonant clusters across Slavic (and in plenty of other language families), as in Russian ptica 'bird' or tkat' 'to weave'
You might have better luck in /r/linguistics.
It's also worth pointing out that Ancient Egyptian script is an abjad, meaning that the vowels weren't written. So it's possible that in Egyptian it was pronounced with a vowel between the p and t.
