Egyptian hieroglyphs
are a
writing system used by the
Ancient Egyptians, that contained a combination of
logographic,
alphabetic, and
ideographic elements. The word
hieroglyph comes from the
Greek (
hierogluphiká); the adjective
hieroglyphic, as well as related words such as (
hierogluphos 'one who writes hieroglyphs', from (
hierós 'sacred') and γλύφειν (
glúphein 'to carve' or 'to write', see
glyph). Hieroglyphs themselves, were called (γράμματα) (
tà hierogluphiká (
grámmata), 'engraved characters') on monuments (such as
stelae, temples and tombs). The word
hieroglyph has come to be used for the individual hieroglyphic characters themselves. Whilst "hieroglyphics" is commonly used, it is technically incorrect.
The Egyptian phrase for hieroglyphs is
n:t:r-R8-m-d-w-t-S43-Z1:Z1:Z1 or more simply
R8-S43-Z1:Z1:Z1(often
transliterated as
medew-netjer "Divine Words").
Hieroglyphology (
archaically "
hierology") refers to the study of hieroglyphs or hieroglyphic texts.
Hieroglyphs emerged from the preliterate artistic traditions of Egypt. For example, symbols on
Gerzean pottery from
circa 4000 BC resemble hieroglyphic writing
[[1]]. For many years the earliest known hieroglyphic inscription was the
Narmer Palette, found during excavations at
Hierakonpolis (modern Kawm al-Ahmar) in the 1890s, which has been dated to
circa 3200 BC. However, in 1998 a German archeological team under
Gunter Dreyer excavating at
Abydos (modern
Umm el-Qa'ab) uncovered tomb
U-j of a
Predynastic ruler, and recovered three hundred clay labels inscribed with
proto-hieroglyphs, dating to the
Naqada IIIA period of the 33rd century BC
[[2]],
[[3]]. The first full sentence written in hieroglyphs so far discovered was found on a seal impression found in the tomb of
Seth-Peribsen at
Umm el-Qa'ab in
Abydos, which dates from the
Second Dynasty [[4]]. In the era of the
Old Kingdom, the
Middle Kingdom and the
New Kingdom, about 700 hieroglyphs existed. By the Greco-Roman period, they numbered more than 5,000 .
Hieroglyphs consist of three kinds of glyphs: phonetic glyphs, including single-consonant characters that functioned like an
alphabet;
logographs, representing
morphemes; and determinatives, or ideograms, which narrowed down the
meaning of a logographic or phonetic word.
 |
Hieroglyphs on an Egyptian funerary stela |
As writing developed and became more widespread among the Egyptian people, simplified glyph forms developed, resulting in the
hieratic (priestly) and
demotic (popular) scripts. These variants were also more suited than hieroglyphs for use on
papyrus. Hieroglyphic writing was not, however, eclipsed, but existed along side the other forms, especially in monumental and other formal writing. The
Rosetta Stone contains parallel texts in hieroglyphic and demotic writing.
Hieroglyphs continued to be used under Persian rule (intermittent in the 6th and 5th centuries BC), and after
Alexander's conquest of Egypt, during the ensuing Macedonian and
Roman periods. It appears that the misleading quality of comments from Greek and Roman writers about hieroglyphs came about, at least in part, as a response to the changed political situation. Some believe that hieroglyphs may have functioned as a way to distinguish 'true Egyptians' from the foreign conquerors. Another reason may be the refusal to tackle a foreign culture on its own terms which characterized Greco-Roman approaches to Egyptian culture generally. Having learned that hieroglyphs were sacred writing, Greco-Roman authors imagined the complex but rational system as an allegorical, even magical, system transmitting secret, mystical knowledge.
By the fourth century, few Egyptians were capable of reading hieroglyphs, and the myth of allegorical hieroglyphs was ascendant. Monumental use of hieroglyphs ceased after the closing of all non-Christian temples in AD 391 by the Roman Emperor
Theodosius I; the last known inscription is from a temple far to the south not long after 391.
