Hieroglyphs (14 page)

For the priests with the ability to read hieroglyphs and trained to copy and edit ancient texts in the ‘House of Life’ it was just not
phs

enough to ensure that the meaning was preserved and that the exact
ogly

rituals were continued. They introduced extra hieroglyphs into the
Hier

writing system, swelling the number of signs used from a core of about 750 in Middle Egyptian to over 7,000 in the texts of the Ptolemaic Temples. A text in basic Middle Egyptian grammar would then appear to be unreadable to someone trained only in Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs:

From the exterior of the naos of the Temple of Edfu, Ptolemaic Period (Chassinat,
Edfou
, VI, 2,4–5).

Transcription of above text into Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Translation: ‘He rises from Nun, he sails the heavens as Hor-Akhty, he stands in the sky opposite it (the temple) every day’.

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Is it really more cryptic? It is certainly more abbreviated, but there are interesting mythical allusions in the writings: the word for the primeval ocean, ‘Nun’, is written in Ptolemaic signs, with a child over the water sign, perhaps hinting at the primeval lotus child emerging from the first waters. The word
nww
later
nn
is a New Kingdom word for ‘child’, so the determinative acquires the value
nwn
and is given the water-canal determinative to complete the writing; the words for ‘every day’ at the end are written with the sun god Re and the moon god Khonsu – sun and moon, a striking image of exactly what is meant.

In other texts, the temple rituals are expanded and do not occur in such a fully written form earlier. Variations and extra signs were added with some imagination and the ways in which the

‘I kno

‘new’ signs were developed took into consideration a number of
w y

different ‘rules’.

ou, I kno

First, more and more determinatives were turned into simple
w y

monoconsonantal phonetic signs. For example, the sign , a man
o

with his arms held up in the air, can be the determinative written
ur nam

at the end of the word for
Haa
‘haa’, to rejoice; so in Ptolemaic,
es’

acquires the sound value of
H
and is written within other words just with this sound value:

in the name of the god Heka

in the Temple of Esna (Esna 242,18). Of course, is also the determinative of
qA
‘ka’, to be high, and so can take on the value
q
and indeed another writing of the word of the god Heka, also at Esna, is the picturesque

(Esna 242, 24).

Secondly, signs capable of carrying or wearing something, did so and in the process acquired another value: a seated man holding a horned viper above his head is read as
fAi
, meaning ‘to raise up’

and the viper has the value
f
. This group really reads
fAi
=
f
and the emphasis of
f
gives the value of the whole group
f
.

Some fewer signs were complete puns in their own right: and

form a pair showing the viper ‘leaving’ the sign and then ‘going 63

into’ the sign. They are the writings for
pr
‘to go out’ and
aq

‘enter’.

The sign of the man holding the hippopotamus by the tail is

used in the writing of the word for lapis lazuli and so has the reading
xsdb
, though this in itself is a later version of the word
xsbd
from Dynasty 18. The writing is a punning sign-play, studied in 1876 by W. Goodwin. He suggested that here the man is performing the action
xs( f )
‘driving away’, and the object of his attention is
db

‘the hippopotamus’, so the phrase
xs( f ) db
‘driving away the hippopotamus’ sounded the same as or similar to the word for lapis lazuli and the signs making up this tableau were used in the writing for the substance. It is also possible that the protective powers of lapis are symbolically invoked here, so that amulets of lapis could be used to drive away danger and evil, here represented by the hippopotamus.

phs

The possibilities for such games with signs and sound values mean
ogly

that sportive texts occur quite often, particularly in ‘religious’ or
Hier

‘funerary’ texts as early as the Old Kingdom, and they are not confined to the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. It has been said that the priests of these times wished to make the Egyptian texts for which they were responsible more difficult for others to read and to try to hide the ‘truths’ which they contained. As the texts could only ever have been read by a small group of people and as the ruling Greek administrators would have been excluded from reading any hieroglyphs anyway this seems to be a specious argument. In fact, the mythological texts, the temple unguent and perfume recipes, the list of library books, and in particular the ritual texts are not written in especially ‘cryptic’ hieroglyphs at all.

The cryptic texts are those very much in prominent places, such as on window frames or architraves – high up, addressing the gods, and almost on show for all to marvel at the intricacies of the script and the erudition of the language. They consist of descriptions, basic acts of ritual, and nothing particularly secret. The cryptic texts rely upon double meanings of signs or signs which represent 64