Hieroglyphs (2 page)

The people of Egypt have left behind monuments and objects, many of them covered in the writing now known as Egyptian hieroglyphs.

They used this pictorial sign system to write down their language and record aspects of their culture. The information from the writing tells us something about how the Egyptians governed their land and people, about their beliefs, and about their hopes and dreams. Though we can read hieroglyphs this does not mean that we know everything there is to know about Ancient Egypt, partly because the writings have survived accidentally and so are a fraction of the original corpus and partly because the writings only preserve those things the Egyptians themselves thought were important.

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This means we have to tread a very careful path in interpreting and attempting to understand the writings, for our sources are biased by chance and by design. They do, however, give us a point of contact with the minds of the Ancient Egyptians.

Ancient Egyptian is classed by linguists as an Afro-Asiatic language.

This means that it is related to North African languages such as Berber and Cushitic, and to Asiatic (or Semitic) languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. Modern Egyptians speak Egyptian Arabic, not Ancient Egyptian, which is now a ‘dead’ language. The ancient language was a mixture of words connected by a grammatical system spoken by people in the north of Africa and the Near East.

Early rock pictures

The earliest people who lived in the Nile Valley may have originated in different places, each bringing with them different aspects of
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language and vocabulary. One such area was the savannah-like
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region on the edges of the Sahara bordering Egypt on the west. The
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people living here around 5000 bc were hunter-gatherers and cattle herders who depended on the food they gathered and their animals for their existence. They would have needed to remember good grazing areas, water holes and routes across the waste margins.

Such memories would be passed down orally and possibly also in pictures.

Rock pictures left behind by these early hunters are found in the Western Desert in the areas of the Gilf Kebir, Uweinat, and around the Kharga Oasis.
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These rock pictures may be the beginnings of pictorial writing in this area – that is, the means of communicating a thought or idea by drawing a sign with a tool held in the hand.

Although they are notoriously difficult to date, some of them are found in close proximity to Neolithic settlement areas and relate to the lifestyles of the people in this region. They also show the beginnings of the visualization of concepts and the need to formulate a common means of communication in some way. These 2

two ideas of communication and visualizing images are the central concepts in understanding writing and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The earliest rock-art images show the things which were most important to those who drew them. They show different groups of people with different lifestyles. At Uweinat the cattle breeders drew mostly cattle and showed themselves leaping over them and herding them with their crooked staffs. They also hunted ostriches with their bows and arrows. In the Kharga Oasis area were men with head-dresses, hunting animals, including antelopes, giraffes, and wild bulls. The people of the more mountainous areas in the east hunted rhinoceros, elephant, and ostrich. The images were either picked out of the rocky outcrops in the desert with stone picks or were painted in red or yellow ochre, black charcoal, or
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gypsum. The animals no longer exist in these parts of the world
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because it is now too dry, but clearly at this time, around the end of the fifth millennium bc, they were important to the hunters.
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It is possible that the hunters drew the images either before the hunt as a wish for what they would catch or after the hunt to record what
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they had captured. Some of the scenes may have been accompanied by oral stories and acted as illustrations for the hunter as he regaled
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his companions with his exploits. In such cases the pictures act as cartoon images representing frozen actions, but they also show the cognitive link between pictures, words, and sounds.

Clearly people were drawing pictures of things important to them at this time, but they may have written on other things now lost to us, such as animal hides, shells, plant leaves or bark, and even themselves. They could have covered their bodies with painted designs, tattoos, and perhaps also pictures of important things, such as the ostrich they wanted to catch the next day, or the bull whose qualities they wanted to acquire. These images and pictures enable the process of sympathetic magic to work and this is another key concept in the use of writing in Ancient Egypt.

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Boats, landscapes, and people

As the savannah areas dried up through climate change, the raging torrent of the River Nile became calmer, allowing people to move into the Nile Valley and delta and begin to live off its fish and water birds and to cultivate the muddy fields of its flood-plain. Rock drawings of boats may relate to the first contacts between the hunters of the savannah and the riverine and marsh people of the Nile Valley. In old water courses called wadis in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, there are also many rock drawings of which the earliest also relate to the boat people.

The boats vary in shape – some have flat bottoms and right-angled keels while others have rounded bottoms. The boats usually contain people and oarsmen, although sometimes they contain standards and animals which may relate to early gods or chiefs in the Nile Valley. The first Predynastic cultures in Egypt and in particular
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Naqada II culture in Upper Egypt (around 3500–3300 bc) also
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1. Rock pictures including animals and a boat with deities or heroes.

From site 26, Wadi Abu Wasil, Eastern Desert.

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painted pictures of boats and desert landscapes on pottery vessels which were buried in tombs. There is no doubt that boats were important within the Nile Valley for transport, perhaps for warfare, for trade, and for the status of early chiefs (in the same way that limousines or yachts stand for millionaire status in our culture) and this may be the reason for their prominence. At certain times of year the wadis could have been covered in grass after rainfall and at this time expeditions may have been sent into them to collect semi-precious and hard stones or plants or to hunt desert game or to graze flocks and herds. The boat pictures could also have acted as reminders of home for the valley people or markers of the rank of individual expeditions sent there. It has long been suggested that they could also represent expeditions sent out to the Red Sea to go further afield and that they could even suggest actual contact with
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other riverine traders outside Egypt at this time, particularly with
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those from Mesopotamia. Some of the boat images in rock pictures and on pottery may represent mythical stories about heroes who ventured or came from beyond Egypt. The people of this area at this time may have been able to recognize the tale about the hero
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meeting the round-bottom boat people at sea, the story of the hero reaching a mystical island, the hero finding the fabulous black stone
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of the desert, or the hero making his epic journey across the desert back to his beloved valley.
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All of the boat images may relate one story or they may tell a thousand different tales. It is impossible for us to know because we have lost the oral narrative, but something is being communicated here and its culmination is in Tomb 100 at Nekhen (Hierakonpolis).

