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Egyptian hieroglyphs
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Egyptian hieroglyphsType logography usable as an abjad
Spoken languages Egyptian language
Time period 3200 BC – AD 400
Parent systems (Proto-writing)
→ Egyptian hieroglyphs
Child systems Hieratic, Demotic, Meroitic, Middle Bronze Age alphabets
ISO 15924 Egyp
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.
Egyptian hieroglyphs (pronounced /ˈhaɪərəʊɡlɪf/; from Greek ἱερογλύφος "sacred carving", also hieroglyphic = τὰ ἱερογλυφικά [γράμματα]) was a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that contained a combination of logographic and alphabetic elements. Egyptians used cursive hieroglyphs for religious literature on papyrus and wood. Less formal variations of the script, called hieratic and demotic, are technically not hieroglyphs.
Etymology
The word hieroglyph comes from the Greek adjective ἱερογλυφικά (hieroglyphiká), a compound of ἱερός (hierós 'sacred') and γλύφω (glýphō 'to engrave'; see glyph). The glyphs themselves were called τὰ ἱερογλυφικά γράμματα (tà hieroglyphiká grámmata, 'the sacred engraved letters'). The word hieroglyph has become a noun in English, standing for an individual hieroglyphic character. While "hieroglyphics" is commonly used, it is discouraged by Egyptologists.
History and evolution
Hieroglyphs emerged from the preliterate artistic traditions of Egypt. For example, symbols on Gerzean pottery from circa 4000 BC resemble hieroglyphic writing. 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 archaeological team under Günter 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.[1][2] 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, which dates from the Second Dynasty. In the era of the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom, about 800 hieroglyphs existed. By the Greco-Roman period, they numbered more than 5,000.[3]
Hieroglyphs consist of three kinds of glyphs: phonetic glyphs, including single-consonant characters that functioned like an alphabet; logographs, representing morphemes; and determinatives, which narrowed down the meaning of a logographic or phonetic words.
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 alongside 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 4th 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 Philae, known as the The Graffito of Esmet-Akhom, from AD 396.[4]
Decipherment of hieroglyphic writing
In the 5th century the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo appeared, a spurious explanation of almost 200 glyphs. Authoritative yet largely false, the work was a lasting impediment to deciphering Egyptian writing. 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.
The first known attempts at deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs were made by Arab historians in medieval Egypt during the 9th and 10th centuries. By then, hieroglyphs had long been forgotten in Egypt, and were replaced by the Coptic and Arabic alphabets. Dhul-Nun al-Misri and Ibn Wahshiyya were the first historians to be able to at least partly decipher what was written in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs,[5] by relating them to the contemporary Coptic language used by Coptic priests in their time.[6]
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 real breakthrough in decipherment began with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon's troops in 1799 (during Napoleon's Egyptian invasion). In the early 1800s scholars such as Silvestre de Sacy, Johan David Åkerblad and Thomas Young studied the inscriptions on the stone, and were able to make some headway. Finally, Jean-François Champollion made the complete decipherment by the 1820s:
“ It is a complex system, writing figurative, symbolic, and phonetic all at once, in the same text, the same phrase, I would almost say in the same word.[7] ”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.
Writing system
Visually hieroglyphs are all more or less figurative: they represent real or illusional elements, sometimes stylized and simplified, but all generally perfectly recognizable in form. However, the same sign can, according to context, be interpreted in diverse ways: as a phonogram (phonetic reading), as a logogram, or as an ideogram (semagram; "determinative") (semantic reading). The determinative was not read as a phonetic constituent, but facilitated understanding by differentiating the word from its homophones.
Phonetic reading
Most hieroglyphic signs are phonetic in nature, meaning the sign is read independent of its visual characteristics (according to the rebus principle where, for example, the picture of an eye could stand for the English words eye and I [the first person pronoun]). Phonograms are formed, whether with one consonant (signs called mono- or uniliteral) or by two consonants (biliteral signs) or by three (triliteral signs). The twenty-four uniliteral signs make up the so-called hieroglyphic alphabet. Since Egyptian hieroglyphic writing does not normally indicate vowels, in contrast, for example, to cuneiform, it could perhaps be argued that it is a variety of abjad.
Thus, hieroglyphic writing representing a duck is read in Egyptian as sȝ, the consonants of the word for this animal. Nevertheless, it is also possible to use the hieroglyph of the duck without a link to the meaning in order to represent the phonemes sȝ, independent of any vowels which could accompany these consonants, and in this way write the words: sȝ, "son," or when complemented by other signs detailed further in the text, sȝ, "keep, watch"; and sȝṯ.w, "hard ground". For example: