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 A section of the Papyrus
of Ani showing cursive hieroglyphs.
(larger image)Etymology
The word hieroglyph comes from the Greek ἱερογλυφικά (hieroglyphiká); the adjective hieroglyphic, as well as related words such as ἱερoγλυφος (hieroglyphos 'one who writes hieroglyphs', from ἱερός (hierós 'sacred') and γλύφειν (glýphein 'to carve' or 'to write', see glyph). Hieroglyphs themselves, were called τὰ ἱερογλυφικά (γράμματα) (tà hieroglyphiká (grámmata), 'engraved characters') on monuments (such as stelae, temples and tombs). The word hieroglyph has come to be used for the individual hieroglyphic characters themselves. While "hieroglyphics" is commonly used, it is discouraged by Egyptologists. |
 Egyptian characters and alphabets.
Author: Carl Faulmann (1835-1894).
German. The Book of the Book
Containing the characters and
alphabets of all ages and all
peoples of the world. Second,
increased and improved
(larger image)
Hieroglyphs emerged from the preliterate artistic traditions of Egypt. For example, symbols on Gerzean pottery from circa 4000 BC resemble hieroglyphic writing. For many years the earliest known hieroglyphic inscription was the Narmer Palette, found during excavations at Hierakonpolis (modern Kawm al-Ahmar) in the 1890s, which has been dated to circa 3200 BC. However, in 1998 a German archaeological team under Günter Dreyer excavating at Abydos (modern Umm el-Qa'ab) uncovered tomb U-j of a Predynastic ruler, and recovered three hundred clay labels inscribed with proto-hieroglyphs, dating to the Naqada IIIA period of the 33rd century BC. The first full sentence written in hieroglyphs so far discovered was found on a seal impression found in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen at Umm el-Qa'ab, which dates from the Second Dynasty. In the era of the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom, about 800 hieroglyphs existed. By the Greco-Roman period, they numbered more than 5,000.
Hieroglyphs consist of three kinds of glyphs: phonetic glyphs, including single-consonant characters that functioned like an alphabet; logographs, representing morphemes; and determinatives, which narrowed down the meaning of a logographic or phonetic words.
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| As writing developed and became more widespread among the Egyptian people, simplified glyph forms developed, resulting in the hieratic (priestly) and demotic (popular) scripts. These variants were also more suited than hieroglyphs for use on papyrus. Hieroglyphic writing was not, however, eclipsed, but existed alongside the other forms, especially in monumental and other formal writing. The Rosetta Stone contains parallel texts in hieroglyphic and demotic writing.
Hieroglyphs continued to be used under Persian rule (intermittent in the 6th and 5th centuries BC), and after Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt, during the ensuing Macedonian and Roman periods. It appears that the misleading quality of comments from Greek and Roman writers about hieroglyphs came about, at least in part, as a response to the changed political situation. Some believe that hieroglyphs may have functioned as a way to distinguish 'true Egyptians' from the foreign conquerors. Another reason may be the refusal to tackle a foreign culture on its own terms which characterized Greco-Roman approaches to Egyptian culture generally. Having learned that hieroglyphs were sacred writing, Greco-Roman authors imagined the complex but rational system as an allegorical, even magical, system transmitting secret, mystical knowledge.
By the 4th century, few Egyptians were capable of reading hieroglyphs, and the myth of allegorical hieroglyphs was ascendant. Monumental use of hieroglyphs ceased after the closing of all non-Christian temples in AD 391 by the Roman Emperor Flavius Theodosius (Theodosius I); the last known inscription is from Philae, known as the The Graffito of Esmet-Akhom, from AD 396.
Decipherment of hieroglyphic writing
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Various modern scholars attempted to decipher the glyphs over the centuries, notably Johannes Goropius Becanus in the 16th century and Athanasius Kircher in the 17th, but all such attempts met with failure. The real breakthrough in decipherment began in the early 1800s by scholars as Silvestre de Sacy, Akerblad and Thomas Young. Finally, Jean-François Champollion made the complete decipherment. The discovery in 1799 of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon's troops (during Napoleon's Egyptian invasion) provided the motivation to study the script, but the text on the stone was of almost no use in decipherment. The critical breakthrough in the nature of the script was made by Champollion by the 1820s:“ It is a complex system, writing figurative, symbolic, and phonetic all at once, in the same text, the same phrase, I would almost say in the same word. ” This was a major triumph for the young discipline of Egyptology.
