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Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs ( ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined Ideogram, , syllabic and elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters.In total, there were about 1,000 graphemes in use during the Old Kingdom period; this number decreased to 750–850 during the Middle Kingdom, but rose instead to around 5,000 signs during the Ptolemaic period. Antonio Loprieno, Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), p. 12.The standard inventory of characters used in Egyptology is Gardiner's sign list (1928–1953). A.H. Gardiner (1928), Catalogue of the Egyptian hieroglyphic printing type, from matrices owned and controlled by Dr. Alan Gardiner, "Additions to the new hieroglyphic fount (1928)", in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 15 (1929), p. 95; "Additions to the new hieroglyphic fount (1931)", in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 17 (1931), pp. 245–247; A.H. Gardiner, "Supplement to the catalogue of the Egyptian hieroglyphic printing type, showing acquisitions to December 1953" (1953). Unicode Egyptian Hieroglyphs as of version 5.2 (2009) assigned 1,070 Unicode characters. 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.Howard, Michael C. (2012). Transnationalism in Ancient and Medieval Societies. p. 23. Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system. Moreover, owing in large part to the Greek alphabet and Aramaic alphabet scripts that descended from Phoenician, the majority of the world's living writing systems are descendants of Egyptian hieroglyphs—most prominently the Latin script and through Greek, and the Arabic script and Brahmic scripts through Aramaic.
The use of hieroglyphic writing arose from proto-writing symbol systems in the Early Bronze Age (Naqada III), with the first decipherable sentence written in the Egyptian language dating to the 28th century BC (Second Dynasty). Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs developed into a mature writing system used for monumental inscription in the classical language of the Middle Kingdom period; during this period, the system used about 900 distinct signs. The use of this writing system continued through the New Kingdom and Late Period, and on into the Persian and Ptolemaic periods. Late survivals of hieroglyphic use are found well into the Roman period, extending into the 4th century AD.
During the 5th century, the permanent closing of pagan temples across Roman Egypt ultimately resulted in the ability to read and write hieroglyphs being forgotten. Despite attempts at decipherment, the nature of the script remained unknown 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.
The entire Ancient Egyptian Text corpus, including both hieroglyphic and hieratic texts, is approximately 5 million words in length; if counting duplicates (such as the Book of the Dead and the Coffin Texts) as separate, this figure is closer to 10 million. The most complete compendium of Ancient Egyptian, the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache, contains 1.5–1.7 million words.Peust, Carsten, " Über ägyptische Lexikographie. 1: Zum Ptolemaic Lexikon von Penelope Wilson; 2: Versuch eines quantitativen Vergleichs der Textkorpora antiker Sprachen", in Lingua Aegyptia 7, 2000: p. 246: "Nach einer von W. F. Reineke in S. Grunert & L Hafemann (Hrsgg.), Textcorpus und Wörterbuch (Problemeder Ägyptologie 14), Leiden 1999, S.xiii veröffentlichten Schätzung W. Schenkels beträgt die Zahl der in allen heute bekannten ägyptischen (d.h. hieroglyphischen und hieratischen) Texten enthaltenen Wortformen annähernd 5 Millio nen und tendiert, wenn man die Fälle von Mehrfachüberlieferung u.a. des Toten buchs und der Sargtexte separat zählt, gegen 10 Millionen; das Berliner Zettelarchiv des Wörterbuchs der ägyptischen Sprache von A. Erman & H. Grapow (Wb), das sei nerzeit Vollständigkeit anstrebte, umfasst "nur" 1,7 Millionen (nach anderen Angaben: 1,5 Millionen) Zettel."
From the Ptolemaic Egypt (3rd–1st centuries BC), the glyphs themselves were called (τὰ ἱερογλυφικὰ γράμματα) 'the sacred engraved letters', the Greek counterpart to the Egyptian term 'words of gods'.Antonio Loprieno, Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), p. 11. Greek meant 'a carver of hieroglyphs'..
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).
Proto-writing systems developed in the second half of the 4th millennium BC, such as the clay labels of a Predynastic ruler called "Scorpion I" (Naqada IIIA period, ) recovered at Abydos (modern Umm el-Qa'ab) in 1998 or the Narmer Palette ().
The first full sentence written in mature hieroglyphs so far discovered was found on a seal impression in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen at Umm el-Qa'ab, which dates from the Second Dynasty (28th or 27th century BC). Around 800 hieroglyphs are known to date back to the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom eras. By the Greco-Roman period, there were more than 5,000.
