Hieroglyphs (20 page)

Taking into account the modern developments, Frederick Junge’s
Neuägyptische Grammatik
(1999), James Allen’s
Middle Egyptian
Grammar
(2000), and Rainer Hannig’s
Großer Handwörterbuch
Ägyptisch–Deutsch
(1995) have all helped make material accessible for all interested people, not just Egyptology scholars. A visit to a local museum can provide a few hours of interest and fun, and visits to the monuments in Egypt are more possible than they used to be, so that the hieroglyphic texts can be tackled by a wider audience of readers than ever before.

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Specialist areas

Increasingly, scholars have become more specialized in the kind of work they do. Each type or genre of text can be studied in detail, including poetry, literature, religious rituals, legal documentation, economic texts, funerary texts, and letters. Each individual part of a text can be studied, ranging from the different parts of grammar, words and their meanings and writings, down to individual signs and in particular the way in which determinatives really work.

These studies contribute overall to the study of the history and development of ideas in Egypt.

Lexicographers have gathered together all words to do with the same thing, such as names of medicines, plant names, foreign place names, personal names, words for cooking, baking, and grilling, words used for greeting and talking to each other. To some degree this may be an artificial construct, but it does show interesting
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smaller aspects of Egyptian culture which fit into the overall
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system.

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For example, one of the words for a turtle is

StA
which

derives from the verb
StA
meaning ‘to hide, be hidden’. The turtle’s habit of hiding in the mud at the bottom of watery pools had led to it being given this name, ‘the one who is hidden’. One of the names of Seth in Ptolemaic temple texts is
Mdy
and it has been suggested that this originates in the word for the Medes and Persians who invaded Egypt in the seventh century bc. The memory of the Persian soldiers in Egypt was particularly hateful as they were considered to have no respect for the Egyptian gods.

This term
Mdy
then may have had particular resonance when applied to the demonic Seth.

Specialist studies of particular bodies of material can also illumine wider issues about Egypt and the Ancient World. A number of examples of diplomatic correspondence have survived from Egypt and elsewhere. For example, at the end of diplomatic negotiations 96

between Ramesses II and the Hittite king Hattusil III a magnificent silver plaque was sent from Hatti to Pi-Ramesses. The cuneiform text in Babylonian set out the terms for peace and after ratification it was translated into Egyptian on papyrus, inscribed in hieroglyphs in the temple at Karnak, and transferred to clay tablets in cuneiform for the Hittites. The Egyptian hieroglyphic version and a Hittite clay tablet version have in fact survived.

Each preserves the same text and it is interesting to see how they differ. Both versions are business-like documents setting out the terms and conditions of the peace without much recourse to hyperbole. They strike the reader as having a succinct legalistic document at their base and it is clear that they derive from the same text, which presumably would have been agreed by the bilingual and trilingual scribes of the courts of the two kings. It
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seems that the Egyptians were more fascinated by the Hittite seal
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on the silver plaque for it showed the Storm-god embracing the
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Hittite king and in the Egyptian document there is a verbal
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description of this scene.
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In the same vein is the diplomatic correspondence between
gyptian

Amunhotep III and Akhenaten and the various rulers of the Near Eastern countries and city-states in the fourteenth century bc. Only those letters which were kept in the archives at Akhetaten, the capital city of Akhenaten, survive and they are either copies of letters sent out by the Egyptians or the letters sent by the foreign rulers to the Egyptian court. They are written mostly in cuneiform script and Babylonian language, but include Egyptian names written out phonetically and give some hint as to how they may have sounded. Akhenaten Neferkheperure comes out as

‘Napkhurriya’, and Meritaten (daughter of Akhenaten) as ‘Mayati’, with Amunhotep III Nebmaatre as ‘Nibmuareya’. The word for Egypt is ‘Misri-ni-we’, which is close to the modern name ‘Misr’.

They are certainly different from the modern Anglicized spellings and conventions and give some pause for thought as to the sound of Egyptian and the precise rhythm of the language.
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Modern hieroglyphs in the service of Egyptian

The publication of texts had to overcome a difficult technical problem from the beginning – that of handling the hieroglyphic script. The earliest publications were engraved facsimiles of handwritten material relying on the ability of the epigrapher to both copy and reproduce a text accurately, as in the monumental works of the
Description de l’Égypte
, Champollion’s
Monuments de
l’Égypte et de la Nubie
, and the Prussian Expedition led by Richard Lepsius,
Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien
. With the establishment of the serious study of Egyptology and the need for the publication of books and other material printers addressed the problem of a hieroglyphic font. Publishers used to typeset books, that is, each page was laid out using individual metal type for each word. For alphabets of twenty-odd signs this meant having thousands of similar letters per page and the technique of setting them in place was a considerable skill. For typesetting hieroglyphs
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the labour involved was no less, but the production of the signs was
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more difficult, as hundreds of different signs were used for Middle
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Egyptian alone. In addition, the signs could be quite complex or detailed. The French Institute in Cairo (
Institut Français
d’Archéologie Orientale
, IFAO) was at the forefront of the development of a hieroglyphic font for its publication of Edfu and Dendera temples, requiring thousands of different signs. The signs had to be accurately copied from the temple walls and cut in metal typeface, then laid out to create the page and printed off. The earlier IFAO font consisted of outline signs, so that additional detail could be put in the interior of the sign if necessary. This must have been a very time-consuming process, but it was later decided that the best compromise was to have solid signs which contained the necessary fine detail for Ptolemaic hieroglyphs.
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For the first eight volumes of Edfu Temple alone there are over three thousand printed pages full of hieroglyphs, a truly monumental work carried on today by Sylvie Cauville and her team at both Edfu and Dendera temples.

