Hieroglyphs (7 page)

written version of the required spells so that the king would not
eroglyp

forget them and so that he could have them for ready reference. For
hic scri
this reason they were carved into the walls of the king’s burial chamber, beside his mummified body in its sarcophagus. At this
pt an

stage the texts were not accompanied by any scenes or depictions of
d E

images and the signs were filled in with green or blue paint. The
gyptian lan

writings were probably composed by priests and wise men to form a compendium for use by the kings of the later part of the Old Kingdom. The Step Pyramid of Zoser and the great pyramids of Giza
gua
are largely uninscribed, so it is not known if these kings used earlier
ge
versions of the Pyramid Texts, perhaps written on papyrus and now lost. The texts became the basis for the more widely used religious spells known as the Coffin Texts (Middle Kingdom) and the Book of What is in the Underworld (New Kingdom and onwards).

It may be significant that the Palermo Stone was also written down in Dynasty 5. This is a remnant of a temple wall with royal annals like those from the labels of Dynasty 1. Something, perhaps political instability, occurred at this particular time to make the codification and collection of earlier writings a priority for kings. The impetus to collect, recopy, and edit texts over and over again is a practice which continued throughout Egyptian history and hints at the legitimizing power implicit in the hieroglyphic writings.
1

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Other documents were written in Old Egyptian. Autobiographical tomb inscriptions of officials, royal decrees, and a very few hieratic papyri containing letters have survived and there is also a famous set of temple archive documents called the Abusir Papyri. They must represent only a tiny fraction of a lost corpus of texts. The main difference between Old Egyptian and the later language forms is its verbal structure, with some inflected forms,
2
no pseudo-verbal construction at all.
3
So far as the writing of the language is concerned, the writing of the first-person suffix ‘I’ and

‘me’ or ‘my’ is often omitted and spellings of words are often cumbersome and full, with every sound carefully represented, sometimes more than once. In the Pyramid Texts there is a reluctance to split words if they go over from one vertical column to another, even to the extent of leaving a gap at the end of a column. In all there are about a thousand hieroglyphic signs known for this stage.
4

phs

Middle Egyptian was later regarded by the Egyptians themselves as
ogly

the classic form of the Egyptian language and it is the most long-Hier

lived stage of Egyptian. It was used to write all kinds of texts in the Middle Kingdom and after that continued to be used to write monumental texts (in tombs and temples) until the end of the Ancient Egyptian culture. Spellings of words were standardized at this stage by the court schools, which meant a reduction in the number of hieroglyphs in use to around 750 signs. The hieroglyphic script was retained to write monumental and religious texts into the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, by which time over 7,000 separate signs were used. In grammatical terms both earlier stages of the language have a preference for the word order Verb–Subject–Object when verbs are used and this is known as a
synthetic
pattern. Here the verb carries all the information about its tense and mood in its own writing and all the information about the subject and object is attached to it afterwards.

Late Egyptian differs significantly from Middle Egyptian in its writing system, grammar, and vocabulary. There is a change 28

towards a more roundabout writing of verb forms in which the subject is introduced by a particle or phrase which may also introduce tense and mood. The verb is then left to trail in second place. This
analytic
pattern therefore switches to the word order Subject–Verb–Object.

Middle Egyptian

sDm
=
f
verb (to hear, present tense) plus attached subject (he) ‘he hears’

Late Egyptian

ir
=
f sDm
verb (to do), attached subject (he), actual action (to hear) ‘he does hear’

Hieroglyp

The advantage of this system for Egyptologists is that in Middle Egyptian any subtle variations of tense were shown in speech by
hic scri

changes in sounds but did not show up in the writing. In Late
pt an

Egyptian subtle changes in tense or meaning could be made by
d E

altering the introductory element and leaving the verb alone. This
gyptian lan

means that the writings for the sense, tense, and mood are converted but not the writing of the verb itself. This gives rise to forms such as:

gua

ge

i-ir
=
f sDm
‘that he hears’

wn
=
f Hr sDm
‘he was hearing’

mtw
=
f sDm
‘and he will hear’

Note that in all cases the verb retains the same form in the writing and the same position in the sentence, but all the information about it is given by changing the first element.

Late Egyptian also contains foreign loan words, such as foreign city names, words for non-Egyptian things (compare in English ‘sushi’), or which had come into common usage, like Egyptian
r-bl
, ‘out’

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(compare in English
par excellence
). For example, one such borrowing from Semitic is the word for ‘sea’

ym
‘yom’. This

change reflects the increasingly cosmopolitan nature of Egyptian society, particularly in the capital Memphis from the beginning of the New Kingdom. The city must have been one of the great melting pots of culture and language in the ancient world and as the capital city of Egypt, the language spoken here drove the development of the language throughout the country. From the New Kingdom (if not earlier) there is a clear split between monumental texts written in Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs and documents and literary texts written in Late Egyptian, mostly in hieratic. In a sense, Middle Egyptian became an ossified language, like Latin as used in medieval Europe, while the Egyptian language itself continued to develop and change. Even Late Egyptian texts written in hieroglyphs look different, for example in the ‘Hymn to the Aten’

from Akhetaten. Many more smaller signs are squeezed together in word blocks and spaces are commonly filled with small vertical
phs

strokes or t-signs.

ogly

Hier

Late Egyptian itself was replaced in the seventh century bc by a

‘new’ script for writing the developed form of the language, both of which are known as Demotic. It is possible that the script was developed in Saı¨s, the capital of Egypt at the time, but it is more likely that the scribes of Memphis and Saı¨s worked together to develop this script for their mutual benefit and to put Egypt back on a stable footing after the invasions and rule of Nubian kings.

Demotic looks a lot less like hieroglyphs than anything written before and although ultimately it derives some of its forms from hieroglyphs, it is very cursive and is exclusively written from right to left. The language shows a continued development of the grammatical structures in Late Egyptian and the stage of Egyptian called ‘Abnormal Hieratic’ seems to be the link in the evolution of the language. In writing there is a marked tendency to use specific determinatives for verbs and others for nouns and the script is more methodical in writing plural forms of nouns using a plural marker.

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It is used to write the same range of texts, however, including tales, prayers, letters, marriage contracts, shopping lists, oracles, and so on, all the rich material of ancient lives.

Demotic has a reputation for being difficult to learn and only a few people in the world can read it and translate extant Demotic texts.

Some Demotic texts can be seen painstakingly inscribed on temples, funerary stelae, and official decrees. As the language in everyday use, it would have been heard in every market, on every street corner and in every home in Egypt. For most Egyptians at this time hieroglyphs were far removed from their daily lives. On the official Ptolemaic decrees recording temple donations, such as the Rosetta Stone or the Canopus Decree, the same text would be
Hi

written in three different languages: Greek (for the ruling
eroglyp

administration of the day), hieroglyphs (for the gods), and Demotic
hic scri
(for everyone else). The range of languages reflects the strata of Egyptian society at this time and the lines of communication.

pt an

Demotic itself can be divided into chronological stages: early (Saite
d E

and Persian periods), Ptolemaic, and Roman, with the final datable
gyptian lan

text written around ad 450 in Philae Temple. The differences in the stages of Demotic can be seen in vocabulary, syntax (which could differ from one part of the country to another), and handwriting
gua