Egyptian hieroglyphs

Formal writing system used by ancient Egyptians

"Hieroglyph" redirects here. For other uses, see Hieroglyph (disambiguation).

Egyptian hieroglyphs
KV17), 13th century BC
Script type	Logography usable as an Unicode range	U+13000–U+1342F Hieroglyphs U+13430–U+1343F Controls
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

Egyptian hieroglyphs (

logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters.^[7][8] Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet.^[9] Through the Phoenician alphabet's major child systems (the Greek and Aramaic scripts), the Egyptian hieroglyphic script is ancestral to the majority of scripts in modern use, most prominently the Latin and Cyrillic scripts (through Greek) and the Arabic script, and possibly the Brahmic family of scripts (through Aramaic, Phoenician, and Greek).^{[citation needed}

]

Colorful Hieroglyphs in the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut from the New Kingdom

.

The use of hieroglyphic writing arose from

Roman period, extending into the 4th century AD.^[4]

With the

final closing of pagan temples in the 5th century, knowledge of hieroglyphic writing was lost. Although attempts were made, the script remained undeciphered throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The decipherment of hieroglyphic writing was finally accomplished in the 1820s by Jean-François Champollion, with the help of the Rosetta Stone.^[10]

The number of words contained in all Ancient Egyptian (i.e. hieroglyphic and hieratic) texts known today is approximately 5 million, and tends towards 10 million if counting duplicates (such as the Book of the Dead and the Coffin Texts) separately. The most complete compendium of Ancient Egyptian, Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache, contains 1.5–1.7 million words.^[11][12]

Etymology

The word hieroglyph comes from the Greek adjective ἱερογλυφικός (hieroglyphikos),^[13] a compound of ἱερός (hierós 'sacred')^[14] and γλύφω (glýphō '(Ι) carve, engrave'; see glyph)^[15] meaning sacred carving.

The glyphs themselves, since the

Ptolemaic period, were called τὰ ἱερογλυφικὰ [γράμματα] (tà hieroglyphikà [grámmata]) "the sacred engraved letters", the Greek counterpart to the Egyptian expression of mdw.w-nṯr "god's words".^[16] Greek ἱερόγλυφος meant "a carver of hieroglyphs".^[17]

In English, hieroglyph as a noun is recorded from 1590, originally short for nominalized hieroglyphic (1580s, with a plural hieroglyphics), from adjectival use (hieroglyphic character).[18]^[19]

Sahidic Coptic call the hieroglyphs "writings of the magicians, soothsayers" (Coptic: ϩⲉⲛⲥϩⲁⲓ̈ ⲛ̄ⲥⲁϩ ⲡⲣⲁⲛ︦ϣ︦).^[20]

History and evolution

Origin

See also: History of writing and List of Egyptian hieroglyphs

Naqada II

pottery (3500–3200 BCE)

Designs on some of the labels or tokens from Abydos, carbon-dated to circa 3400–3200 BC and among the earliest form of writing in Egypt.^[22][23] They are similar to contemporary tags from Uruk, Mesopotamia.^[24]

Since the 1990s, the above-mentioned discoveries of glyphs at Abydos, dated to between 3400 and 3200 BCE, have shed doubt on the classical notion that the Mesopotamian symbol system predates the Egyptian one. However, Egyptian writing appeared suddenly at that time, while Mesopotamia had a long evolutionary history of the usage of signs—for agricultural and accounting purposes—in tokens dating as early back to circa 8000 BC.^[23]

Egyptian scholar Gamal Mokhtar argued that the inventory of hieroglyphic symbols derived from "fauna and flora used in the signs [which] are essentially African" and in "regards to writing, we have seen that a purely Nilotic, hence African origin not only is not excluded, but probably reflects the reality" although he acknowledged the geographical location of Egypt made it a receptacle for many influences.

