HIEROGLYPHS

What interested me in ancient Egyptian was the language itself. I was always interested in languages, and one day, when I was a teenager, I went to a used book sale and I picked up a book and opened it, and it was full of hieroglyphs, pages of hieroglyphs. And I thought this would be interesting to see how this language works, and I’ve been trying to do that ever since.

This is the pyramid of Unis, and in its subterranean chambers are walls covered with hieroglyphs and that collection of hieroglyphs, which we call the Pyramid Text, is the first extensive text from ancient Egypt; it’s the first example of Egyptian literature, the first example of Egyptian poetry that we have. That’s about 2350 BC, about the same time Stonehenge was being built, the Egyptians were carving hieroglyphs in this pyramid.

The earliest examples of hieroglyphs that we have show the basic principles of hieroglyphic writing, which is pictures of things used in two ways: used to represent things themselves, a picture of a rabbit for example to represent the word rabbit, but also pictures used for their sounds rather than for what they are pictures of. And by using pictures in this way, you can write words that you can’t draw pictures of. So its seems to be something that was invented all at once, probably one person who got this idea, one of the great ideas of human history, that you could write things that you couldn’t make pictures of, by writing sounds rather than by drawing pictures. It’s the beginning of the modern era.

The Egyptian system actually is fairly cumbersome because it’s a very decorative system; you can write hieroglyphs from left to right, or right to left, in columns, or in horizontal lines. So that if you have a doorway for example you could put a nice framing inscription where the hieroglyphs face each other as they go down the columns. But it’s not a good system for representing the way the language sounded, because they didn’t write the vowels, they only wrote the consonants, and its not a good system for representing the grammatical nuances of the language, many of which were carried by vowels. So in some cases, we’re not even certain how many verb forms the Egyptians had, and Egyptologists are still arguing about that; its one of the deficits of the hieroglyphic system.

Egyptian writing was invented some time after 3500 BC, and it lasted about 4000 years. I think it’s the longest attested writing system in history. It evolved of course; the Egyptians, for everyday use, didn’t draw pictures or carve hieroglyphs into stone. They used paper, papyrus, and wrote with pen and ink, and they used a much more cursive form. That form of writing, which we call hieratic, a hand written form of hieroglyphs, eventually became even more simplified around 600 BC, into something that we call demotic. Eventually, after Christianity came to Egypt, demotic gave way to the alphabet. Egyptian Christians began to use the Greek alphabet to write their own language, because they didn’t want to use the symbols that were associated with paganism to write the sacred scriptures. And eventually Coptic became the way the Egyptian language was written.

One of the benefits of Coptic is that, like Greek, they wrote the vowels, so at least at this point of Egyptian history, we know what the language sounded like. Now hieroglyphs remained in use until about 394 AD. After that, at that time there were probably 3 or 4 people left alive who knew how to write hieroglyphs, and after that, after those people died, the knowledge of hieroglyphic writing died out.

Demotic writing died out about 50 years later; the latest dated demotic inscription was 452 AD. After that, Egyptians used Coptic to write their own language, used the Coptic alphabet, and that actually survived as a living language until the Middle Ages, and it was eventually replaced by Arabic, which, of course, is the language of Egypt today, and the ancient Egyptian language died out. It’s no longer a living language; it’s used in the rituals of the Coptic Church, like Latin used to be used in the Roman Catholic Church, but it’s no longer a living language. After the hieroglyphs died out and people forgot what the principle of the writing system was, they spent almost a thousand years or more actually trying to figure out again what the text said, what these symbols said. And influenced by the ancient Greeks, who believed that the Egyptians had developed a kind of mystical knowledge that normal people didn’t have access to, they believed that these were symbols, that this was symbolic writing, and tried to read into the symbols their own understanding of ancient Egypt, without success. The only clue that scholars had was Coptic, because they could still read Coptic, so they knew at least the words of the Egyptian language as they were pronounced after three thousand, four thousand years of writing.

DECIPHERING HIEROGLYPHS

This remained a puzzle until Napoleon invaded Egypt, and at the end of the 18th century. His soldiers were building a fort at the Mediterranean, at a place known as Al-Rashid, which westerners call Rosetta. And they discovered a slab of stone that was covered with writing, three kinds of writing. There was hieroglyphic writing at the top, Demotic writing in the middle, and Greek at the bottom. And this was a great breakthrough because, of course, they could read Greek, so they knew what the text said at least, and they had a chance of trying to understand how the hieroglyphic text or the demotic text said the same thing. Scholars worked on this for about 20 years, two in particular: Thomas Young in England, and Jean-Francois Champollion in France. Champollion hit on the answer in 1822, and the clue to him was Coptic, he knew Coptic, he knew the Coptic language, and he looked at what Egyptologists call cartouches – the rings the ovals that surround kings names – and he could see in the Greek text the names of King Ptolemy and his Queen Cleopatra. And they occurred in the Greek text approximately the same place that the oval rings occurred in the hieroglyphic text. So he figured that these surrounded the names, and so that the names must say something like Ptolemy and Cleopatra. And comparing the two names it so happens that Ptolemy and Cleopatra share four or five consonants: P, T, L, and that’s about it. And he could see that in fact there were signs in the approximate place in Ptolemy’s name, corresponding to P, T, and L, that were in Cleopatra’s name. And so he had three or four signs, and the important thing about this was not that he knew how the Egyptians wrote P, T, and L, but that he realized that these hieroglyphs were not mystical symbols but they actually represented sounds like the letters of an alphabet did.