Decipherment of hieroglyphic writing
In the fifth century appeared the
Hieroglyphica of
Horapollo, a spurious explanation of almost 200 glyphs. Authoritative yet largely false, the work was a lasting impediment to the decipherment of Egyptian writing. But whereas earlier scholarship emphasized Greek origin of the document, more recent work has recognized remnants of genuine knowledge, and casts it as an attempt by an Egyptian intellectual to rescue an unrecoverable past. The
Hieroglyphica was a major influence on
Renaissance symbolism, particularly the
emblem book of
Andrea Alciato, and including the
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of
Francesco Colonna.
Various modern scholars attempted to decipher the glyphs over the centuries, notably
Johannes Goropius Becanus in the 16th century and
Athanasius Kircher in the 17th, but all such attempts met with failure. The breakthrough in decipherment was done by
Thomas Young and
Jean-François Champollion beginning in the early 1800s. The discovery in
1799 of the Rosetta Stone by
Napoleon's troops (during
Napoleon's Egyptian invasion) provided the critical information which allowed Champollion to discover the nature of the script by the 1830s:
This was a major triumph for the young discipline of
Egyptology.
Hieroglyphs survive today in two forms: Directly, through half a dozen Demotic glyphs added to the Greek alphabet when writing
Coptic; and indirectly, as the inspiration for the
original alphabet that was ancestral to nearly every other alphabet ever used, including the Roman alphabet.
Engraved hieroglyphs are all more or less figurative: they represent real or imaginary elements, sometimes stylized and simplified, but perfectly recognizable in most cases.
In fact, the same character can even, according to context, be interpreted in diverse ways: as a phonogram (phonetic reading), as an ideogram, or as a determinative (semantic reading). The determinative was not read, but facilitated reading by differentiating the word from its homphones.
Phonetic reading
|
A bull's head, a snake, a hand... |
This is when a character is read independently from its meaning (according to the principle of the
rebus.) Phonograms are formed, whether with one consonant (signs called
mono- or
uniliteral) or by two consonants (
biliteral signs) or by three (
triliteral signs). The 24 uniliteral signs make up the hieroglyphic pseudo-alphabet. Hieroglyphic writing appears as an
abjad – it does not write out the vowels, in contrast, for example, to
cuneiform.
Thus, hieroglyphic writing representing a duck is read as
sȝ, because these are the consonants of the word indicating this animal. One could nevertheless use the sign of the duck without a link to the meaning in order to represent the
phonemes "s" and "ȝ" at the same time (independently vowels which could accompany these consonants) and in this way write words like this:
sȝ, "son" or, complementing other signs that could be detailed further on in the text,
sȝ, "keep, watch",
sȝṯ.w, "hard ground":
G38 – the character
sȝ;
G38-Z1s – the same character used only in order to signify, according to the context, "duck" or, with the appropriate determinative, "son", two words having the same consonants; the meaning of the little vertical stroke will be explained further on:
z:G38-A-A47-D54 – the character
sȝ in the vein of the word
sȝw, "keep, watch"
Hieroglyphs are written from right to left, from left to right, or from top to bottom, the usual direction being from right to left. The reader, in order to get the sense of the text, must consider the direction in which the asymmetrical hieroglyphs are turned. For example, when human figures and animals, easily spotted, are turned to the left, they must be read from left to right, and vice versa.
Words are not separated by blanks or by punctuation marks. However, certain characters appear (especially at the end of words) that sometimes make it possible to distinguish words. It is nevertheless evident that only a solid understanding of the language and of the syntax allows the reader to cut the text into words.
;Uniliteral signs
The script had a much larger number of biliterals and a number of triliterals – glyphs which represented sequences of two or three consonants. It would have been possible to write all Egyptian words in the manner of these signs, but the Egyptians never made the jump to that step and never simplified their complex writing into an alphabet.
