EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS
With the foregoing references to some of the most venerable documents
that have yet come to light, we may leave Assyria for Egypt, no longer
a land of marvel and of mystery, with its past hidden as the sources
of the great river of which that land is "the gift" were long hidden.
For the discovery of the key to that past, and of the vast waters
that feed the Nile, alike lie within the present century. Till then
the veil of Isis hung over the significance of the inscriptions on
coffin, sepulchral box, stele, tomb, obelisk, and temple, and over the
interpretation of characters written on papyri rolls centuries before
the foundations of Athens were laid. Of these records, be it noted,
Death, which sweeps away man and the memory of him from his fellows,
has been more than aught else--in Egypt, and indeed, all the world
over, but notably in Egypt--the preserver. And this because there all
that appertained to the departed was guarded with the most jealous
care. The tomb, as often elsewhere, was modelled on the plan of the
house, and supplied with utensils, food, and drink, or adorned with
the painted representations of these things on the walls, for the
needs of the _ka_, or double, _sahn_, or spirit, or some other of the
eight Egyptian ontological divisions of the individual.
Like the other pictographic systems already surveyed, the Egyptian
interests us because it has preserved the traces of its origin, adding
its "cloud of witnesses" to the identity of the several stages of
development marking the scripts of all literate peoples. Until very
recently, its chief interest lay in the belief that it is the parent
of the family of alphabets of the civilised world; but, as will be
shown later on, the theory is no longer tenable. Although the earliest
known examples of Egyptian hieroglyphs (Greek _hieros_, "sacred," and
_glypho_, "to carve," so called in the belief that they were used
solely by the priests) contain alphabetic characters, they have come
down as highly elaborated types of picture-writing, the changes in
which during the long period covered by the records being so slight
that, to cite Professor Whitney, "it is like a language which has never
forgotten the derivations of its words, or corrupted their etymological
form, however much it may have altered its meaning." Therefore,
although the Egyptians had developed alphabet-signs five thousand
years B.C. they never advanced to the stage of their sole and
independent use, partly because of the conservative instincts of the
race, which, fostering veneration for the old, was reluctant to alter
anything, and partly because, as Professor Flinders Petrie has pointed
out, their "treatment of everything was essentially decorative,
the love of form and drawing being in Egypt a greater force than
amongst any other ancient people. Babylon and China, from want of
sufficient artistic taste, allowed their pictorial writing to sink
into a mere string of debased and conventional forms; the Egyptians,
on the contrary, preserved the purely pictorial and artistic character
of their hieroglyphs to the end. The hieroglyphs were a decoration
in themselves; their very position in the sentence was subordinate
to the decorative effect. The Egyptian could not be guilty of the
barbarism seen on some of the Assyrian sculpture, where inscriptions
were scrawled right across the work without regard to design. So far
was this idea carried that many words or ideas were represented by
two distinct characters, one wide and the other narrow and deep, so
that the harmony of the design should not be broken by an unsuitable
element. The result was that the Egyptians were rewarded by having the
most beautiful writing in the world." (_Egyptian Decorative Art_, p. 4.)
This writing exists in three groups of characters (fig. 45): (_a_)
_Hieroglyphic_, (_b_) _Hieratic_, (_c_) _Demotic_. The demotic is
derived from the hieratic, and the hieratic from the hieroglyphic.
[Illustration: Fig. 45.--Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, and Demotic Signs for
Man]
(_a_) Pictogram, ideogram, and phonogram--in other words, signs
representative of word, idea, and sound--make up the seventeen hundred
_hieroglyphs_ which, in the older signs, preserve the traces of
their origin in rude picture-writing. They were chiselled on stone
of various kinds, cut or painted on wood or plaster, and written on
papyrus or skin; the characters being arranged in vertical columns.