Using this then, he went to look at other cartouches, and from Ptolemy’s name – Ptolemaeus - he also had the hieroglyph for S. And he saw a cartouche that had a circle, which obviously represented the sun, and he knew that the word for sun in Coptic was something like Ra or Re. And so he had a cartouche with a circle, a strange sign that looked like a trident, and two S’s. So he had Ra S S, and he tried to figure out what the name was, and, of course, knowing the list of Egyptian kings, the name that came to mind was Ramses, and this gave him another hieroglyph. That same combination of this kind of trident sign was actually three fox skins tied together, and the S he found in the text of the Rosetta Stone, at a place that corresponded in the Greek text to the word for birth, or ‘give birth.’ And he knew from Coptic that the Egyptian word for ‘to give birth’ was Misa; M, S, and some vowels, and that gave him the realization that hieroglyphs were actually writing the same language that was written in Coptic. And this was the great breakthrough. After that it was like the dam burst, and in a few years, he was able to read, fairly fluently, many Egyptian inscriptions.

WRITING SYSTEMS

Basically, I think there are three writing systems in the world. There is the system that we’re used to, the alphabetic system where you have, basically, a letter for every sound of the language. You have the syllabic system where, instead of writing single sounds, you write an entire syllable. So you have one sign for the syllable Ba and another sign for the syllable Be, and another sign for the syllable Bay, and so forth. And you have the ideographic system, represented by the Chinese, where you actually have almost a different symbol for every word of the language.

Egyptian combines these three principles in one language, in one writing system, I should say. There are signs that represent single sounds like a wavy sound, which is water, representing the sound N; that’s basically its function in the hieroglyphic system. There are also signs that represent more than one consonant - for example, the sign for what looks like a rectangle with little spikes sticking up, which is actually a playing board with playing pieces on top of it, which represents the two consonants M and N, MeN. And then you have signs that represent actual things, like the picture of a round sun for the word sun. The hieroglyphic system puts all of these together and since there are a number of different combinations of consonants - in fact, Egyptian has signs for one consonant, signs for two consonants, and signs for three consonants, plus signs for whole words that you can draw pictures of, and signs that are used at the end of the word to show what class of meaning it belongs to. All of these combined together make a very complicated writing system. To read classical Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, you need to know about five or six hundred signs.

I wouldn’t call it the worst system ever invented. It’s bad for representing the nuances of the language, which are very often reflected by vowels. One of the interesting things about the hieroglyphic writing system is that it gives us a picture into the Egyptian mind, the way the Egyptians looked at the world. In fact, to the Egyptians, almost everything was a hieroglyph. When you look at a scene in an Egyptian temple or on the wall of a tomb, you will see that its got large scale figures of people and animals, people working in the fields and so forth, people hunting whatever, and its also covered with hieroglyphs. And to us it looks like they’re writing on their pictures, but they’re not actually. The writing and the pictures are the same thing to the ancient Egyptians. The scenes that we see…lets say there’s a picture of a hunter lassoing a gazelle in the desert and you see the hunter, you see the gazelle, and you see the lasso around the gazelle’s neck, and there’s a hieroglyphic inscription on the top that says “Lassoing the gazelle by the hunter.” Now to us that’s gilding the lily, why should you put that on there? To the Egyptians however, it wasn’t adding hieroglyphs to a picture. In fact the hieroglyphs were spelling out what the picture said, and the pictures – the large-scale pictures – were actually the determinatives, the words that indicated the meaning of the hieroglyphs themselves. If you went into any one of these tombs, you’d see scenes on the walls and you’d see the hieroglyphs on the same thing, on the same scene. And in the Egyptian eyes, the large-scale figures are hieroglyphs, which, by the way, is why they look so strange to us. Egyptians were not concerned with representing things the way they actually looked, they were drawing symbols of things. A typical picture of an Egyptian person with the head turned to the side and the shoulders in the front, and the legs turned to the side and the hips in three quarter view, this is not a strange way of standing, this is a symbol of a person. It’s not an attempt to actually represent what a real person looked like, it’s a big hieroglyph. And the little hieroglyphs simply spell out what this big hieroglyph is doing.