Egyptian Phonemic Transmission Architecture: The Decan System as Phoneme Repository and the Greek Filter Hypothesis

This paper presents evidence that the Egyptian 36-decan astronomical system encodes a complete phonemic inventory, complementing the 16-position wheel structure previously documented. Analysis reveals that phonemes absent from the 16-position wheel—specifically emphatic, pharyngeal, uvular, and archaic stop consonants—are preserved in decan names, particularly in year-opening (knmt) and year-closing (tjmAt) groups. These "missing" phonemes fall into two categories: (1) sounds Greek phonology could not absorb (q, x, tj), and (2) sounds that had already merged in Egyptian itself by the time of Greek contact (k/g → single phoneme, d → t). The decan system functioned as a phoneme preservation repository maintaining archaic Egyptian phonology, while the wheel encodes the post-merger inventory transmissible to Greek. This hypothesis is strongly falsifiable and opens a novel interdisciplinary research program bridging Egyptology, historical linguistics, and the history of science.