THE ORIGIN OF WRITING

Recent discoveries at the early cemeteries at Abydos have produced some remarkably early writings in the hieroglyphic script from around 3500 BC. And this has woken the old controversy as to which culture was the first to invent writing; was it Egypt? Was it the cultures of the ancient near East, such as Sumer? And really, of course, Egyptologists say it was the Egyptians, and the Assyriologists say it was the ancient Near East. And I don’t think one will ever have an absolute consensus or agreement on this, but both cultures were very much in contact in these early periods, and both produced remarkably early texts, and until we find further information, its going to be very hard to say exactly who was definitively the first. And perhaps it’s a pointless question; the important thing is that both of them started writing material down, that we do have records from this very early period. And these can help bring the ancient peoples alive for us. It’s not just a question of who was the first person to invent something technical; it’s also who were the first people that we can recapture from the past.

THE ROSETTA STONE

The Rosetta Stone is perhaps the most famous single item in the whole of the British Museum, and has become a great icon of all attempts to understand the ancient past in its own terms. And what it is, is the only surviving fragment of a stele that was erected in a temple in Egypt in 197 BC. And the texts on it record the so-called Decree of Memphis, which is issued by the priests of Egypt in honor of the new boy king Ptolemy the 5th, and Ptolemy comes from a Macedonian dynasty, the priests are native Egyptians, and there’s a very uneasy relationship between these two cultures that are involved in the governance of Egypt. And so, in return for tax concessions for their temples, the priests offer a cult to the boy king, and this explains the crucial fact about the stone: the same text is written in three different languages. At the top, you have the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the traditional script of the Egyptian priesthood, Egyptian culture. In the middle is the demotic language, which is the normal, every day language of the ancient Egyptians, and at the bottom, and the position is very significant, you have the script and language of the invading foreign rulers. It was designed to be erected in an Egyptian temple, and so the Egyptian script comes at the top and the Greek script comes at the bottom. Because it has the same text in three different languages, it really provided the great key that allowed Egyptian hieroglyphs to be deciphered.

The importance of the stone is really an accident of history. It was discovered by the French, by engineers of Napoleons army in 1799. After Napoleon’s defeat, it was surrendered as part of the collection made by Napoleon’s scholars to the English, and it came to the British Museum in 1801, where it has resided ever since. And this discovery at this particular moment, the fact that copies were widely circulated throughout Europe and the new world, is what really underlies its importance for Egyptology. It came out of the ground at exactly the right moment, for people such as Young and Champollion to work on it. And really it’s this accidental quality that makes it so remarkable. It was the right thing at the right time, that traveled through the right places, was circulated to the right people. And this almost freak accident of history allowed it to become the turning point in our understanding of ancient Egyptian writing.

HIEROGLYPHS

The mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphs had fascinated Europe since the Renaissance. Basically, people didn’t have any idea how to read this script, and they were constantly misled by its appearance. Egyptian hieroglyphs are a set of signs, which are pictures, showing animals, objects, features of the natural world. So classical authors, the Greek and Roman visitors to ancient Egypt and modern scholars following them, assumed that each of the signs was a picture that recorded an idea through symbolism. They assumed there was nothing to do with the sounds of the Egyptian language, and this was quite a reasonable idea when the Greek and Romans first visited Egypt, because at this time, the priests were playing very learned games with the pictorial aspects of the script. But it really provided a complete dead-end for western scholars. There was some highly imaginative attempts to decipher the Egyptian script, all of which created immense clap-trap and nonsense about how the world was bound together by supernatural powers of love and affection. Everything seemed wonderful, mysterious, and symbolic about the script.

To us, the hieroglyphic script seems an incredibly muddled complex system, but it really is quite a sensible one. The combination of signs - sound signs, and picture signs - allows you to have a good guess at a word’s meaning from two different directions. It’s also an incredibly beautiful script, and this was something that the Egyptians of the late period were very aware of. One of the reasons why the Greek and Roman visitors thought the script was symbolic was the Egyptians used the pictures to write out the words, but they also played with the pictures. So there’s one fantastic hymn to the rhyme-God Knum in the temple of Ezna where every hieroglyph ends up being a picture of a ram. It’s a wonderful bit of learned priestly wit, aesthetically it’s a fantastic achievement, the only problem is it’s so cleverly written that nowadays we find it incredibly difficult to read. And from texts like that, it’s not surprising the Greek and Roman visitors used to, essentially, the western alphabet, thought the hieroglyphic script was something entirely different. In actual fact its much closer to the alphabet than we often realize.

The breakthrough came with copies of inscriptions which showed rings, known as cartouches, which enclosed groups of signs. And people guessed quite rightly that these might mark out the names of the rulers of Egypt. And various scholars started working trying to identify the names of the kings, which were of course known from classical historians, and also from the Bible.

DECIPHERING HIEROGLYPHS

One of the great steps forward was taken by Thomas Young, an English polymath. He looked at the cartouches enclosing king’s names on inscriptions such as the Rosetta stone, and he knew that these should contain the name of the king mentioned in the Greek text, Ptolemy. And so he gradually assembled an alphabet of signs: the hieroglyphic sign representing the P, the hieroglyphic sign representing the T, etc. The trouble was, although he had this alphabet for writing names, he firmly believed that normally hieroglyphs were pictures recording ideas, and that the Egyptians only used this alphabet when they were writing foreign names. And this, of course, was the age-old misconception about the hieroglyphic script, and this was as far as Young ever got. He could never actually make the intellectual breakthrough that would take him past this stumbling block.