Hieroglyphs survive today in two forms: Directly, through half a dozen Demotic glyphs added to the Greek alphabet when writing Coptic; and indirectly, as the inspiration for the original alphabet that was ancestral to nearly every other alphabet ever used, including the Roman alphabet. In the 5th century appeared the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, a spurious explanation of almost 200 glyphs. Authoritative yet largely false, the work was a lasting impediment to the decipherment of Egyptian writing. Whereas earlier scholarship emphasized Greek origin of the document, more recent work has recognized remnants of genuine knowledge, and casts it as an attempt by an Egyptian intellectual to rescue an unrecoverable past. The Hieroglyphica was a major influence on Renaissance symbolism, particularly the emblem book of Andrea Alciato, and including the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of Francesco Colonna.
Writing system
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Visually hieroglyphs are all more or less figurative: they represent real or imaginary elements, sometimes stylized and simplified, but all generally perfectly recognizable in form. However, the same sign can, according to context, be interpreted in diverse ways:
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phonogram (phonetic reading)
A phonogram is a grapheme (written character) which represents a phoneme (speech sound) or combination of phonemes, such as the letters of the Latin alphabet or the Japanese kana. This contrasts with logograms, which represents words and morphemes (meaningful units of language), and determinatives, silent characters used to mark semantic categories.
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as a logogram
A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme (the smallest meaningful unit of language). This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes (speech sounds) or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.
Logograms are commonly known also as "ideograms" or "hieroglyphics", which can also be called "hieroglyphs". Strictly speaking, however, ideograms represent ideas directly rather than words and morphemes, and none of the logographic systems described here are truly ideographic.
Since logograms are visual symbols representing words rather than the sounds or phonemes that make up the word, it is relatively easier to remember or guess the sound of alphabetic written words, while it might be relatively easier to remember or guess the meaning of logograms. Another feature of logograms is that a single logogram may be used by a plurality of languages to represent words with similar meanings. While disparate languages may also use the same or similar alphabets, abjads, abugidas, syllabaries and the like, the degree to which they may share identical representations for words with disparate pronunciations is much more limited.
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or as an ideogram
(semagram; "determinative")(semantic reading).
An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek ἰδέα idea "idea" + γράφω grafo "to write") is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms.
Examples of ideograms include wayfinding signs, such as in airports and other environments where many people may not be familiar with the language of the place they are in, as well as Arabic numerals and formal languages (mathematical notation, logic, UML), which are used worldwide regardless of how they are pronounced in different languages. Other examples include the Blissymbols, Nsibidi, used by the Igbo and Ekpe in West Africa, Emoticons and pictographs as used by the Sioux and Ojibwa.
The determinative was not read as a phonetic constituent, but facilitated understanding by differentiating the word from its homophones.
Phonetic reading
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 Egyptian hieroglyphic detail.
Four lines of hieroglyphs:
Line 1: Arms in Negation, Ibis bird, with incense pot in-front
Line 2:?
Line 3:H-Ra-H-"eternity"-"block"
Line 4:?
Source: Guillaume Blanchard,
July 2004, Fujifilm S6900
(larger image)Thus, hieroglyphic writing representing a duck is read in Egyptian as sȝ, the consonants of the word for this animal. Nevertheless, it is also possible to use the hieroglyph of the duck without a link to the meaning in order to represent the phonemes sȝ, independent of any vowels which could accompany these consonants, and in this way write the words: sȝ, "son," or when complemented by other signs detailed further in the text, sȝ, "keep, watch"; and sȝṯ.w, "hard ground":
– the character sȝ;
– the character sȝ as used in the word sȝw, "keep, watch"
As in the Arabic script, not all vowels were written in Egyptian hieroglyphs; it is debatable whether vowels were written at all. Possibly, as with Arabic, the semiconsonants /w/ and /y/ doubled as the vowels /u/ and /i/. Therefore, in modern transcriptions, an e is added between consonants to aid in their pronunciation. For example, nfr "good" is typically written nefer. This does not reflect Egyptian vowels, which are obscure, but is merely a modern convention. Likewise, the ȝ and ʾ are commonly transliterated as a, as in Ra.
Hieroglyphs are written from right to left, from left to right, or from top to bottom, the usual direction being from right to left. The reader must consider the direction in which the asymmetrical hieroglyphs are turned in order to determine the proper reading order. For example, when human and animal hieroglyphs face to the right (i.e., they look right), they must be read from right to left, and vice versa, the idea being that the hieroglyphs face the beginning of the line.
Like many ancient writing systems, words are not separated by blanks or by punctuation marks. However, certain hieroglyphs appear particularly commonly at the end of words making it possible to readily distinguish words.