[*]Each uniliteral glyph once had a unique reading, but several of these fell together as
Old Egyptian developed into
Middle Egyptian. For example, the folded-cloth glyph seems to have been originally an
/s/ and the door-bolt glyph a
/θ/ sound, but these both came to be pronounced as /s/ as the /θ/ sound was lost. A few uniliterals first appear in Middle Egyptian texts.
The traditional
transliteration system shown on the left of the chart below is over a century old and is the one most commonly seen in texts. It includes several symbols such as "ȝ" for sounds that were of unknown value at the time. Much progress has been made since, though there is still debate as to the details. For instance, it is now thought the "ȝ" may have been an
alveolar lateral approximant ("l") in Old Egyptian that was lost by Middle Egyptian. The consonants transcribed as
voiced (d, g, dj) may actually have been
ejective or, less likely,
pharyngealized like the Arabic
emphatic consonants. A good description can be found in Allen
. For other systems of transliteration, see
transliteration of ancient Egyptian.
Note that, like the
Arabic and
Hebrew scripts today, few vowels were written. Therefore in modern transcriptions an
e is added between consonants to aid in their pronunciation. For example,
nfr "good" is typically written
nefer. This does not reflect Egyptian vowels, which are obscure, but is merely a modern convention. Likewise, the
ȝ and
ʾ are commonly transliterated as
a, as in
Ra.
;Biliteral signs
Triliteral signs
;Phonetic complementsEgyptian writing is often redundant: in fact, it happens very frequently that a word might follow several characters writing the same sounds, in order to guide the reader. For example, the word
nfr, "beautiful, good, perfect", was written with a unique triliteral which was read
nfr;
nfrHowever, it is considerably more common to add to this triliteral the uniliterals for
f and
r. The word is thus written as
nfr+f+r but one reads it merely as
nfr. The two alphabetic characters are adding clarity to the spelling of the preceding triliteral hieroglyph.
Redundant characters accompanying biliteral or triliteral signs are called
phonetic complements. They are sometimes (rarely) placed in front of the sign, after the sign (as a general rule) or they even frame it, appearing both before and after. Ancient Egyptian scribes consistently avoided leaving large areas of blank space in their writing, and might add additional phonetic complements or sometimes even invert the order of signs if this would result in a more
aesthetically pleasing appearance (good scribes attended to the artistic (and even religious) aspects of the hieroglyphs, and would not simply view them as a communication tool). Various examples of the use of phonetic complements can be seen below:
S43-d-w –
mdw +d +w (the complementaries are placed after the sign) ' it reads
mdw, "tongue"
< x:p-xpr:r-i-A40 > –
ḫ +p +ḫpr +r +j (the complementaries frame the triliteral sign) ' it reads
ḫpr.j, "
Khepri".
Notably, phonetic complements were also used to allow the reader to differentiate between signs which are
homophones, or which don't always have a unique reading. For example, "the seat,"
Q1 – This can be read
st,
ws and
tm, according to the word in which it is found. The presence of phonetic complements—and of the suitable determinative—allows us to know which reading will follow.
st –
Q1-t:pr –
st, written
st+t ; the last character is the determinative of "the house" or that which takes us there, "seat, throne, place".
< Q1-t:H8 > –
st (written
st+t ; the last character is "the egg", determinative of the name of the goddess
Isis), "Isis",
ws –
< Q1-ir-A40 > wsjr (written
ws+
jr, with, as a phonetic complement, "the eye", which is read
jr, following the determinative of "god"), "
Osiris",
tm –
H-Q1-m:t-E17 tm.t (written
+tm+m+t, with the determinative of "the jackal"), a kind of wild animal,
H-Q1-t-G41 tm (written
+
tm+
t, with the determinative of the flying bird), "to disappear".
