EGYPTIAN WRITING

There are different theories as to how writing was invented in Egypt. Part of it must obviously have something to do with bureaucracy: how to keep track of things, how to keep track of who uses how much water in their fields, or how to transport objects from A to B, who do they belong to? The earliest form of writing in Egypt would refer to either places where objects come from or are going to or to whom they belong.

For the Egyptians, writing was very important because by writing something down it becomes eternal and true. So if you write it, it becomes real. And in fact the whole creation myth, one of them from ancient Egypt, was first the god had the thought and then he spoke it, and by speaking it and writing it down it becomes a reality. So by every record that is written down, a whole reality is being created, and for the ancient Egyptians it was an eternal reality if written in stone.

THOTH

The ancient Egyptians had a god of writing and his name was Thoth. He’s often pictured either as a baboon or more commonly as an Ibis bird. And people think that Thoth was associated with writing and Ibis’s because the Ibis bird has a long thin beak, which looks very much like a reed pen and also looks down in a very learned kind of way, it’s a bit like a Secretary Bird. So it was a particularly appropriate animal for the god Thoth, and it also spent a lot of time in papyrus marshes to sort of emphasize this unity with writing.

Thoth was a god that the scribes all believed in and many scribal sets, which would be places that had their pens, their little color things, water jugs, as well as rolled up pieces of papyrus; they also often have in their little set a small image of the god Thoth and perhaps some incense because they would burn incense to Thoth before embarking on a writing extravaganza.

SCRIBES

The scribe was probably the most important bureaucratic person in ancient Egypt and in fact, in early Egyptian history, when very few people were literate, to be a scribe was a great honor, and it was the king and his family and only very high-level people who were scribes.

The kings and their families would have been initially scribes and you can see in early Egyptian tombs where people were very, very proud of their ability to read and write, because one of the first titles they have is that of scribe, Sesh. As time progressed, say by about 2500 BC, it became a little less so, and more and more people were literate, but literacy was generally reserved for the elite and it wasn’t very common. So to be a scribe meant that you were someone of consequence.

HIEROGLYPHICS

Hieroglyphics appear in important sacred spaces; it is sacred writing. So you would get it in a temple, in a tomb, inside a coffin. Hieroglyphics could be inscribed on limestone, on granite, sandstone, quartzite, and sometimes diorite as well. So, in fact, any stone that existed in Egypt and was used in the Pharonic period would have been inscribed with hieroglyphs if used in something that was a monumental object or building.

You would have hieroglyphics made in glass inlays or sometimes in jewelry so that you would have it made of turquoise or lapis lazuli or carnelian. So it could be made in miniature – in semi-precious stones, or in silver or gold or enamel, or even in glass. And Egyptians would use it in a formal context in whatever medium that happened to be necessary.

But generally, if we were writing letters to one another, these hieroglyphics wouldn’t be used, but hieratic which is a form of cursive hieroglyphics would have been used instead. And that, in fact, is written very quickly and you can recognize certain scribe’s hands because you can see them appearing again and again and they write specific letters in the same way. And it is quite difficult to read like any handwriting is because they never complete their letters, so sometimes they’re very lazy and there’s a little stroke which is meant to be a bird’s tale but it sort of dies out.

Basically recording sort of covers whether you are drawing, whether you are writing, whether you are sculpting. It is the making of something, but it doesn’t have these sort of specifics because what the Egyptians were doing was creating – whether it be two dimensions or three, it didn’t matter because for them the essence behind it, the meaning was the same, is that you are creating something for eternity.

CHAMPOLLION AND THE DECIPHERMENT OF HIEROGLYPHICS

Once the ancient Egyptian Pharonic civilization has died, the knowledge of hieroglyphics died with them. It wasn’t until 1822 that this was rediscovered. Until that time people had struggled with hieroglyphs and tried to interpret them in an iconographic or metaphoric way. But in 1822, Champoleon, a Frenchman who was a whiz at languages, had, in fact, managed to understand how hieroglyphics worked by a dint of using a trilingual stone. And this is the Rosetta stone which is now in the British Museum. The stone is a decree written by Ptolemy the Fifth and it talks about giving things to a temple, it’s a temple donation.

Champoleon actually managed to associate certain symbols with certain sounds or letters of the alphabet and thus he was able to break the code. So by using the name Ptolemy and Cleopatra, which was in the royal cartouche, he could see which was the P, which was the T, and so for the first time the hieroglyphic alphabet was deciphered and this was the key to understanding the language from the beginning to the end. He then realized that some signs were worth more than one letter but were a sound that was made up of two letters. So first mono-literals, bi-literals, and then tri-literals.

So by using both the Rosetta stone as well as other bilingual texts he managed to decipher hieroglyphics. This had, of course, been going on for some time and many other people had been involved, but Champoleon was the first person to publish with this knowledge. So in 1822 he published his “Lettre à monsieur Dacier,” which explained how hieroglyphics worked. And from then on suddenly ancient Egypt stopped being a very mysterious closed book, but opened up with knowledge of understanding their reading and writing, and we could finally understand what the Pharaohs themselves had to say.

Once Champoleon had deciphered hieroglyphics the world of Egyptology went mad and everyone started copying down text from tombs and temples and papyri because they wanted to be able to read finally what the pharaohs had actually written.

Champoleon came to Egypt and had a long voyage up and down the Nile where he went and he collected information by copying things from the walls, as well as, sadly, collecting many blocks and objects which were then taken to France and formed part of the Louvre Museum.

Some of the finest things in Luxor that Champoleon in fact had seen were hieroglyphics written in the tomb of Seti the First, as well as some beautiful pieces in the Ramses Museum. Unfortunately Champoleon also wrote his name in big letters in cursive script in many places so that the world of Egyptology would know who had been there.

Two enormous obelisks used to stand in front of Luxor temple, and the Hadif in fact gave them to the French as a gift in exchange for some technical objects and knowledge. And one of them the French managed to take and the other one still stands in its own place in Luxor and I hope the French don’t claim it.

But the other one know stands in the Place de la Concorde with the base of it decorated with the story of how it came from Egypt to France, and, in fact, it is done in a way that I think the ancient Egyptians would certainly approve.