Uniliteral signs
The Egyptian hieroglyphic script contained 24 uniliterals (symbols that stood for single consonants, much like English letters). It would have been possible to write all Egyptian words in the manner of these signs, but the Egyptians never did so and never simplified their complex writing into a true alphabet.
Each uniliteral glyph once had a unique reading, but several of these fell together as Old Egyptian developed into Middle Egyptian. For example, the folded-cloth glyph seems to have been originally an /s/ and the door-bolt glyph a /θ/ sound, but these both came to be pronounced as /s/ as the /θ/ sound was lost. A few uniliterals first appear in Middle Egyptian texts.
Besides the uniliteral glyphs, there are also the biliteral and triliteral signs, to represent a specific sequence of two or three consonants in the language.
Phonetic complements
Egyptian writing is often redundant: in fact, it happens very frequently that a word might follow several characters writing the same sounds, in order to guide the reader. For example, the word nfr, "beautiful, good, perfect", was written with a unique triliteral which was read nfr.
However, it is considerably more common to add to this triliteral the uniliterals for f and r. The word is thus written as nfr+f+r but one reads it merely as nfr.
The two alphabetic characters are adding clarity to the spelling of the preceding triliteral hieroglyph.
Redundant characters accompanying biliteral or triliteral signs are called phonetic complements. They are sometimes (rarely) placed in front of the sign, after the sign (as a general rule) or they even frame it, appearing both before and after. Ancient Egyptian scribes consistently avoided leaving large areas of blank space in their writing, and might add additional phonetic complements or sometimes even invert the order of signs if this would result in a more aesthetically pleasing appearance (good scribes attended to the artistic (and even religious) aspects of the hieroglyphs, and would not simply view them as a communication tool).
Notably, phonetic complements were also used to allow the reader to differentiate between signs which are homophones, or which don't always have a unique reading. For example, "the seat,"
– st, written st+t ; the last character is the determinative of "the house" or that which is found there, "seat, throne, place".
– st (written st+t ; the "egg" determinative is used for female personal names in some periods), "Isis."
wsjr (written ws+jr, with, as a phonetic complement, "the eye", which is read jr, following the determinative of "god"), "Osiris".
ḥtm.t (written ḥ+ḥtm+m+t, with the determinative of "the jackal"), a kind of wild animal,
ḥtm (written ḥ+ḥtm+t, with the determinative of the flying bird), "to disappear".Finally, it sometimes happens that the pronunciation of words might be changed because of their connection to Ancient Egyptian: in this case, it is not rare for writing to adopt a compromise in notation, the two readings being indicated jointly. For example, the adjective bnj, "sweet" became bnr. In Middle Egyptian, one can write
bnrj (written b+n+r+i, with determinative) which is fully read as bnr, the j not having been saved except in order to keep a written connection with the ancient word (in the same fashion as the English language words through, knife, or victuals, which are no longer read the way they are written.)
Semantic reading
Besides a phonetic interpretation, characters can also be read for their meaning: in this instance logograms are being spoken (or ideograms) and semagrams (the latter are also called determinatives).
Logograms
A hieroglyph used as a logogram defines the object of which it is an image. Logograms are therefore the most frequently used common nouns; they are always accompanied by a mute vertical stroke indicating their status as a logogram (the usage of a vertical stroke is further explained below); in theory, all hieroglyphs would have the ability to be used as logograms. Logograms can be accompanied by phonetic complements. Here are some examples:
- rˁ, "sun"
- pr, "house"
- swt, "reed" - the t is the phonetic complement.
- ḏw, "mountain", etc
In some cases, the semantic connection is indirect (metonymic or metaphoric):
- nṯr, "god" ; the character in fact represents a temple flag (standard)
- bȝ, " bâ" (soul) ; the character is the traditional representation of a "bâ", a bird with a human head
- dšr, "flamingo"; the corresponding phonogram means "red", and the bird is associated by metonymy with this colour.
Determinatives
Determinatives or semagrams are placed at the end of the word. These mute characters serve to clarify what the word is about, as homophonic glyphs are common. If a similar procedure existed in English, words with the same spelling would be followed by an index which would not be read but which would fine-tune the meaning: "retort [chemistry]" and "retort [rhetoric]" would thus be distinguished. Compare also the way Wikipedia uses disambiguations.
All these words have a meliorative connotation: "good, beautiful, perfect." A recent dictionary, the Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian by Raymond A. Faulkner, gives some twenty words which are read nfr or which are formed from this word—proof of the extraordinary richness of the Egyptian language.
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