Finally, it sometimes happens that the pronunciation of words might be changed because of their connection to Ancient Egyptian: in this case, it is not rare for writing to adopt a compromise in notation, the two readings being indicated jointly. For example, the adjective
bnj, "sweet" became
bnr. In Middle Egyptian, one can write
b-n:r-i-M30 bnrj (written
b+n+r+i, with determinative) which is fully read as
bnr, the
j not having been saved except in order to keep a written connection with the ancient word (in the same fashion as the
English language words
through,
knife, or
victuals, which are no longer read the way they are written.)
Semantic reading
Besides a phonetic interpretation, characters can also be read for their meaning: in this instance
logograms are being spoken (or
ideograms) and
semagrams; the latter are also called
determinatives)
[Antonio Loprieno, Ancient Egyptian, A Linguistic Introduction, Cambridge University Press (1995), p. 13];LogogramsA hieroglyph used as a
logogram defines the object of which it is an image. Logograms are therefore the most frequently used common nouns; they are always accompanied by a mute vertical stroke indicating their status as a logogram (the usage of a vertical stroke is further explained below); in theory, all hieroglyphs would have the ability to be used as logograms. Logograms can be accompanied by phonetic complements. Here are some examples:
ra:Z1 rˁ, "sun"
pr:Z1 pr, "house"
sw-t:Z1 swt, "reed" - the
t is the phonetic complement.
Dw:Z1 ḏw, "mountain", etc
In some cases, the semantic connection is indirect (
metonymic or
metaphoric):
nTr-Z1 nṯr, "god" ; the character in fact represents a temple flag (standard)
G53-Z1 bȝ, "
bâ" (soul) ; the character is the traditional representation of a "bâ", a bird with a human head
G27-Z1 dšr, "flamingo"; the corresponding phonogram means "red", and the bird is associated by
metonymy with this colour.
;Determinatives
Determinatives or
semagrams are placed at the end of the word. These mute characters serve to clarify the
semantic domain of the word, its
lexical field, in order to sharpen its meaning:
homographic characters being very common (even more frequently written than the consonants by themselves), the recourse to determinatives is crucial. If a similar procedure existed in English, homographic words would be followed by an index which would not be read but which would fine-tune the meaning: "retort
chemistry" and "retort [rhetoric]" would thus be distinguished.
A number of determinatives exist: divinities, humans, parts of the human body, animals, plants, etc. Certain determinatives possess a
literal meaning and a
figurative meaning. For example, a roll of papyrus,
Y1 is used to define "books," but also abstract ideas. The determinative of the
plural is a shortcut to signal three occurrences of the word, that is to say, its plural (since the Egyptian language was familiar with a dual, sometimes indicated by two strokes). This special character is explained below.
Here are several examples of the use of determinatives borrowed from the book,
Je lis les hiéroglyphes ("I am reading hieroglyphics") by Jean Capart, which illustrate their importance:
nfr-w-A17-Z3 nfrw (
w and the three strokes are the marks of the plural: [literally] "the beautiful young people", that is to say, the young military recruits. The word has as a determinative:
A17 The determinative is one of babies and children.
nfr-f:r:t-B1 nfr.t (
.t is here the suffix which forms the feminine): "the nubile young woman", with
B1 as the determinative of the woman;
nfr-nfr-nfr-pr nfrw (the tripling of the character serving to express the plural,
flexional ending
w) : "foundations (of a house)", with the house as a determinative,
pr;
nfr-f:r-S28 nfr : "clothing," where
S28 is the determinative for lengths of cloth;
nfr-W22:Z2 nfr : "wine" or "beer,"
W22 with a jug as the determinative.
All these words have a meliorative connotation: "good, beautiful, perfect." A recent dictionary, the
Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian by Raymond A. Faulkner, gives some twenty words which are read
nfr or which are formed from this word—proof of the extraordinary richness of the Egyptian language.
