Hieroglyphs (4 page)

The year’s planning was based on one particular astronomical event. At the moment the flood began, the star Sirius was first visible from Egypt after a seventy-day absence. This coincidence signalled the beginning of the whole administrative year and it was all recorded. The timing of the rising of Sirius – the goddess
Th

Sopdet in Egypt – and especially the height of the flood were
e origins of writin

meticulously recorded and cross-checked. The flood began around mid-July, covered the Nile Valley and delta for about three months, and then receded. The ideal height was about 20 cubits (10 m) at Aswan, 12 cubits (6 m) near Cairo, and about 7 cubits in
g in E

the delta (3.5 m). If this were exceeded settlements and farms could be destroyed, but if the flood fell short, not enough land
gypt

would be flooded or water brought to produce the required food and surpluses. The southernmost part of Egypt at Aswan was therefore one of the key points in the country for measuring the flood height. As soon as the king’s officials knew the height of the flood, they could calculate from their past records in the archives how much tax could be collected and therefore what kind of projects could be sustained for the glory of the king. This fiscal yield was broken down into units so that by the time the flood began to recede about three months later the scribes could be on hand to mark out the exact amount of land and inform farmers of their expected yields. From that first sign of the flood at Aswan a king would know what building projects he could afford, how many artisans and specialists he could usefully put to work, and perhaps how many foreign campaigns he could undertake. At times of low floods, the king would know that he needed to 15

husband his resources wisely and perhaps scale down his building works and temple donations.

All of this was made possible by careful record-taking and accessible archives. Any king worth his salt would invest in his scribal training programme and he may even have come through it himself. Measuring, counting, calculating, and taxing were therefore the practical motivating reasons for developing a clear writing system in Egypt. The ideological reasons for the development of writing were concerned with recording this information to establish the status of the king in this life, in the next, and in the realm of the gods.

phs

ogly

Hier

16

Chapter 2

Hieroglyphic script

and Egyptian language

Sacred signs

Language is an evolving and constantly changing system.

New words are created, old ones go out of use, meanings and pronunciations of words change, the structure of words alters, and the very grammatical framework of language evolves. The English word ‘piggin’, current in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to describe a small wooden pail or bucket, is now obscure, while the Old English word order with the verb last in a subordinate clause, as in ‘they knew then that they naked were’ has not survived. It was the same for Egyptian and both the spoken language and the script used to record it in the Early Dynastic phase had over three thousand years of development ahead of it.

The rise of the unified state in Egypt must have prompted development of a writing system to make accurate records for the benefit of the king and his court. Legend has it that the first king of Egypt, Menes ‘The Founder’, established the capital city at Memphis, at the apex of the delta, and that this was the administrative centre of the kingdom. It is no accident that the patron god of Memphis is the craftsman Ptah, who was believed to have created the world by thinking of the names of things. When he uttered those names, so giving form to thought, they came into existence. Writing is one of the ways of creating and recording ideas 17

in a concrete form. The scribes and bureaucrats working at Memphis passed on their knowledge to their sons and laid the foundations for an élite class of literate bureaucrats. From the very beginning there was a difference between the hieroglyphic script and the cursive and linear hieratic scripts used in everyday life which would have been much more usual and more widely known.

The Egyptian word for their pictorial writing was ‘medu-netjer’, which means ‘words of god’, and it seems that this was recognized as the primary function of the hieroglyphic script: to communicate between Egyptians and their gods. This was possible in the buildings mainly associated with the gods, their temples, and in places where the divine world touched the earthly world – that is, in tombs and cemeteries. In addition, as the king was regarded as the intermediary between people and the gods, almost anything official or monumental relating to the king had to be written in hieroglyphic script. The drawing or carving of the pictorial
phs

hieroglyphs was a time-consuming process and if scribes had had to
ogly

paint in every feather in every bird-sign it necessarily would have
Hier

taken a great deal of time. Formal hieroglyphic writing was not a very efficient use of scribal time and so to speed up the writing process they had developed a shorthand script, which we call hieratic. The language written in this script is no different from that written in hieroglyphs and the scripts continue to be used in parallel with each other. It would be the difference between writing something in ‘illuminated’ letters like those in the Lindisfarne gospels or in Koranic calligraphy and writing something in ‘real’

(joined-up) writing. In general, the more monumental a text (temple, tomb, stela) then the more likely that it will be written in hieroglyphs. Egyptian is thus a dual creature in two ways: language and script; and hieroglyph and hieratic.