With the quickened zeal of modern excavators discoveries come apace, so
that before these words are printed, some additional find, throwing all
others into the shade, may come to light. Such, for example, would be
the production of epigraphic evidence as to the sojourn and oppression
of the Israelites in Egypt, and their escape from that "house of
bondage." For a long time the earliest known example of hieroglyphic
writing which the Gizeh and Ashmodean Museums could show (each
institution possessing fragments of the relic) was a mutilated stele
or monumental tablet to the memory of Shera, a priest or grandson of
Sent, the fifth king of the Second Dynasty, which, adopting Professor
Flinders Petrie's chronology, flourished about four thousand five
hundred years B.C. In this record three alphabetic characters
are employed to spell that monarch's name. But in November 1897, Dr.
Borchardt reported the important discovery that the royal tomb found by
M. de Morgan in the spring of that year at Nagada, situated opposite
Coptos, a little north of Thebes, is that of Menes, the founder of
the First Dynasty, whose date Professor Flinders Petrie fixes at 4777
B.C., "with a possible error of a century." Calcined remains of
the body are now in the Gizeh Museum, and, among other objects, the
broken fragments of an ivory plaque which, when joined, showed the
_ka_ name of Aha (the _ka_ being the "double" or "other self" of the
deceased which abode with the mummy), and, attached thereto, the name
MN = Menes, borne by the Pharaoh during his lifetime. Assuming that Dr.
Borchardt's interpretation is accepted by Egyptologists, it proves that
the hieroglyphic system of writing was then already fully developed.
It may be remarked, incidentally, that among the remains of the
pre-dynastic race discovered by Professor Flinders Petrie in 1895, in
the district north of Thebes, no hieroglyphs or traces of other writing
were found. There was evidence of knowledge of metals, but not of the
potter's wheel. It therefore seems probable that writing came in with
the First Dynasty, which, according to M. de Morgan, was descended from
Chaldean Semites.
But more interesting, for the light thrown on early Egyptian thought,
than inscriptions on stele or plaque are the copies of portions of the
sacred literature entitled "Chapters of the Coming Forth by Day," and
also the "Chapters of Making Strong the Beatified Spirit," but commonly
known as the _Book of the Dead_. This venerable embodiment of human
conceptions about an after life, and of human hope and consolation this
side the grave, contains the hymns, prayers, and magic formulæ against
all opposing foes and evil spirits, to be recited by the dead Osiris
(the soul was conceived to have such affinity with the god Osiris as
to be called by his name) in his journey to Amenti, the underworld
that led to the Fields of the Blessed. It lies outside both our scope
and space to give an account of the contents of the several chapters,
and, fortunately, the entire text, translated by Dr. Wallis Budge,
with admirable facsimiles of illustrations, is within the reach of
a moderate purse. But one curious and prominent feature should have
reference, because it shows the persistence of barbaric ideas about
names as integral parts of things. (On this subject, see the author's
_Tom Tit Tot; an Essay on Savage Philosophy in Folk-Tale_, 1898.) The
Osiris has not only to be able to recite the names and titles of the
gods, but of every part of the boat, "from truck to keel," as the
nautical phrase goes, in which he desires to cross the great river
flowing to Amenti. And then, before he can enter the Hall of the Two
Truths--that is, of Truth and Justice, where the god Osiris and the
forty-two judges of the dead are seated--the jackal-headed Anubis
requires him to tell the names of every part of the doors, posts,
and woodwork generally. These correctly given, the soul declares its
innocence in language whose moral tone has never been surpassed, while
it throws a light on the virtues and vices of old Egyptian society
which makes clear how poor a guide to the past are its monuments
compared with its literature.
The age of the composition of this remarkable book is unknown. But so
old is it that the earliest copies we possess show that when they were
made, some six thousand years ago, the exact meaning of parts of the
text had become obscure to the transcribers. Fragments of it have been
found in those ancient tombs, the Pyramids; chapters or long extracts
were written on stone and wooden coffins; but after the expulsion of
the Hyksos, or Shepherd Dynasty, by the kings of Thebes, about 1580
B.C., papyrus came more into use for the purpose.