Scholars have long debated whether hieroglyphs were developed independently of any other script, or derived from cuneiform, the earliest writing system in human history that developed to write Sumerian in southern Mesopotamia during the late 4th millennium BC. Scholars like Geoffrey Sampson argued that Egyptian hieroglyphs "came into existence a little after Sumerian script, and, probably, were invented under the influence of the latter", and that it is "probable that the general idea of expressing words of a language in writing was brought to Egypt from Sumerian Mesopotamia".Iorwerth Eiddon Stephen Edwards, et al., The Cambridge Ancient History (3d ed. 1970) pp. 43–44. Further, Egyptian writing appeared suddenly, while Mesopotamia had a long evolutionary history, with antecedent signs use in tokens for agricultural and accounting purposes as early as .
While there are many instances of early Egypt–Mesopotamia relations, the lack of direct evidence for the transfer of writing means that "no definitive determination has been made as to the origin of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt". Since the 1990s, the above-mentioned discoveries of glyphs at Abydos, dated between 3400 and 3200 BC, have shed further doubt on the classical notion that the Mesopotamian symbol system predates the Egyptian one. A date of for the earliest Abydos glyphs challenges the hypothesis of diffusion from Mesopotamia to Egypt, pointing to an independent development of writing in Egypt."The seal impressions, from various tombs, date even further back, to 3400 B.C. These dates challenge the commonly held belief that early logographs, pictographic symbols representing a specific place, object, or quantity, first evolved into more complex phonetic symbols in Mesopotamia."
Rosalie David has argued that the debate is moot since "If Egypt did adopt the idea of writing from elsewhere, it was presumably only the concept which was taken over, since the forms of the hieroglyphs are entirely Egyptian in origin and reflect the distinctive flora, fauna and images of Egypt's own landscape." Egyptian scholar Gamal Mokhtar argued further 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."
By the 4th century AD, 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 391 by the Roman Emperor Theodosius I; the last known inscription is from Philae, known as the Graffito of Esmet-Akhom, from 394.The latest presently known hieroglyphic inscription date: Birthday of Osiris, year 110 of, dated to August 24, 394
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 () representing the word for 'son'.
A half-dozen Demotic glyphs are still in use, added to the Greek alphabet when writing Coptic alphabet.
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. 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.
The breakthrough in decipherment came only with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon's troops in 1799 (during Napoleon's Egyptian invasion).
As the stone presented a hieroglyphic and a demotic version of the same text in parallel with a Greek translation, plenty of material for falsifiable studies in translation was suddenly available. In the early 19th century, 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. In his Lettre à M. Dacier (1822), he wrote:
Phonograms formed with one consonant are called uniliteral signs; with two consonants, biliteral signs; with three, triliteral signs.
Twenty-four uniliteral signs make up the alphabetic elements. 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 northern pintail is read in Egyptian as , derived from the main consonants of the Egyptian word for this duck: 's', 'ꜣ' and 't'. (Note that ꜣ or , two half-rings opening to the left, sometimes replaced by the digit '3', is the Egyptian Egyptian alef.)
It is also possible to use the hieroglyph of the pintail duck without a link to its meaning in order to represent the two s and ꜣ, independently of any vowels that could accompany these consonants, and in this way write the word: 'son', or when complemented by other signs detailed below 'keep', 'watch'; and 'hard ground'. For example:
As in the Arabic alphabet script, not all vowels were written in Egyptian hieroglyphs; it is debatable whether vowels were written at all. Possibly, as with Arabic, the semivowels and (as in English W and Y) could double as the vowels and . In modern transcriptions, an e is added between consonants to aid in their pronunciation. For example, '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.Sir Alan H. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar, Third Edition Revised, Griffith Institute (2005), p. 25. Both hieroglyph lines as well as signs contained in the lines are read with upper content having precedence over content below. 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). 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.
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 (𓋴) seems to have originally been an /s/ and the door-bolt glyph 𓊃) a /θ/ sound, but these both came to be pronounced , as the sound was lost. A few uniliterals first appear in Middle Egyptian texts.
Besides the uniliteral glyphs, there are also the biliteral and triliteral signs, to represent a specific sequence of two or three consonants, consonants and vowels, and a few as vowel combinations only, in the language.
However, it is considerably more common to add to that triliteral, the uniliterals for f and r. The word can thus be written as nfr+f+r, but one still reads it as merely 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 (or complementaries). They can be placed in front of the sign (rarely), after the sign (as a general rule), or even framing 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:
Notably, phonetic complements were also used to allow the reader to differentiate between signs that are homophones, or which do not always have a unique reading. For example, the symbol of "the seat" (or chair):
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:
which is fully read as bnr, the j not being pronounced but retained 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 pronounced the way they are written.)
In some cases, the semantic connection is indirect (metonymic or ):
Here are several examples of the use of determinatives borrowed from the book, Je lis les hiéroglyphes ("I am reading hieroglyphs") by Jean Capart, which illustrate their importance:
All these words have a meliorative connotation: "good, beautiful, perfect". The Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian by Raymond A. Faulkner, gives some twenty words that are read nfr or which are formed from this word.
