Egyptian hieroglyphs

The story

Little labels in a very ancient tomb

In the desert near Abydos, in Upper Egypt, there is a cemetery that the Arabs call Umm el-Qa'ab, “the mother of broken pots”, because the ground is covered with sherds left by very ancient offerings. The first kings of Egypt were buried here. In the 1980s the German archaeologist Günter Dreyer, of the German Archaeological Institute, dug a mud-brick tomb with twelve rooms, which scholars call U-j. It had been robbed already in ancient times, but among the rubble about 190 small labels of bone and ivory were left, as big as a postage stamp, with a little hole for string. On each one a few signs were carved. And similar signs were painted or carved on a great many jars.

Those signs, dated to around 3300 BC, are among the oldest hieroglyphs known. The labels probably showed where goods came from or whose they were: a sign for a place, a sign for a quantity, a sign for a name. In Egypt, too, as in Mesopotamia, writing was born in a setting of administration and accounts, near the storehouses of a powerful man. The owner of the tomb, perhaps a king named Scorpion (a name read from a scorpion-shaped sign), was therefore a man who needed to keep his wealth in order.

How hieroglyphs work

The word “hieroglyph” comes from Greek and means “sacred carved writing”: the Greeks used it when they saw those pictures on temple walls. The Egyptians themselves called them “the words of the god”. Each sign is a little picture: a bird, a hand, a wave, an eye. But a sign can be used in three different ways.

The first is to be a picture that shows the very thing it portrays: a picture of a sun means “sun”. The second is to stand for a sound: a picture of a mouth stands for the letter r. The third is to be a “determinative”, that is, a silent sign placed at the end of a word to say what kind of thing is being talked about: a figure of a seated man for jobs, two legs for words of movement, a papyrus scroll for abstract ideas. They do a bit the same job as the pictures that go with a difficult word.

The signs used in texts of the classical period numbered a few hundred; in the late period they grew to more than five thousand. They could be written from right to left, from left to right or from top to bottom: to tell the direction you only have to look at which way the birds and people are facing, because the faces are turned towards the start of the line.

Three scripts for three uses

Hieroglyphs were a beautiful script, suited to temples, tombs and monuments. To write quickly on papyrus with a reed brush, scribes used hieratic writing, a cursive, simplified version. From the 7th century BC demotic spread, faster still, used for documents, letters and contracts. Scribes were greatly respected: their trade took years of schooling and gave access to the pharaoh's offices. A famous Egyptian saying holds that the scribe's trade is better than any other.

The last hieroglyph and the silence

For more than three thousand years the Egyptians wrote in hieroglyphs. The last dated inscription we know is in the temple of Philae, in the south, and bears the date 24 August AD 394. Then the pagan temples were closed, the language changed and the knowledge of the sacred script was lost. For more than fourteen hundred years nobody could read those signs. Some scholars, such as the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher in the 17th century, believed that every picture was a mysterious symbol, and their explanations were pure fantasy.

The key from Rosetta

The turning point came in 1799, when French soldiers of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, while strengthening a fort near Rashid (Rosetta), found a large slab of black stone. It carried the same decree, from 196 BC, written in three ways: in hieroglyphs, in demotic and in Greek. Since Greek could be read, the stone could provide the key. It was taken to London, where it still is, in the British Museum.

The work of decipherment was long. The Englishman Thomas Young understood that some signs enclosed in an oval, the cartouche, wrote the names of kings. But it was the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion, a genius with languages who knew Coptic (the last form of the Egyptian language), who found the complete principle. On 27 September 1822 he presented to the Academy in Paris his “Letter to Monsieur Dacier”, in which he showed that hieroglyphs were a script that combined signs for sound and signs for meaning. It is said that, once he understood, he fainted with excitement. After him, for the first time in more than fourteen hundred years, it was possible to read the Egyptians in their own words.

A doubt still open

Scholars still do not know whether the Egyptians invented writing on their own or whether the idea came from Mesopotamia, where cuneiform writing is a little older. The evidence is thin. For some, the Egyptian signs are too different to have been copied; others think that the idea of writing arrived, but not the signs. The discoveries at Abydos have made the race much closer than was once believed.