;Additional signs
;Replacement stroke |
A character is sometimes judged to be offensive: "deliver (birth)." |
Offensive characters, funerals, taboos, rare or complex, can be replaced by a slanted stroke:* the verb
F31-s-B3ms(j), "deliver" (as in a birth), may be written
F31-s-Z5 the determinative of the woman giving birth (the last character) being sometimes deemed offensive;
* the name
m-t-A14m(w)t, "Death, to die", will also be written
m-t-Z5to avoid the determinative of "the enemy on the ground" (last character), a funerary sign.
;;CartoucheRarely, the names of gods are placed within a
cartouche; the two last names of the sitting king are always placed within a cartouche:
< N5:Z1-i-Y5:n-A40 >jmn-rˁ, "Amon-Rê " ;
< q:E23-i-V4-p:d:r-A-t:H8 >qrwjwȝpdrȝ.t, "Cleopatra."
;Filling strokeA filling stroke is used in order to end a quad which would be incomplete without it.
;;Signs joined togetherSome signs are the contraction of several others. These signs have, however, a function and existence of their own: for example, a forearm where the hand holds a scepter is used as a determinative for words meaning "to direct, to drive" and their derivatives.
;;DoublingThe doubling of a sign indicates its dual; the tripling of a sign indicates its plural.
;;Grammatical signs
* The vertical stroke, indicating the sign is an ideogram;
* The two strokes of the "dual" and the three strokes of the "plural";
* The direct notation of flexional endings, for example:
W ;;SpellingThe idea of
orthography—"correct" spelling—in Egyptian hieroglyphics doesn't pose itself in the same terms as it does in modern languages. In fact, one or several variants exist for almost every word. It can be wondered whether the Ancient Egyptians had any concept of correct spelling. One finds:
* Redundancies;
* Omission of
graphemes, which are ignored whether they are intentional or not;
* Substitutions of one grapheme for another, such that it is impossible to distinguish a "mistake" from an "alternate spelling";
* Errors of omission in the drawing of signs, much more problematic when the writing is cursive: hieratic writing, but especially demotic, where the schematization of the signs is extreme.
Simple examples
The glyphs in this
cartouche are transliterated as:
though
ii is considered a single letter and transliterated
i or
y.
Another way in which hieroglyphs work is illustrated by the two Egyptian words pronounced
pr (usually vocalised as
per). One word is 'house', and its hieroglyphic representation is straightforward:
pr:Z1Here the 'house' hieroglyph works as an
logogram: it represents the word with a single sign. The vertical stroke below the hieroglyph is a common way of indicating that a glyph is working as a logogram.
Another word
pr is the verb 'to go out, leave'. When this word is written, the 'house' hieroglyph is used as a phonetic symbol:
pr:r-D54Here the 'house' glyph stands for the consonants
pr. The 'mouth' glyph below it is a
phonetic complement: it is read as
r, reinforcing the phonetic reading of
pr. The third hieroglyph is a
determinative: it is an
ideogram for verbs of motion that gives the reader an idea of the meaning of the word.
Hieroglyph articles
*Gardiner's Sign List
*List of hieroglyphs
*Hieratic
*Demotic
*Coptic alphabet
*Egyptian numerals
*Transliteration of ancient EgyptianEgyptian language
*Egyptian language
*Egyptian languages
*Coptic language;Other scripts
*
Anatolian hieroglyphs
*
Cretan hieroglyphs*
Byblos syllabary*
Middle Bronze Age alphabets*
Maya hieroglyphs
Other
*Ankh
*Thoth
*Egyptology
*Wikimedia Help:WikiHiero syntax*
*
Glyphs and Grammars Resources for those interested in learning hieroglyphs, compiled by Aayko Eyma.*
Hieroglyphs! Annotated directory of popular and scholarly resources.*
Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary by
Jim Loy*
Comprehensive Dictionary of Cartouches for all Egyptian Pharaohs*
GreatScott.com's Hieroglyphs Commercial (free intro)*
Glyphdoctors: Study Egyptology Online! Online courses in hieroglyphs and free discussion forums