One of the most superbly-illustrated examples is that known as the
_Papyrus of Ani_, belonging to what is called the Theban recension of
the text, which was much used from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth
Dynasty (1587-1060 B.C.). It will suffice, as evidence of
the magical qualities attributed to the written word, to quote the
following from the seventy-second chapter, as translated into sonorous
English by Dr. Wallis Budge:--
"If this writing be known (by the deceased) upon earth, and this
chapter be done into writing upon (his) coffin, he shall come forth
by day in all the forms of existence which he desireth, and he shall
enter into (his) place, and be not rejected. Bread and ale and meat
shall be given unto Osiris, the scribe Ani upon the altar of Osiris
... there shall wheat and barley be given unto him; there shall he
flourish as he did upon earth, and he shall do whatsoever pleaseth
him, even as do the gods who are in the underworld, for everlasting
millions of ages, world without end."
Under Dr. Wallis Budge's editorship, the Ani papyrus has recently been
supplemented by the issue of facsimiles and translations of papyri
and other texts connected with the _Book of the Dead_. Among these is
a _Book of Breathings_, written in a late hieratic, and dating from
late pre-Christian times. It contains a ritual to be said by the priest
for or over the dead, and teaches belief in a resurrection of the body
and a state of material bliss on earth. "Thy soul shall live," and, so
runs the text, "thy corruptible body shall burst into life, and thou
shalt never decay." ... "Grant that his soul may go into every place
wheresoever it would be, and let him live upon earth for ever and ever."
Up to a point the story of Egyptian writing illustrates the stages of
development of writing generally so clearly that its recital, even at
the cost of some repetition, will be helpful, and the more so as it
falls into line with the story of other scripts.
"It goes without saying" that the representation of an object was
a simple matter enough, the rudest draughtsmanship sufficing for a
picture that should tell its own meaning at a glance. But as soon as
the need arose to graphically express ideas, for example, such as vice
and virtue, time and space, health and sickness, symbolism came in. To
the illustrations of this supplied by the scripts already dealt with
may be added a few examples from Egyptian ideography, into which, at
the stage that we first meet it, the whole system of hieroglyphics
may be said to have become modified. The bee was a symbol of kingship
and also of industry; a roll of papyrus denoted knowledge; an ostrich
feather, justice, because these feathers were supposed to be of equal
length; a palm branch, one year, because that tree was popularly
believed to put forth a fresh branch every new moon--although, as Mr.
Gliddon suggests, a more plausible reason is in the annual cutting of
the lower leaves close to the trunk. The ideograph for a priest was
a jackal--not, as may be cynically hinted, because of his "devouring
widows' houses," but because of his watchfulness; for a mother, a
vulture, because that bird was believed to nourish its young with its
own blood. Thirst was represented by a calf running towards water;
power by a brandished whip; and battle by two arms, the one holding
a shield and the other a javelin. Among the Dakotah Indians combat
is indicated by two arms pointed at each other. The ideograph for
night, a star pendant from a curve, is like the Ojibwa; while among
the ancient Mexicans night was represented by a semicircle with eyes,
as stars, attached to it. Signs for hunger, thirst, supplication, and
so forth, among both Innuit Indian and ancient Egyptian--as indeed
many other signs among peoples, both in the old world and the new,
whose writing has not reached a purely phonetic stage--have that
correspondence to be expected when things common to all men are
graphically represented (fig. 46). Running water, for example, remains
necessarily a pictograph, but water depicted in connection with rites
represents, by one symbol or another, the varying nature of the latter.
Both in Egypt and Mexico it is represented flowing from a vessel, the
Egyptian ideograph having a kneeling figure with arms uplifted, as
if in adoration or gratitude. There appears, also, some resemblance
between the symbol for negation between these two, but this has the
doubt attaching to all metaphysical interpretation of signs.
