Visible Language (Part II)

Rock drawings are the oldest precursor to Egyptian writing, tracing back to early habitation of the Nile Valley. The most salient examples date to the Naqada I period (3750–3500 BC). Some popular rock drawing motifs include boats, animals, and humanoid figures with feathers.

The designs on pottery from the Naqada II period (3500–3320 BC), like this clay jar, share many similarities with rock drawings. The images on the rocks and vessels seem to evoke greater narrative contexts (which are unclear to the modern viewer).

While the images from rock drawings and pottery are similar to later hieroglyphs, they do not represent known words and cannot be considered writing. In order to constitute writing as defined in this exhibit, signs must be conventionalized and indexed to language. Otherwise, a picture of a boat could convey a generic message like "sailing" or "voyage" rather than a specific word or idea such as "boat."

Tomb U-j is best known for three distinctive forms of administrative record keeping: ink-inscribed vessels, sealings, and incised tags. For example, this tag has six incised marks, perhaps denoting the quantity of linen in a cedar box in Tomb U-j. While the very brief written evidence from Tomb U-j—especially on the tags—probably denotes quantities of goods and localities in Egypt (and beyond), in general, texts on monuments later than U-j are more complex captions that relate to larger images and scenes.

The Tomb U-j materials have often proved difficult for scholars to interpret. The tags and pottery found inside the tomb have a limited repertoire of signs, restricted to names and designations of places and prestigious beings. However, the inscriptions "look" like writing. Most of the Tomb U-j signs continue to appear in later stages of Egyptian writing, suggesting continuity of development. Additionally, the signs do not maintain their real-life relationships. For example, on this tag the bird is the same size as the elephant. Finally, some Tomb U-j tags display phonetic elements and rules for combining signs. Ultimately, scholars have argued that the Tomb U-j materials—particularly the tags—represent an early developmental form of writing.

In Mesopotamia, writing was probably a response to the administrative complexities of growing cities. In Egypt, early writing seems to have served an important ceremonial function in addition to an administrative one. In Tomb U-j, for example, the vessels and tags involved a time-consuming production process. The tags were first carved, then filled with paste, while the vessels were painted with elaborate details. Neither the paste fill of the tags or the internal details of the painted signs served a practical purpose. However, these extra details often added to the value and symbolism of the item.

Because early Egyptian writing had ceremonial functions, some of the earliest hieroglyphs are found on palettes, mace-heads, and ceremonial tags. In the early Dynastic Period (3200–3000 BC), writing complemented pictorial compositions and asserted the power and authority of specific kings. Writing was also found on seals, funerary vessels, private funerary stelae, and in offering lists.

Unlike early cuneiform, which relied heavily on logograms, Egyptian hieroglyphs had a strong phonetic component from the outset. This may be because Egyptian writing, with its emphasis on ceremony, funerary rituals, and kingship, utilized many personal names. Names are difficult to express logographically and often require the use of the rebus principle, which allowed for phonetic spellings as the writing system continued to develop.

Cylinder seals and their impressions, called “sealings,” occur as early as about 3320 BC in Tomb U-j at Abydos. Their function was to secure access to ceramic vessels, papyri, or boxes, allowing the early administration to track the movement of goods throughout Egypt and beyond. Archaeologists have discovered sealings made by the same cylinder seal in different locations. Seals and their impressions did always contain written inscriptions, such as this seal impression, which dates to 3150 BC, bearing a "wild animals" motif. By Dynasty 0 (ca. 3200 BC), cylinder seals often included written inscriptions. Some are quite simple, for example, featuring only the king’s name in a serekh (a rectangle with a Horus falcon on top, indicating the use of a royal name), while other conveyed more complex information such as officials’ names and titles, and the names of royal economic domains.

By Dynasty 2, cylinder seals carried increasingly complex information, as well as finely carved hieroglyphic signs. This sealing was impressed by the official cylinder seal of the royal overlord of the place of provisioning. It bears the name of King Sekhemib.

Early Egyptian writing is best known from archaeological finds from graves and tombs. Writing often served not only to label the grave goods with which ancient Egyptians were buried, but also specifically to commemorate the deceased.

In ancient Egypt, writing was more than a means of communication because the written word had the symbolic power to create what was recorded. For example, a text in a tomb wishing for "a thousand of bread and beer" ensured that those provisions would be provided for the deceased forever through the permanence of the written word. In a similar way, writing a person's name on a stone statue identified it with that person and helped their memory to live on among their community, much as modern gravestones today.

Egyptian protective texts were so potent that they were capable of effecting cures. This statue, which portrays the young god Horus standing on crocodiles, grasping and immobilizing dangerous creatures, symbolizes his ability to control wild and evil influences. The sides, back, and base of the statue are incised with hieroglyphic texts that refer to divine protection against threatening forces. Just as Horus the Child triumphed against the wild animals, the text could heal the sting and bite of wild animals. The power of the texts was transferred to the sufferer by dunking the statuette in water, thereby activating the liquid through contact with the words. The water was then consumed by the sufferer.

Hieroglyphs appeared about 3320 BC. The last dated hieroglyphic text is dated to AD 394. Hieroglyphs were generally used for texts on tomb and temple walls and on statues and stelae. The script could be written from left to right or right to left in columns or rows. Usually, signs and figures faced in the same direction.