In Germany, fonts had been developed to print grammars and the 98

Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache
and the Theinhardt font comprised ‘open’ hieroglyphs with clear internal details (1875). In England in 1892, the publishers Harrison and Sons already had a list of fifteen different types of Egyptian Hieroglyphic Type used for British Museum publications and others. They were produced in an environment where the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) was printing the Bible in local languages and scripts for distribution all over the world, so the production of one more script alongside Urdu, Ethiopic, Chinese, and Arabic was not a problem.

The other main font for hieroglyphs was produced by the Griffith Institute in Oxford, essentially for the production of Gardiner’s
Grammar
. The design of the hieroglyphs was put out to artists
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who had worked in the Theban tombs, Norman and Nina de
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Garis Davies. Nina Davies had written a book about Egyptian
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hieroglyphs, reproducing the most elaborate signs in all their
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artistic glory in a series of watercolour facsimiles. Working with
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Gardiner, the two of them established a distinctive font with considerable detail in the reproduction of each sign. Their skill was
gyptian

matched by the unsung craftsmen working for Oxford University Press, in particular a Mr W. J. Bilton.
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The Oxford font was specially designed to be available in Britain and only intended for short pieces of text, so that many long texts continued to be produced in handwritten facsimiles. This did provide the opportunity for gifted Egyptological palaeographers to demonstrate their skills, usually anonymously – for example Herbert Fairman with his transcriptions of Middle Egyptian stories, onomastica, and texts from Edfu Temple. The font has survived as the Cleo font, a computer font designed by Cleo Huggins and based on the font commissioned by Gardiner.

Computer-generated hieroglyphs

One of the original focuses of the Centre for Computer-Aided Egyptological Research (CCER) was the production of a new 99

computer font for hieroglyphs and of a word-processing program so that hieroglyphic computer documents could be written. It came about as a true team effort from 1988, led by Jochen Hallof and Dirk van der Plas.
8 Eric Aubourg’s original M
acScribe and WinScribe has evolved into a sophisticated application, allowing texts to be written in vertical or horizontal lines, from right to left or left to right, with the ability to group signs at will and render parts of texts in red. The hieroglyphic text can also be pasted into any word-processing package, making the production of texts easy. The CCER font and word-processing application came concomitantly with other computer-glyphs, such as Saqqara Technology’s Inscribe software (1994), fun learning packages, and Egyptian games on computer, such as Senet, not just computer-games with an Egyptian theme.

The CCER has taken the process one step further because it offers not only a standard font-set of 700 signs, but for those who are more adventurous, a full Ptolemaic complement. This might not seem to be for the faint-hearted but it has proved to be the making
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of the whole enterprise. The French Institute in Cairo has been
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continuing the publication of the Temple of Dendera and saw the
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opportunity to move to computer-produced text with the CCER’s program. The volumes of the Osiris Chapels are neat and clean versions of the temple texts, with ‘new’ signs designed as needed, both expanding and developing the font-set available. At the same time, it is possible to work at the temple wall with a laptop computer, enter the texts straight into a publishable format and also begin to make the translations. Imagine the facility of being able to check a text straight from the stone, without having to check photographs or wait to go back to the monument at a later date. The other aspect of this work is that it is possible to upload the text to a server and make it instantly available on the web. Wall to web on the same day! With a webcam, students studying a particular text could even access their text instantly in whatever museum or other location in Egypt and work from the original, adding an extra dimension to their studies. Such facilities are also important in the consideration of access to the text, legibility, visibility, and conservation of texts.

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Importance of the decipherment of hieroglyphs

The achievements of philologists have opened up a rich source of information about Egypt. The discipline of Egyptology is often said to have begun with the decipherment of hieroglyphs. Textual information does fill out our knowledge of Ancient Egypt and without it our understanding of the ancient culture would be much less varied, even though statistically so little has survived.

Archaeology has provided the architectural contexts, the material evidence for religious and burial practices, the specialist goods manufactured for the élite, and sometimes even the bodies of the Egyptians themselves. Textual information, however, has given us the names of those people and their jobs, their thoughts, their poetry, and the things in which they were interested, thus showing
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us either their wider cosmic view or the small things which worried
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them. These private thoughts, tax returns, the minutiae of life, and
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even important state events would not survive in any meaningful
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way in an archaeological context. For example, we would not know
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that Amenemhet I was assassinated if it were not for a teaching which begins with his death and continues as his spirit gives advice
gyptian

to his son. The court records detailing the Tomb Robbery trials give a picture of corruption and neglect in Egypt of the Late New Kingdom and suggest that the west bank at Thebes was essentially surviving on the fruits of tomb-robbing. The words of Akhenaten to his god are personal and affecting, the pleas of the Letters to the Dead speak of bereavement and love after death, the jokes of the boatmen in the papyrus swamps bring life to the past, the visit of Amun to the mother of Hatshepsut is full of implicit eroticism and joy.