The Egyptian used in monuments had formal restrictions about how it sounded and was used, and particularly later on it must have sounded archaic and somewhat artificial. Whenever this kind of Egyptian was spoken or written it may have immediately implied a 18

formal type of communication with the divine sphere (compare the different modes of address and degrees of formality in Japanese, which change depending on whether you are talking to children, for example, or to your boss). Monumental hieroglyphic Egyptian is an extremely high-status language.

Script

The scripts are usually written and read from right to left, but also occur reading from left to right, particularly for aesthetic purposes. The texts can also be written in horizontal lines or vertical lines. Egyptian is visually versatile and easily adapts to the place in which it is written. The presence of figural signs such as
Hi

animals, birds, men, women, serpents, or fish and the fact they are
eroglyp

usually drawn in profile means that they face one way or another.

hic scri

In order to make clear which way a text is to be read all these figural signs face the same way and the text is read into the faces
pt an

of the signs. A single glance at a text is enough to see which way it
d E

is to be read:

gyptian lan

gua

In this example, the man with his upraised hands, the horned
ge

vipers, the quail chick, and the owl all face to the right. The text reads towards or into their faces (from head to tail) and therefore from right to left.

In Egyptian only consonantal sounds and not vowels are written, so that a basic written word could conceivably have had various permutations of vowel sounds attached to it. For example, the word for a house is written

, p-r. It may have been pronounced ‘per’,

‘aper’, ‘pero’, or ‘epre’. The pronunciation of the word might have changed depending on the function of the word within a sentence:

‘the house is big’ = ‘per’ (house is subject of the sentence); ‘the man enters the house’ = ‘epre’ (house is object of the sentence). By extension, nuances of tense may have been rendered in the spoken 19

tongue but not in the written language, so they certainly existed but were not written.

In order to be able to communicate to each other how they understand Egyptian, Egyptologists use a system of converting hieroglyphs into a script based on the Roman alphabet. This method of rendering the characters of one language in those of another is called transliteration. For example, the word is

shown in transliteration as
ra
, the latter sign representing
a
ayin, a sound not found in English, but which occurs in Semitic and in Arabic. It is pronounced something like ‘raa’ and is the word for the

‘sun’ or for a ‘day’. When
ra
is written down, Egyptologists can therefore see how the word is being read and understood in the context of a sentence. For words which are spelled out this is not so vital, but sometimes words are written in a very abbreviated fashion and how they are understood could affect the meaning of a sentence. For example,

by itself could be read as
pt
, ‘sky,’ or as
phs

Hry
, ‘what is above’ or ‘chief’. With any luck the rest of the sentence
ogly

in which this sign occurs (the context) will help to give its meaning.

Hier

Phonetic (sound) signs

There was not a true Egyptian ‘alphabet’ as we know it, but Egyptologists have devised an alphabet of a kind and this is used as a starting place in learning Egyptian hieroglyphs. The order of the signs is a modern, linguistic order and the list includes a number of sounds which are not heard in the pronunciation of the English language. It is very close to the claim of the Greek writer Plutarch that there were twenty-five consonants in Egyptian (
De Iside et
Osiride
, section 56). All of the signs in this list are a single consonantal sound and they are written as if the text in which they occur is read from left to right.

At the beginning of the list are sounds which are classed as vowels in English but in Egyptian are consonants (basic element of speech). They are followed by sounds made with the lips (labial), palate, tongue, or throat and can be made with force or simply 20