• 

  Labels with early inscriptions from the tomb of Menes (3200–3000 BCE)

• 

  Ivory plaque of Menes (3200–3000 BCE)

• 

  Ivory plaque of Menes (drawing)

• 

  The oldest known full sentence written in mature hieroglyphs. Seal impression of

  Second Dynasty

  , c. 28–27th century BCE)

Mature writing system

Hieroglyphs on stela in Louvre

, circa 1321 BCE

Artist's scaled drawing of hieroglyphs meaning "life, stability, and dominion." The grid lines allowed the artist to draw the hieroglyphs at whatever scale was needed. ca. 1479–1458 B.C.^[32]

Hieroglyphs continued to be used under Persian rule (intermittent in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE), and after Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt, during the ensuing Ptolemaic 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 believed that hieroglyphs may have functioned as a way to distinguish 'true Egyptians' from some of 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.^{[citation needed]} 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.^[4]

By the 4th century AD, few Egyptians were capable of reading hieroglyphs, and the "myth of allegorical hieroglyphs" was ascendant.

The Hieroglyphica of Horapollo (c. 5th century) appears to retain some genuine knowledge about the writing system. It offers an explanation of close to 200 signs. Some are identified correctly, such as the "goose" hieroglyph (zꜣ) representing the word for "son".^[4]

A half-dozen Demotic glyphs are still in use, added to the Greek alphabet when writing

Decipherment

Ibn Wahshiyya's attempt at a translation of a hieroglyphic text

Knowledge of the hieroglyphs had been lost completely in the medieval period. Early attempts at decipherment are due to Dhul-Nun al-Misri and Ibn Wahshiyya (9th and 10th century, respectively).^[34]

All medieval and early modern attempts were hampered by the fundamental assumption that hieroglyphs recorded ideas and not the sounds of the language. As no bilingual texts were available, any such symbolic 'translation' could be proposed without the possibility of verification.^[35] It was not until Athanasius Kircher in the mid 17th century that scholars began to think the hieroglyphs might also represent sounds. Kircher was familiar with Coptic, and thought that it might be the key to deciphering the hieroglyphs, but was held back by a belief in the mystical nature of the symbols.^[4]

The Rosetta Stone in the British Museum

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.[36]

Illustration from Tabula Aegyptiaca hieroglyphicis exornata published in Acta Eruditorum

, 1714

Hieroglyphs typical of the Graeco-Roman period

Most non-determinative hieroglyphic signs are phonograms, whose meaning is determined by pronunciation, independent of visual characteristics. This follows the rebus principle where, for example, the picture of an eye could stand not only for the English word eye, but also for its phonetic equivalent, the first person pronoun I.

Phonograms formed with one consonant are called

Twenty-four uniliteral signs make up the so-called hieroglyphic alphabet. Egyptian hieroglyphic writing does not normally indicate vowels, unlike cuneiform, and for that reason has been labelled by some as an abjad, i.e., an alphabet without vowels.

Thus, hieroglyphic writing representing a

It is also possible to use the hieroglyph of the pintail duck without a link to its meaning in order to represent the two phonemes s and ꜣ, independently of any vowels that could accompany these consonants, and in this way write the word: sꜣ, "son"; or when complemented by other signs detailed below^{[clarification needed]} sꜣ, "keep, watch"; and sꜣṯ.w, "hard ground". For example:

 – the characters sꜣ;

 – the same character used only in order to signify, according to the context, "pintail duck" or, with the appropriate determinative, "son", two words having the same or similar consonants; the meaning of the little vertical stroke will be explained further on under Logograms:

 – the character sꜣ as used in the word sꜣw, "keep, watch"^{[clarification needed]}

As in the Arabic script, not all vowels were written in Egyptian hieroglyphs; it is debatable whether vowels were written at all. Possibly, as with Arabic, the semivowels /w/ and /j/ (as in English W and Y) could double as the vowels /u/ and /i/. 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 ꜣ and ꜥ are commonly transliterated as a, as in Ra (rꜥ).

Hieroglyphs are inscribed in rows of pictures arranged in horizontal lines or vertical columns.^[37] Both hieroglyph lines as well as signs contained in the lines are read with upper content having precedence over content below.^[37] The lines or columns, and the individual inscriptions within them, read from left to right in rare instances only and for particular reasons at that; ordinarily however, they read from right to left–the Egyptians' preferred direction of writing (although, for convenience, modern texts are often normalized into left-to-right order).^[37] The direction toward which asymmetrical hieroglyphs face indicate their proper reading order. For example, when human and animal hieroglyphs face or look toward the left, they almost always must be read from left to right, and vice versa.

As in many ancient writing systems, words are not separated by blanks or punctuation marks. However, certain hieroglyphs appear particularly common only at the end of words, making it possible to readily distinguish words.

Uniliteral signs