[Illustration:
Night (Egyptian).
Night (Maya).
Supplication (Egyptian).
Supplication (Ojibwa).
Negation (Egyptian).
Negation (Californian Indian).
Negation (Maya).
Medicine Man (Ojibwa).
God of Medicine (Easter Island).
Fig. 46.--Comparative Ideographs]
Obviously, this presentment of ideas through graphic designs into
which metaphor often bordering on enigma had to be read, implied good
memories and clear grasp of association on the part of the interpreter.
Any doubt or ambiguity, with resulting confusion, as to the meaning
of the symbol, rendered it worse than useless. Hence the addition of
"determinants," concerning which something was said when treating of
the Chinese script (see p. 85). These are of two classes--the special
and more numerous, whose use was confined to one word or idea; and the
general, numbering about two hundred, which, like the Chinese "keys,"
refer to whole groups of words.
But ideas have to be arranged in sentences, and these are made up
of nouns, adjectives, verbs, and other parts of speech for which
symbolism, however ingenious, can make no provision. Moreover, while
the characters are limited in their application, the ideas to be
expressed graphically are ever growing, and hence, in course of time,
there are not enough symbols "to go round." A way of escape opened
itself, and thereby led to an invention undreamed of, when recourse was
had to the use of pictures of things which were different in sense,
but the names of which had the same _sound_; in other words, to the
pictorial pun known as the rebus (see p. 79). As an amusing instance
of the formation of a compound phonogram out of syllabic signs, Canon
Taylor quotes from an inscription of Ptolemy XV. at Edfu, in which, as
he says, "it seems not impossible to detect a faint flavour of ancient
Egyptian humour. The name of _lapis lazuli_ was _khesteb_. Now the
word _khesf_ meant 'to stop,' and the syllable _teb_, 'a pig.' Hence
the rebus 'stop-pig' was invented to express graphically the name of
_lapis lazuli_, which is figured by the picture of a man stopping a pig
by pulling at its tail." Probably the Canon is right, but in western
lands that action is often intended to make the pig move on. Another
example of the rebus occurs in the name of Osiris, which in Egyptian
is _Hesiri_ (Wallis Budge gives it as _Ausir_). The god, on this
showing, is represented, presumably, by a figure on a seat, _hes_, and
by an eye, _iri_. But with the constant revision of interpretations by
Egyptologists, it behoves us to quote with caution. There is a stock
illustration as to the adoption of the supposed picture of a lute
(used by the Egyptian scribes to denote "excellence"), as a phonogram
to express the word _nefer_, "good." But it seems that what was thought
to be a lute is the picture of a heart and windpipe!
At last, we know not when, and we cannot, speaking of Egypt alone,
guess where, there dawned upon some mind the fact that all the words
which men uttered are expressed by a few sounds. Hence, what better
plan than to select from the big and confused mass of ideograms,
phonograms, and all their kin, a certain number of signs to denote,
unvaryingly, certain sounds?
That was the birth of the ALPHABET, one of the greatest and
most momentous triumphs of the human mind. The earliest phonograms
represented syllables, not individual letters, the distinguishing signs
for vowels and consonants being of yet later introduction; in fact,
some alphabets, notably the Hebrew and other Semitic, have no true
vowels, but only distinguishing marks, diacritical points as they are
called, to denote them. To recapitulate, we have 1, picture-writing; 2,
ideograms; 3, phonograms representing words; 4, phonograms representing
syllables; 5, alphabetic characters. From their four hundred verbal
phonograms and syllabic signs the Egyptians of a remote age--for it is
literally true "that the letters of the alphabet are older than the
Pyramids"--appear to have selected at the outset forty-five symbols
for alphabetic use, but the rare occurrence or special use of some of
these caused a further reduction to twenty-five letters. "All that
remained to be done was to take one simple step--boldly to discard all
the non-alphabetic elements, at once to sweep away the superfluous
lumber, rejecting all the ideograms, the homophones, the polyphones,
the syllables, and the symbolic signs to which the Egyptian scribes
so fondly clung, and so to leave revealed in its grand simplicity
the nearly perfect alphabet, of which, without knowing it, the
Egyptians had been virtually in possession for almost countless ages."
