Hieroglyphs (19 page)

and the suffix pronoun ‘him’ in Demotic. Remarkably he published a Demotic alphabet in 1802, but it seems that his concentration on
Th

the purely alphabetic nature of Demotic held him back. Thomas
e deci

Young (1773–1829) was an English physician and physicist best
p

remembered for his discovery of the wave-theory of light. He
herm

recognized the relationship with Coptic and first suggested that
ent of E

the Egyptian scripts used both alphabetic and non-alphabetic signs.

He read the name of Ptolemy and two of his epithets and also read
gyptian

the name of Queen Berenike and recognized that it had a feminine egg and
t
ending. The man who perhaps coordinated and oversaw many of these discoveries was Antoine Silvestre de Sacy (1758–

1838), Professor of Arabic at the École des Langues Orientales Vivantes at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. He had first recognized and transcribed three names in Demotic but was held back by thinking of the language as written with an alphabetic script. He corresponded with and encouraged Young, but ultimately it was his own student who was to make the breakthrough.

Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) was a child prodigy and linguist who knew Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and most importantly, Coptic. By the time he was 16 Champollion was keeping his diary in Coptic. At this time, some Coptic priests in Egypt used the language in the Coptic liturgy, so although it had been preserved to some extent, it was still not very well known.

89

Champollion also studied Old Chinese, Persian, and Farsi and became a fellow of the teaching staff at the Lycée in Grenoble, aged 17. He had also obtained a copy of the Rosetta Stone.

The state of knowledge at this time was as follows: the name of the king, Ptolemaios, was known from the Greek and Demotic sections and could be compared with the cartouches around the king’s name in the hieroglyphic section. Champollion had to make a guess about the direction of the writing and also an assumption that the name was to be read alphabetically, with each hieroglyph being a separate sign. Once he had decided this, he had the name of Ptolemy, giving him seven letters. (Independently, Young had arrived at the same point.)

In 1815, William J. Bankes, a friend of the Duke of Wellington, had found two obelisks at Philae. They were brought to Kingston Lacy, Dorset, in 1827. On one obelisk the shaft bore hieroglyphs but the
phs

base was written in Greek. Champollion obtained a copy and found
ogly

the Ptolemy cartouche (of Ptolemy VIII). Also on the obelisk in the
Hier

Greek was the name of the wife of the king, Kleopatra. Champollion located the cartouche and found that he now had confirmation of some letters and a few new ones. He also had two letters for
t
, but concluded that they were homophones (sounded the same). Thanks to Young, the two signs of a
t
and an egg had been recognized as a feminine ending, again confirming this was the name of a female ruler. In itself this would not have been enough to decipher much, but Champollion compiled a list of cartouches (and thus of signs) of the Ptolemaic and Roman period and published it as his
Lettre à M.

Dacier relative à l’alphabet des hiéroglyphes phonétiques
in 1822.

This was the first breakthrough. It was a small step and by itself did not mean that every text could then be transliterated
and
translated, for as yet no grammatical rules, let alone vocabulary, had been established. Though it was a long way away from the Renaissance interpretation of hieroglyphs, Champollion, at this point, still thought that Egyptian was written symbolically. For the 90

next step in understanding the language rather than just a few signs or being able to read royal names, Champollion used copies of texts from Abu Simbel with the cartouches of another king, thought to be the famous ruler Ramesses II, mentioned in the Bible. Champollion already had the letter-sound
s
, and so to the fox-skins he gave the value
m
. The sun disk sign seemed clear and Champollion knew that in Coptic the word for sun was
r-e
. So he read the signs as
r-e m-s sw

‘Ramesses’. Also in the cartouche was the name of another god, Amun, with the canal sign at the end of the cartouche. Champollion guessed that a king was often called beloved of a god. Again in Coptic the word for ‘to love’ is
me
, thus this part of the cartouche would actually mean ‘beloved of Amun’ and in essence the first translation, rather than just rendering the signs, had been achieved.