What Champollion did was quite different from Young. From a very early age, he had been fascinated by tales of the discovery of the Rosetta stone. He had trained in a vast number of languages in the hope that they would lead him towards decipherment. And what he did was, working with Young’s alphabet, he managed to make the breakthrough that convinced him that not only did these sound signs write foreign names, they also wrote the names of the Egyptian kings. And his breakthrough was realizing that he could read the name Ramses, known from classical authors, known from the Bible, in copies of an inscription from Abu Simbel. He used Young’s alphabet to read the “S” signs at the end, and at the beginning he could see a picture, a hieroglyph of the sun. And because he knew Coptic, the descendant of the ancient Egyptian language, he knew that the ancient Egyptian word for sun was probably Ra or Re. And putting these facts together, suddenly he found he could read the name of an Egyptian native king, and if the Egyptians used sound signs to record the names of their own kings, then they must have used them to write the whole of the language. And suddenly, almost instantaneously, using his knowledge of Coptic, using his knowledge of the sound signs, he began to be able to read, very tentatively at first, but to read material that had been unread for almost three thousand years. Coptic was obviously a language, a normal language written in a normal manner, unlike the supposedly mystical hieroglyphic script. And Coptic was really the key to Champollion’s success, far more than the Rosetta Stone itself. He knew the language, he could recognize the words, and this was what allowed him to see in the consonant skeletons that were written with hieroglyphs the words of the Egyptian language. He managed to break through the great veil of mystery that surrounded the script, seeing it not as a set of mystical pictures, but as a very straight forward, a very sensible, very useful form of recording the Egyptian language.

The reports of the moment of revelation, the great breakthrough, are highly romantic. His brother describes how when he realized he could read the name Ramses, from Abu Simbel, he rushes to his brother’s office, cried out “I’ve solved it!” and fell into a dead faint lasting several days. In actual, fact it was a much slower process to consolidate his knowledge of the grammar, of the words, and really his work was left slightly unfinished when he died at a very early age shortly afterwards. His great Grammar was only published by his brother, but it was quickly recognized for being what it was - the very foundation of all our knowledge of ancient Egyptian language and literature.

English have always emphasized the great achievements of Thomas Young, but we have to remember that Young essentially unlocked parts of an alphabet and went no further than that. Champollion, however, unlocked the whole nature of hieroglyphic script, and with Champollion, a total decipherment is achieved. Thomas Young could read the odd letters, the odd word, Champollion could read essentially three thousand years of written tradition in a single go. Champollion made a visit to Egypt. It was quite a remarkable visit because it was the first time in two thousand years that any visitor had gone to Egypt able to read the inscriptions that are found on tomb and temple walls.

And on the way there, Champollion made really the discovery of ancient Egyptian literature by viewing a papyrus in the collection of Mr. Salier, in the south of France. And with this people began to realize that hieroglyphs didn’t just record the deeds of kings and of nobles, there is also a sense in which, on papyrus, you have a much wider body of literature. On this fragile material, you find love songs, letters, notes, laundry lists, a whole world of writing, all of which was entirely inaccessible before Champollion made this vital intellectual breakthrough. This expedition wasn’t just a visit to Egypt; it was the uncovering of thousands of years of human history.

One of the ironies is that, although people associate the Rosetta Stone with Champollion’s decipherment, he never saw it apart from one solitary visit to London after decipherment. What he worked from were paper copies and plaster casts of the stone that were circulated regardless of international hostilities during the period of its discovery. It was these that allowed him the understanding of a hieroglyphic script as a mixture of signs that record sounds, and signs that act as pictures. And the example we always use is the word for cat, it happens to be an ancient Egyptian “meow,” and the way it is written is with a group of sound signs recording the consonants of the word, the M and the W, and then there follows a picture of a cat. Its very much a mixed system; it sounds complicated, its actually a very sensible, a very pragmatic way of writing things. Most words are spelled out with sound signs, and then a picture sign at the end tells you what sort of word it is: a picture of a stele for the word for a stele, a picture of a cat for the word for a cat. For verbs of motion, a set of walking legs. For words to do with men and their jobs, a picture of a man, a picture of a woman for words to do with women. Its very straightforward, it’s a very sensible, a very practical system, and of course if you’re not quite sure what the word means, you then can look at the picture and it gives you some idea of the category of meaning that the word is about. And this is what Champollion realized; this is what Champollion termed a determinative - a word that is still used by Egyptologists today to describe this very important feature of the hieroglyphic script.

One of the problems with the hieroglyphic script is we still can’t pronounce it properly, and the reason for this is that, like many Semitic scripts, its really only the consonants that are written. The vowels in English: a, e, i, o, u, - the softer sounds, as it were - tend not to be written, with a few exceptions. This is the reason why you will find various spellings of Egyptian kings names in various books, because we only have the skeleton of the consonants. Its really anybody’s guess exactly how you restore the vowels.

And this, of course is, one of the great advantages of Coptic. Coptic is a descendant of the Egyptian language that was recorded in a form of the Greek alphabet. And so we have the vowels there, we can understand a little more about the structure of the words and the verb forms, and it gives us a form of Egyptian that we can actually read aloud in a moderately convincing manner.

The hieroglyphic script has huge artistic potential in it, and it’s used to decorate many monuments, and one of the things that helps it do this is the fact it can be written in two directions, either from right to left, or left to right. And the way you can tell which direction it is to be read in is by looking at the signs showing the birds and animals. The birds always face towards the start of the line. That gives you the clue, so you know exactly where to read it.

Visiting Egypt, you have the impression of writing being absolutely everywhere. In actual fact probably only one percent of the population was literate, and so it was very much a tool used by the government to control the people. It probably didn’t change the lives of many of the normal Egyptian population, but what it has done is to preserve the ideas, the emotions, the feelings of these ancient people for us - a heritage that has lasted 5000 years. And in this sense, writing surely, historically, is one of the greatest inventions of mankind, a way of preserving and carrying on not just knowledge but also the sheer experience of humanity.