Tomb 100 was the tomb of the chief of Nekhen, one of the early states of the Egyptian Kingdoms. The tomb consisted of a number of small chambers made of mud brick and was partly sunk into the desert surface. When it was discovered in 1896 it had been robbed out completely, but the paintings on its walls, though damaged, told a remarkable story. There were scenes showing a series of boats of all kinds with dancing women, desert landscapes, animals, animal hunters, the capture and slaying of human prisoners, and also the 5

hero who tamed wild animals. The tomb has been dated on stylistic grounds and from the archaeological material associated with it to the Naqada IIc period, about 3300 bc. The scenes seem to be a culmination of all kinds of visual arts from Predynastic Egypt. Is the tomb a repository of the most important myth of the people of Nekhen or is it one man’s life, shown with his family at certain important times – the first hunt, religious rituals, his death? It may be a narrative or an advertisement, a fantasy or an idealizing autobiography.
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Élite writing at Abydos

A little later at Abydos (the cemetery of another early kingdom at This), the local rulers were also being buried in élite tombs with separate compartments for the body of the dead chief and for the goods which were buried with him. The man buried in Tomb U-j around 3200 bc was very wealthy and his goods included jars of
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resin or wine from the area of Syria-Palestine, a dish made of
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obsidian, an ivory sceptre, and many other things of which only the
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labels have survived. Around 190 labels were found in the form of small rectangles of wood or ivory carved with pictorial hieroglyphic signs showing a variety of information. The most simple bore numbers: one vertical stroke represented one object, two strokes denoted two objects, tens were shown with an inverted horseshoe shape, and hundreds by a swirl. Each label had a hole bored in the corner so that it could be tied to whatever it denoted – perhaps a box or bag containing, for example, three (lengths of cloth), two (festival bread loaves). These numerical signs are the earliest recognizable writing from Egypt – a symbol specifically designed to give information which cannot otherwise be deduced. The single units would be clear but the swirls would have to be understood as numbers by both the writer and the viewer. A second group of labels show a variety of signs in a bewildering series of associated groups.

They have been interpreted as representing goods from different places: a shrine resembling an elephant together with a real elephant may represent Nekhen or Aswan; the jackal perhaps 6

stands for the jackal lands of Middle Egypt, while the archer may represent the tribes of archers in the Eastern Desert – perhaps those who sent bows or arrows as tribute to this powerful Abydos ruler.

There are writings of the placenames Buto, ‘Fighter-City’, and ‘Ship-City’, the identities of which are otherwise lost. The most complex labels may show administrative activities such as bird hunting, fish catching, and cloth production which were directly controlled by the ruler’s residence and harim. Altogether around fifty signs are attested, both signs with sound values only (
phonograms
) and signs with meaning values only (
semograms
), indicating the level of

sophistication of writing at this time.5

Tombs dating from the Predynastic period often contain pottery vessels, probably not because the pottery itself was always
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intrinsically valuable but because of their contents – fats, unguents,
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ointments, perfumes, beer, wine, resin, grain, meat, pickles, preserved fruit, or dried meat. Pottery and stone vessels were the plastic boxes and bags of their time. Often these pots were incised or drawn in ink with a sign such as a circle, a pair of arms, or a cross
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and in these cases the signs do not describe the contents (no doubt labels were used, since jars could store many different items). These
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signs instead seem to indicate ownership – either of the pot or of the jar and its contents – for when the kingdoms of Egypt were united in the Early Dynastic Period, around 3100 bc, we find that these pot marks contain the names of the early kings of the country. They are written as a rectangular box called a
serekh
, half covered in a series of vertical lines with a picture sign in the other half and a falcon standing on top of the box. The falcon is a sign for the king, the box represents the royal residence and the sign inside the box is a writing in pictorial script of the name of the king. It seems logical that the most important things should have been among the first things to be identified by this writing. Here the king’s name denotes his ownership of the jar and its contents. The
serekh
is a stylized representation of the palace complex with a niched-facade enclosure wall and is the first identifier of a king’s name, at once protecting it and symbolizing the institution of the palace administration.

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Commemoration and accounting, ownership

and display

Writing in the tombs of the Early Dynastic Period at Abydos was used sparingly, so far as we can tell. This might, however, be a false impression. The tombs seem to be miniature versions of the houses of the kings and stored all his requirements for the next life. These ranged from food and clothing to oil for anointing (like aftershave and bath salts), plus exquisitely beautiful prestige and imported goods worthy of a king in the afterlife, so that his royal status was apparent to the gods. It was thought vital to record the ownership of these items so that there could be no doubt of it. It was also necessary to record the quantities and provenance of the goods so that the living would know how much had been placed in the tomb and therefore removed from the real storerooms of the palace. This suggests that the tomb records would then be compared with the palace magazine records and the two tallied so that the debits from
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