Hieroglyphs (11 page)

Proportion and aesthetic variation

For practical purposes the lines of hieroglyphic texts had to be able to fit into the spaces allocated for them. The versatility of the hieroglyphic script and the artistic sense of proportion of those who drew the hieroglyphs mean that there is hardly ever a space at the end of a line of a monumental text where the hieroglyphs ran out and could not fill up the register, and nor do the hieroglyphs become smaller towards the end of the line as the artist tried to cram them all into an ever diminishing space. Of course there are examples of texts from elite monuments where this does occur, but in so many areas of wall and stone surface it shows that even Egyptian artisans sometimes miscalculated, had breaks, or changed their minds. Lines of text were written from the beginning with aesthetic principles as one of the most important driving factors. Firstly, imagine the area covered by a large hieroglyph as being divided into four small squares. Then almost every
phs

sign will fit into those spaces and be either small and squat
ogly

(one square), long and horizontal or vertical (two squares), or
Hier

large (four squares).

Individual words tend to be able to fit into a rectangle or square area. For example, the writing of the word ‘strong’ is made up from the following signs:

all vertically compact signs,

with the longer horizontal first and last signs. This could be written: combining groups in small square units to take up less space and look more aesthetically pleasing. Nevertheless, it retains the order in which the signs are read. If the space available was very small, however, it could be written:

. In order to accommodate

such variability signs sometimes had to be written in different sizes, but as long as they were still recognizable, it was fine. Sometimes the actual writing of words could be shortened or changed in order to make the word fit into the space available. There were also space-filling vertical strokes to fill up the awkward gaps.

‘beautiful’ is

often abbreviated to alone, especially in epithets, where a short, pithy writing is desirable.

48

bA
‘to hack up earth’ can be written more imaginatively and using less space as

, but with exactly the same meaning.

As in most languages until the recent past there was no uniform way to spell words in Egyptian, so that some variation was possible.

It is clear that for certain words there were definite ways in which they could be written and ways in which they were never written, so that students did have to learn some spellings. For example, ‘to hear’

is usually written

or

, but hardly ever

which

would be the way of spelling it with monoconsonantal signs.

In fact, it was not only words which were subject to variation; even individual signs could appear visually different. The pictorial quality of the signs underlies another important principle of Egyptian hieroglyphs, that of the possibility of variation in signs which might or might not have an influence on the meaning of the
Hieroglyp

sign and its use. In a recent study of First Intermediate Period stelae from Gebelein and Naga ed-Deir, Sabine Kubisch collected together
hs an
all the examples of the hieroglyph used to write the word
wdpw
,
d ar

‘cup-bearer’, and the variation is remarkable. The fifteen examples
t

of this hieroglyph all show the same basic thing, a man standing and holding out a cup, but they are all different. The man is more or less bent over, his arm holding the cup is straight or bent, he may hold a second vessel in his other hand, he may pour liquid from a vessel into the cup, or he holds the two vessels high up into the air.

Here, away from the eagle eye of the conformists at court, the local artists drew whatever they wanted, but each of these variations seems to mean exactly the same thing. The differences are not significant for the reading of the word. They may be due to a deliberate choice on the part of the scribes to make each sign different, to the fact that different people had different ways of rendering this particular sign, or to the fact that even individuals are inconsistent about what they do. The ‘Dancing Men’ deciphered by Sherlock Holmes formed a cryptic script where each pose had a precise and different meaning. There is no better example than this to show the way in which Egyptian differs from cryptic scripts and 49