Because they were used for ceremonial purposes, hieroglyphs could be quite ornate and time-consuming to execute. This led to the creation of cursive scripts like hieratic and Demotic, which allowed a scribe to write several signs without lifting his brush for more ink.

Hieratic, a cursive form of hieroglyphs, appeared about 3200 BC and continued in use until the third century AD. Because hieratic could be written more rapidly than hieroglyphs, it was used for legal, literary, business, and some religious texts. It was always written from right to left. Initially it was written in columns, but by about 2000 BC, it was more commonly arranged in horizontal lines.

Hieratic is neither a derivative nor an abbreviation of hieroglyphs. Despite their similarities, there is not a one-to-one correspondence in signs and writing between the two scripts. Hieratic even has some signs that are not found in hieroglyphs. Because hieratic appears so early, it probably developed alongside hieroglyphs.

The designation "Ptolemaic hieroglyphs" refers to the script employed by Egyptian temple scribes from Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt in 332 BC to the end of the second century AD. Ptolemaic hieroglyphs are also called "figurative" or "cryptographic" hieroglyphs because words were often written with complex rebuses, obscure puns, playful puzzles, and innovative sign groups. By this time period, thousands of new signs had been added to the corpus of hieroglyphs, and individual signs could have several phonetic values.

While some have speculated that the temple scribes were attempting to conceal sacred knowledge from laypeople by using this script, it seems that Ptolemaic hieroglyphs were not an attempt to hide the meaning of the text. Rather, the use of these interesting hieroglyphs was an intellectual game on the part of the scribes.

Coptic, which appeared in about AD 250, is the latest phase of the ancient Egyptian language. The Coptic script is unique in ancient Egypt because it borrowed the Greek alphabet. Greek was the administrative language of Egypt from 332 BC onward and became common as a language of business and everyday life. Scribes experimented with writing the Egyptian language using the Greek alphabet; however, there are some sounds in Egyptian that are not represented in Greek. Thus when the Coptic alphabet developed in the second and third centuries AD, it combined several signs derived from Demotic with all twenty-four Greek letters.

Coptic differs from the other scripts in that it uses an alphabet, omits non-phonetic signs (determinatives), and writes vowels. Like Greek, Coptic is written from left to right only, marking a major departure from hieratic, Demotic, and hieroglyphs.

The Coptic script developed as Christianity became the religion of Egypt, and its break with the pagan past probably helped to promote its use. Professional scribes wrote Coptic in cursive, with frequent use of ligatures (two or more letters joined together) and abbreviations. This ostracon (piece of pottery or stone) was written in a non-cursive, uncial script (like printed capital letters), probably by a Christian monk as suggested by the crossed rho at the beginning of the text. Coptic was replaced by Arabic in the seventh century for many official and legal purposes. However, it continues to be used in the Coptic church today.

Although Egyptian hieroglyphs were not used after the fourth century AD, the hieroglyphic writing system inspired an innovation that we still use today: the alphabet. Alphabetic writing is a system in which every sign represents one or more sounds. The first alphabetic script was invented in about 1800 BC by Canaanites in the Sinai Peninsula who spoke a West Semitic language. They adapted Egyptian hieroglyphic signs to write their own language. Texts using this adaptation of the hieroglyphic script have been called Proto-Sinaitic. For example, the Egyptian hieroglyphic sign that looks like a hand is used for the consonant /d/ in Egyptian. However, in West Semitic languages, the word for hand is "kaph," and in the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet, the sign that looks like a hand has the sound /k/ through the acrophonic principle—deriving a letter's phonetic value from its initial sound.

By 1000 BC, the use of alphabetic systems had spread north into Palestine and then into Phoenicia, where scholars had once thought the alphabet was invented. Within a few centuries, alphabetic scripts were used to write Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, South Arabian, and Arabian.

Many signs were pictographs, but signs could also be combined to create more descriptive words. For example, “mouth” could be combined with “dog” to write “bark,” reminiscent of the Sumerian example for "disbursement" from the beginning of this exhibit. The rebus principle offered a more fruitful method for writing new, often more abstract, words. For example, the pictograph of a human nose was used to write “nose,” but also the words “self” and “from,” since all three words were pronounced the same.

In the great majority of cases, however, two separate signs (or portions of signs) were combined to write a new word. One of the signs indicated the general category to which this new word belonged (like “tree,” “fish,” “sheep,” “liquid,” or “illness”) while the second indicated its pronunciation.

Today, of the 5,000 or so characters in common usage (not to mention the 50,000 or more distinct characters found in the largest dictionaries), only a relative handful remain pictographic. Most depict the sound of the word.

There were about 400 signs commonly used in the late classic Maya script. Some signs were syllables, while others were pictographs. Signs were arranged in blocks read from top to bottom and left to right, often in double columns. Maya inscriptions appeared on stone stela, buildings, murals, shell and jade objects, and pottery vessels. There were also texts painted on paper, wood, cloth, and skin, many of which have not survived.

Among the most common inscriptions are those that record the day and month of rituals and events in the lives of the nobility, including births, deaths, coronations, calendrical cycle rituals, and the taking of captives in warfare. Many Maya inscriptions function as captions for the images they accompany. The Maya script generally fell out of use after the conquest of Mexico in the 16th century AD.