Th

What Champollion had discovered was that Egyptian writing
e deci

combined signs for sounds with signs for ideas and he published his
p
results in 1824, in his
Précis du système hiéroglyphique
. Using all
herm

the tools at his disposal and treating the texts as a language, not
ent of E

just two scripts, Champollion continued to collect texts and work through them, dividing out the word groups and applying each new
gyptian
piece of information as he found it. Though not everyone accepted his discovery at first, the study of Egyptian was spurred on by the Champollion breakthrough. With the recognition of different function for signs, the text on the Rosetta Stone could be divided up into words. The meaning of some words could be guessed by comparison with the Greek text and Coptic words. The grammar of the text could be studied by comparison with Coptic, though there was still some way to go.

Egyptian language studies

Various scholars studied the language, forming themselves into distinct ‘schools’ in Egyptology, but the first major publication after Champollion was a grammar of Demotic by Heinrich Brugsch in 1855. Brugsch was already a major figure in early Egyptology when he first noted the Semitic side to Egyptian grammar and then 91

collected the information in a more systematic way. His
Dictionnaire hiéroglyphique et démotique
, the first systematic dictionary for hieroglyphs, was published in seven volumes between 1867 and 1882 and consisted of 3,146 pages. Adolphe Erman (1854–

1937), Professor of Egyptology at the University of Berlin, was the first to recognize the different stages of the Egyptian language, but his greatest work after his
Neuägyptische Grammatik
(1880) and
Ägyptische Grammatick
(1894) was the
Wörterbuch
(dictionary) project. Based in Berlin, a team of twenty scholars went through all known Egyptian texts from Egypt and in museums and made paper slips for every word. These
Zettel
comprised the writing of the word in hieroglyphs, its transliteration, translation, and where the word occurred. They were then filed and organized so that the spellings and range of use for all known words could be established. The
Wörterbuch
, co-edited by Hermann Grapow, appeared in five volumes from 1926 to 1931 and it is still a standard reference dictionary for Egyptian. It is now available on the Internet and
phs

continues the work of collecting texts and their analysis. Another
ogly

German philologist from the ‘Berlin School’, Kurt Sethe, made
Hier

important discoveries in Egyptian grammar, re-edited and collated the Pyramid Texts and copied historical texts, which were published as
Urkunden der 18. Dynastie
from 1906 to 1909.

The fundamentally important effort was in the copying, collection, and publication of textual material in order to make it available to as many people as possible. Smaller texts from the backs of statues, for example, were published in the German
Zeitschrift für
Ägyptische Sprache
(from 1863) and the French
Recueil de travaux
relatifs à la philologie et à l’archéologie égyptiennes et assyriennes
(from 1889), while a concerted effort was made by scholars to make available larger bodies of material, such as complete sets of temple inscriptions. Emmanuel de Rougé and Émile Chassinat pioneered the publication of the texts in the Ptolemaic temples of Edfu and Dendera by the French Institute. The work continued with the publication of the Coffin Texts, material from Deir el Medina and the collection of all texts from the Ramesside period by Kenneth 92

Kitchen. In all cases, the scholars concerned have been able to make the texts available not just as a source but also in translation. The work on the monuments has been paralleled by publication of papyri and ostraka by scholars such as Alan Gardiner, Georges Posener, and Jaroslav Cěrný. The hieratic material was first put out in facsimile photographs so that mistakes would not be made in copying the handwriting. Many of the large-scale publications were prohibitively expensive and obtainable only by specialist libraries, by subscription, or by scholars with private means.

