Hieroglyphs (15 page)

‘I kno

w y

ou, I kno

w your nam

es’

13. Crocodile hymn to Sobek, written in crocodile signs, Temple of
Esna.

what they stand for and they are the best example of the ideographic script believed in by occultists and the early decipherers of hieroglyphs.

Perhaps the most extreme examples of cryptography are two texts in the temple of Esna. They are hymns to the crocodile god, Sobek-Re, and the ram god, Khnum, and they can be seen in the Roman pronaos (the front part of the temple), on the inside of a doorway. When the light hits them, the texts are revealed in all their mischievous glory, for the Sobek hymn is written almost entirely in crocodiles and the Khnum hymn in ram hieroglyphs.

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Luckily, the Sobek hymn begins with the words ‘Praise to Sobek’

and then continues in crocodiles. It is clearly a hymn of praise and seems to consist of epithets of the god, extolling his various qualities and attributes, even his crocodileness. From other texts, the crocodile sign has a wide range of possible uses and readings, such as ‘lord’, ‘power of attack’, ‘divine’, ‘Sobek’, ‘appearing in glory’, ‘time’, ‘one who seizes’, and so on.
6
The clever thing about the hymns is that the priests who wrote them used the whole hymn as a symbolic message, for both gods are recognized as creator gods, who created everything themselves and are immanent in everything. Therefore, the hymns express the idea that divinity exists in everything through the medium of meaning, sound value, writing, and representation. If one text were needed to express the real triumph of hieroglyphs it would be one of these two.

If such texts hint at the same kind of fun as that to be had in
phs

compiling a crossword, there are genuine ‘acrostic’ texts which can
ogly

be read in at least two directions. A stela in the tomb of
Hier

Nebwenenef, from the beginning of the reign of Ramesses II, bears a standard hymn to Osiris and Re written in horizontal lines. Halfway along a pair of vertical lines are drawn down the stela, enclosing one group of hieroglyphs from each line between them. This constitutes a short vertical text. A hymn to Mut on the stela of Paser from the reign of Ramesses VI has taken the process further by writing out every word of a hymn in a squared grid.

Two hymns can be read horizontally and vertically. The text actually refers to a third reading which may have been around the outside, though this part of the stela is now lost and so cannot be read.
7

There are texts which appear to be written in sportive hieroglyphs but may not be. A stela now in the Louvre (Stela C12) contains a usual funerary inscription for the first few lines of the text and then there is an extraordinary row of figures, carved at about double the height of the usual lines of text. These figures seem to 66

be grouped in a small tableau but they are doing or carrying bizarre things. One man carries a human head on a tray, another wears a mask, and a group of headless beings run along together.

This is not usual behaviour for images on such stela or for texts.

Could it be a depiction of some strange rituals carried out at Osiris festivals? Could it be a misunderstood copy of some much older text? Étienne Drioton, who was a master of Ptolemaic writing, saw in this line of figures a line of cryptic texts and proposed a translation for it based on his principles of how such writings were achieved in Eg
ypt.8

There are also examples of whole statues containing word plays or a rebus. In a statue in Cairo Museum, Ramesses II is shown as a child wearing a solar disk on his head, clutching a reed plant in his hand,
‘I kno
and squatting in front of a Horus falcon. Some of the imagery is
w y

standard, such as the Horus falcon protecting the king, but the king
ou, I kno
as a child is more unusual and the reed plant at first seems out of place. As the statue is a rebus it should be read as a phrase where
w

the hieroglyphic elements are: the sun disk, the child, and the reed.
yo
They are the signs reading

ur nam

Ra-ms-sw
, ‘Ramesses’, ‘The sun god Re

bore him’, the name of the king. This was not a new idea and some
es’

of the statues of Senenmut, the high official of Hatshepsut, play similar word games: a man offers a cobra with a pair of arms on its head and a solar disk. This is the word ‘Maat-ka-re’, one of the names of ‘King’ Hatshepsut herself, so her highest official dedicates her to the gods.

In some small way, hieroglyphic texts are constantly invoking extra meaning and symbolism and in ways which we can only barely appreciate. One of the most frequent forms of word plays in texts is the use of onomatopoeia and alliteration in rituals and other texts. At the minimum this is where a string of words beginning with the same sound are combined in an alliterative phrase: ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper.’ It can be further refined where words containing the same sounds are combined: ‘Ten taut taws taught Taurus the tawdry truth.’ The 67

final version of this system is the development of the pun, where two words sound the same but have widely different meanings, often used in English for humour: ‘Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all

got it in for me!’9 All of these
double entendres
, puns, and sound games are used in Ptolemaic and Roman temple texts, though perhaps without the humorous element. In fact, most often punning is treated as an elevated form of expression and of divine communication:
wDA r wDAt nb wDAw m a
=
i
‘wedja er wedjat neb wedjau em aai’, ‘Proceeding to every room, amulets in my hands’, literally meaning ‘Going safely to every safe place, safety-things in my hands’. There is no doubt that the underlying meaning is a sense of protection and preservation. The sounds repeated reinforce the meaning and emphasize the underlying message.

This is particularly important in destroying enemy powers, so alliteration and puns are vital in rituals of this kind:
xftyw xbxb m
xmt
‘kheftiu khebkheb em khemet’, ‘the enemies are destroyed with the harpoon’. They can also be used to affirm good things:
phs

mAa mAat
‘Offering maat’.

ogly

Hier

This last example is also the basis of one of the most important puns in Edfu Temple. This is a temple concerned with the cosmic order and the role of the Egyptian kingship within it, at the centre of it.