(Taylor, i. 68.) That step they never took, but continued the use of
eye-pictures side by side with that of ear-pictures, instead of passing
to the use of fixed signs for certain sounds.
(_b_) The cursive writing known as _Hieratic_ was an abridged and
conventionalised form of the hieroglyphic. The use of the latter
became mainly restricted to monumental and kindred purposes, while the
hieratic was employed by the priests in copying literary compositions,
notable among which was the _Book of the Dead_, papyrus being the
material most commonly used. This was made from the _byblus hieraticus_
or _Cyperus papyrus_, a plant which flourished in the marshy districts
of the Nile. There it has long been extinct, and is now found only
in Sicily. It would seem to have served as many useful purposes to
the ancient Egyptians as the bamboo serves to-day to the Chinese and
other Orientals. "The roots were used for firewood, parts of the plant
were eaten, and other and coarser parts were made into paper, boats,
ropes, mats, &c." In preparing it for writing material, the outer rind
was removed and the pith then cut into strips; which were laid side
by side, with another set of strips across them fastened by a thin
solution of gum, thus forming a sheet, which was pressed, dried in the
sun, and polished to a smooth surface. The sheets were often joined to
make a roll, which was sometimes above one hundred feet long and varied
in width from six to seventeen inches. The finest papyri of the _Book
of the Dead_ are about fifteen inches wide, and, when they contain a
tolerably large number of chapters, are from eighty to ninety feet
long. Dipping his reed, which was either bruised at the end to make
it brush-like, or cut, pen-like, to a point, in the ink-wells of his
stone, wooden, or sometimes ivory palette, which was often dedicated to
the god Thoth, "lord of divine words," the professional scribe wrote
the text in varying colours, chiefly black or red, but also in other
tints imitative of the subject dealt with, as blue for sky, yellow for
woman, and so forth.
The earliest known specimen of hieratic writing is a papyrus containing
chronicles of the reign of King Asa, whose date, according to a
moderate estimate of Egyptian chronology, is about 3580 B.C.
To the same period the most perfect literary work which has come
down to us is usually assigned, although the copy preserved in the
Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, whither it was brought by M. Prisse
d'Avennes from Thebes, seems to have been written between 2700 and
2500 B.C. This valuable relic, commonly known after its donor
as the _Papyrus Prisse_, is entitled the "Precepts of Ptah-Hetep," and
its contents justify the judgment of Dr. Wallis Budge, that "if all
other monuments of the great civilisation of Egypt were wanting, it
alone would show the moral worth of the Egyptians, and the high ideals
of man's duties which they had formed nearly five thousand five hundred
years ago."
(_c_) The _Demotic_ or _Enchorial_ characters preserve but slight
traces of their derivation from picture-writing. As the term _hieratic_
(Greek _hieratikos_, sacerdotal) denotes the class by whom that writing
was used, so the terms _demotic_ (Greek _demotikos_, of the people)
and _enchorial_ (Greek _enchōrios_, of the country) denote that this
writing was in popular use, being adapted to the purposes of daily
life. It appears to have come into use about 900 B.C., and
so continued till the fourth century of our era. It has been shown
that in the time of Darius and other rulers of the Achæmean dynasty,
proclamations and documents of general importance were set forth in
three languages--Babylonian, Medic, and Persian. So, in the time of
the Ptolemies, who inherited the Egyptian possessions of Alexander
the Great and ruled in the Nile Valley till it fell under the sway of
Rome, all matters of public importance were made known in hieroglyphic,
demotic, and Greek characters. The hieroglyphic was called the "writing
of divine words"; the demotic, "writing of letters"; and the Greek,
"writing of the Greeks."