It is perhaps no accident that it was one such English scholar, (Sir) Alan Gardiner (1879–1963), who published the influential
Egyptian Grammar
in 1927. He was an eminent Egyptologist who had been one of the Berlin Dictionary team and he concentrated on
Th

the publication of tombs and hieratic papyri and ostraka. His
e deci

Grammar
was written very much along the traditional lines of a
p

classical grammar book and the way in which the grammar book
herm

was constructed meant that it could be used as a didactic volume,
ent of E

the format of which has had enormous impact on the teaching of Egyptian.

gyptian

The book is divided into sections dealing with specific grammatical issues. These are explained, exemplified from real texts, and then at the end of the section there is an exercise for the student in which they can practise what they have learnt. At various points along the way there is an ‘Excursus’, which deals with some aspect of Egyptian culture, such as ‘Weights and Measurements’, ‘Time Keeping’, and

‘Kings’ Names’. At the end of the book is a list of all the signs for Middle Egyptian, with an explanation of what each sign depicts and its use and meaning. The Gardiner Sign-List has been extremely influential in its classification of individual hieroglyphs and this section of the grammar has never really been bettered. There then follows an English to Egyptian and Egyptian to English vocabulary list. The reason for this is that, as in classical studies, it was not enough to translate
from
the language; one needed to be able to go back from English into Egyptian. Of course, this is a very artificial 93

procedure, but it was designed to enable students to write their own hieroglyphs and to think like Egyptians.

Many other grammar books have appeared in order to address other stages of the language such as Late Egyptian, Demotic, Coptic, and Old Egyptian, and in 1924 the earliest grammar of Ancient Egyptian in Arabic was published by Antoine Zikri.

Gardiner’s work was so magisterial and so relatively cheap, as it was subsidized by the Oxford Griffith Institute, that it continued to be the standard grammar for students of Egyptian. Developments in understanding Egyptian, however, have overtaken the book, as has the nature of people wanting to learn Egyptian hieroglyphs, and so in recent years there have been successful attempts to update Gardiner.
2

Some of the English school curricula do not include English grammar as such, with the result that students who lack a
phs

background knowledge of grammar from another language have
ogly

to study English grammar before they can tackle Gardiner. Popular
Hier

courses teaching adults Egyptian have concentrated on giving students enough skills to enhance their visits to museums with Egyptian collections or on visits to Egypt. The kind of texts in most of these places will be monumental texts, sometimes with very formulaic expressions (for example the standard funerary offering formula) or with easily recognizable cartouches. Such expressions and their meaning can be easily learnt without having to worry about the sometimes complex grammar underneath. Arising out of such a teaching programme, Bill Manley and Mark Collier’s
How to
Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs
has been successful in persuading a very interested general public that, for £10, they really can read hieroglyphs. An individual investment in time and application is still required and local Egyptology societies can sometimes provide a focus for such study.

Recent linguistic developments have also been applied to Egyptian grammar. Scholars have been applying ideas from the field of 94

linguistics to Ancient Egyptian, building on studies of the language over the last forty years. The use of the ‘Second Tense’ in Egyptian has indicated that there are subtle ways in which the written language conveys ideas about emphasis and marks out the important parts of sentences. It has long been noticed that the final consonant is doubled in certain verbs, but the reason for this was not understood until the linguist Hans Polotsky suggested that this was the forerunner of the Coptic Second Tense. This tense throws emphasis onto the adverbial part of the sentence written at the end, thus ‘He went to the house’ becomes ‘To the house he went’.

Other aspects of Egyptian, such as the definition of exactly how verbs should be understood, have also advanced. The concept of the verb as a modified noun, with various markers, either written
Th

endings, particles, pronunciation, position in sentence, suggests
e deci

that Egyptian has interesting subtleties of expression. At a
p

conference in 1986 to discuss the then current state of grammar
herm

studies, the whole process of analysing and investigating Egyptian
ent of E

grammar was described as ‘juggling lots of balls’. Some of these balls included syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic approaches, but
gyptian

most crucially there was a recognition that these areas are related and that several levels operate in the Egyptian language at the same time and interact. It seems that the key to Egyptian grammar is flexibility, but within a defined framework of reference, as was demonstrated by the range of approaches represented at the Copenhagen conference.
3