The concept of ‘
maat
’ as ‘cosmic harmony’, ‘truth’, and ‘justice’ is well known, but it is the central ritual in the temple demonstrating the link and the bargain between humans and gods which is balanced by the king in the middle as the intermediary. It is also the focus of a series of puns where the offering of
maat
is reinforced.

The way in which ‘
maat
’ was actually spoken seems to have sounded more like ‘mere’ and it is close in sound to Egyptian words for

‘throat’, ‘songstress’, ‘what he loves’, and ‘eye’. The mention of all of these things independently can also bring to mind the central idea of
maat
, with each one incorporating all the aspects of the other ideas. There is a central theme, that of the throat providing song and access to the body for nourishment, which is one of the aims of
maat
. When the goddess Hathor is called
maat
, however, the name invokes her roles as songstress, as the nourisher of the king, as his 68

beloved, and as his all-seeing eye. Puns of this kind have a vital purpose to preserve the power of the things they name. Hearing an Egyptian ritual must have been as much an aural and intellectual experience as it was physical, smelling the incense, seeing the gestures, hearing the voices. The play on words and ideas stimulated and engaged all the senses at once.

How lucky the gods were.

‘I kno

w y

ou, I kno

w your nam

es’

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Chapter 5

Scribes and everyday writing

The creation of a hieroglyphic text, with each individual feather of the bird signs and each basket carefully carved in stone and then painted as well, needed the attentions of a team of craftsmen.

Following the composition of the required text probably onto a papyrus roll, it would have first been written in red ink on a prepared wall surface (the work of stonemasons and line setters), then a master draughtsman would have overwritten the text in black ink, using the red text as his guide to the space required and the signs to be used in words. At this stage he would have a perfect idea of exactly where each sign fitted and how large it needed to be to fill the allocated space. In essence, the master was creating a text no less time-consuming, but this time it was perfect.

Then the sculptors moved in. If it were to be raised relief, standing proud of the surface of the stone, the background would have to be cut back, so first the less-skilled team moved in to block out the larger empty areas. As they moved closer to the signs, more-skilled sculptors took over, carving closer and closer around the outlines of the sign and finally moulding and incising details upon each hieroglyph. Finally, the painters, probably with their own allotted colours, would work their way along the wall or monument. As they went by, this ancient wave of colour processors would activate the scene in blue, yellow, red-brown, and white.

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If the scene was to be carved in sunk relief, this faster process required only the actual signs to be cut back as in the rough, undetailed work of the Amarna temple and private stela reliefs.

The cut-back signs, however, often accompanied sunk-relief art, with its surfaces modelled and moulded as if they were made of plaster. The position of the text could also dictate the type of relief required. Texts and images on the outside of buildings or monuments were usually written in sunk relief in order to catch the raking or direct sunlight. Texts inside buildings or enclosed areas were usually carved in raised relief so that they were highlighted by faint lamplight or any light which might come in through the doorway or roof openings.

The creators of such hieroglyphic texts required skill and practice.

There were also different levels of craftsmen and some such as the
Scribes an

painters and sculptors would not have been able to read the texts they were creating. This is reflected in the terms used for the people
d e
involved. The word for a scribe in Egyptian is
sS
(
sX
) and this is
veryda

also applied to ‘writings’ with the papyrus roll determinative. The
y writin

inscriber of hieroglyphs was called
gnwty
‘sculptor’ and the actions of writing in ink and carving in stone were regarded as very
g

different skills.

Scribes and hieratic

For the average scribe making tax returns in a delta village which had to be in by the end of the month, the hieroglyphic script was not a practical option. Instead, the administrative bureaucracy used the shorthand, cursive script known as hieratic. The scribe would sit cross-legged on the ground or a low stool, with his kilt pulled tight over his knees to create a table. His papyrus roll would be unrolled at the required place and a page left open. The left end would have been held by the scribe’s left hand; the right may have been weighted down or allowed to fall to the right, keeping the papyrus taut. Taking his reed brush in his hand, the scribe would dip the brush in his water pot, then onto a cake of ink, mix until the 71

black was perfect, and then paint his hieratic letters swiftly from right to left along the horizontal fibres exposed on the open side of the papyrus. The fibres formed a natural ruled line, keeping his lines of writing straight. The beginning of texts or important parts were written in red ink, the other colour on his palette. The method of holding the pen was more like holding a brush, with the reed pen lightly balanced on the second, third, and fourth fingers and guided by the thumb with the hand held above the surface of the papyrus.

This meant that the cursive hieroglyphs could be written (or painted) even more quickly.

This idyllic picture presupposes that all scribes were right-handed and indeed they are usually shown as right-handed. It is not clear if it was a requirement for the profession or not, but it is more natural for right-handed people to start writing where their hand falls on the page, at the right-hand side, and move away to the left. Further, in the Old and Middle Kingdom, hieratic texts tended to be written
phs

in vertical columns, starting at the right and working to the left. It
ogly

is not known if this was simply a fashion or whether it represented a
Hier

scribal school connected with the location of the political centre of the country. In the Middle Kingdom it was based at Itj-Tawy in the Fayum area and by the New Kingdom it had moved to Thebes and Memphis. By late Dynasty 12 writing in horizontal lines had come in and was to become more usual in everyday papyrus documents after this time. The vertical column style is retained for some religious documents such as the
Books of the Dead
and may have been regarded as a deliberately archaic practice.