However, many of these apparent spelling errors constitute an issue of chronology. Spelling and standards varied over time, so the writing of a word during the Old Kingdom might be considerably different during the New Kingdom. Furthermore, the Egyptians were perfectly content to include older orthography ("historical spelling") alongside newer practices, as though it were acceptable in English to use archaic spellings in modern texts. Most often, ancient "spelling errors" are simply misinterpretations of context. Today, hieroglyphists use numerous cataloguing systems (notably the Manuel de Codage and Gardiner's Sign List) to clarify the presence of determinatives, ideograms, and other ambiguous signs in transliteration.
though ii is considered a single letter and transliterated 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:
Another word pr is the verb 'to go out, leave'. When this word is written, the 'house' hieroglyph is used as a phonetic symbol:
, four fonts, Aegyptus, NewGardiner, Noto fonts Sans Egyptian Hieroglyphs and JSeshFont support this range. Another font, Segoe UI Historic, comes bundled with Windows 10 and also contains glyphs for the Egyptian Hieroglyphs block. Segoe UI Historic excludes three glyphs depicting phallus (Gardiner's D52, D52A D53, Unicode code points U+130B8–U+130BA).
The Egyptian Hieroglyphs Extended-A Unicode block is U+13460-U+143FF. It was added to the Unicode Standard in September 2024 with the release of version 16.0:
The Egyptian Hieroglyph Format Controls Unicode block is U+13430-U+1345F. It was added to the Unicode Standard in March 2019 with the release of version 12.0:
(1990). 9780852550922, J. Currey. ISBN 9780852550922
Mature writing system
Hieroglyphs consist of three kinds of glyphs: phonetic glyphs, including single-consonant characters that function like an alphabet; , representing ; and , which narrow down the semantics of logographic or phonetic words.
Late period
As writing developed and became more widespread among the Egyptian people, simplified glyph forms developed, resulting in the hieratic (priestly) and Demotic Egyptian (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 three parallel scriptshieroglyphs, demotic, and the Greek alphabet.
Late survival
Hieroglyphs continued to be used intermittently under Persian rule in the 6th and 5th centuries C, as well as during the ensuing Ptolemaic and Ancient Rome periods that followed after Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt. 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. 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.
Decipherment
Knowledge of the hieroglyphs had been lost completely in the medieval period.
Early attempts at decipherment were made by some such as Dhul-Nun al-Misri and Ibn Wahshiyya (9th and 10th century, respectively).
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.Jean-François Champollion, Letter to M. Dacier, September 27, 1822
Writing system
Visually, hieroglyphs are all more or less figurative: they represent real or abstract 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 (Phonetics reading), as a logogram, or as an ideogram (semagram; "determinative") (Semantics reading). The determinative was not read as a phonetic constituent, but facilitated understanding by differentiating the word from its homophones.
Phonetic reading
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.
Uniliteral signs
The Egyptian hieroglyphic script contained 24 uniliterals (symbols that stood for single consonants, much like letters in English). It would have been possible to write all Egyptian words in the manner of these signs, but the Egyptians never did so and never simplified their complex writing into a true alphabet.
Phonetic complements
Egyptian writing is often redundant: in fact, it happens very frequently that a word is followed by 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 that was read as nfr:
Semantic reading
Besides a phonetic interpretation, characters can also be read for their meaning: in this instance, are being spoken (or ) and semagrams (the latter are also called determinatives).Antonio Loprieno, Ancient Egyptian, A Linguistic Introduction, Cambridge University Press (1995), p. 13
Logograms
A 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:
Determinatives
or semagrams (semantic symbols specifying meaning) are placed at the end of a word. These mute characters serve to clarify what the word is about, as homophone glyphs are common. If a similar procedure existed in English, words with the same spelling would be followed by an indicator that 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 and a figurative meaning. For example, a roll of papyrus,
Additional signs
Cartouche
Rarely, the names of gods are placed within a cartouche; the two last names of the sitting king are always placed within a cartouche:
Filling stroke
A filling stroke is a character indicating the end of a quadrat that would otherwise be incomplete.
Signs joined
Some 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.
Doubling
The doubling of a sign indicates its dual; the indicates its plural.
Grammatical signs
Spelling
Standard orthography—"correct" spelling—in Egyptian is much looser than in modern languages. In fact, one or several variants exist for almost every word. One finds:
Simple examples
The glyphs in this cartouche are transliterated as:
p
t"ua" l
my (ii) s
Ptolmys
Encoding and font support
Egyptian hieroglyphs were added to the Unicode Standard in October 2009 with the release of version 5.2 which introduced the Egyptian Hieroglyphs block (U+13000–U+1342F).
See also
Notes and references
Further reading
External links
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