Hieroglyphs

Jiho Hone · 

Studied Anthropology & Art History at McGill University

Oftentimes people imagine Egyptians painfully ‘drawing’ their writing every time they have to record something. This is a silly scenario to think about actually.

In reality, somewhat similar to how Japan is today, Ancient Egypt had multiple types of writing systems at the same time – that co-evolved since the beginning of Egypt itself (circa 3000 BC).

The writing system that many are familiar with are the Hieroglyphics, which was used for permanent artistic/holy purposes. The writing system that the average Egyptian used to actually write things down was Hieratic – which in essence was an ultra cursive simplified version of the Hieroglyphics (friendly for writing down on paper).

Comparison of the two systems, same phrase. You will see that they are extremely different due to the radicality of the simplification.

The Hieroglyphics (The Holy Glyphs)

Oftentimes people mischaracterize the Hieroglyphs as a ‘pictographic’ writing system but that is false. The Hieroglyphs were a combination of logographic, syllabic, alphabetic, and numeric glyphs all lumped into one. Some of the glyphs were interchangeable from one mode to another. In fact, the Latin alphabet that we have today ultimately derive from the set of Alphabetic Hieroglyphs.

Example Logographic Hieroglyphs (8000+ ? exist)

Example Syllabic Hieroglyphs, divided into bilateral and trilaterals (Around 200 glyphs exist)

All the Alphabetic Hieroglyphs (24 glyphs, sometimes 27)

You might have noticed the refined and artistic nature of the Hieroglyphs – since the writing system was focused on the aesthetic picturesque nature as much as the meaning within it. This is because the Ancient Egyptians viewed the Hieroglyphs as a type of holy art itself, art that harbored meaning within. The Hieroglyphs weren’t used for everyday writing or even for important scholarly/government documents (and its highly inconvenient to use them anyway). They were only used for artistic, holy, and permanent situations such as:

• Embellishing temple walls and other architecture with mythologies or grandiose historical events. Or even magical spells, prayers to gods, praises to Egypt, chronicles of someone’s life, or other pompous information.
• Embellishing Statues, furniture, jewelry, or other permanent artwork with hieroglyphs, usually confined to names and shorter statements such as praises and prayers.

The aesthetic nature of the Hieroglyphs oftentimes meant that they were juxtapositioned or infused within many of the actual artworks themselves.

Sometimes the Hieroglyphs harmoniously blend in (purposefully) with the pictures/reliefs – it can be hard to tell from where the Hieroglyphs start and from where the pictures end.

Hieratic Script

Hieratic is the script that the Ancient Egyptians used most of the time, even in religious situations. Your everyday writing, your income calculations, your recites, your scholarly studies, your bureaucratic documents, your scrolls of novels, and even books of holy nature were written in Hieratic. So like I say again, imagining some Egyptian painfully and ineffectively ‘drawing’ their writing every time they write is a ridiculous comedy.

Here is a contrast with some of the Hieroglyphs to highlight the radical simplifications in Hieratic:

You can also see that it co-evolved with the Hieroglyphs through time.

Hieratic simplification of the Alphabetic Hieroglyphs:

Hieratic simplification of the Egyptian Numerals:

(so instead of writing the hieroglyphic glyph for 1000 nine times for 9000, you could only write one hieratic symbol once for 9000)

Legacy

The Ancient Egyptian writing system(s) is the origin of so many different writing systems in the world, which includes Latin, Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic. The Egyptians already created the alphabetic system as a part of their writing since 3000 BC, which has been isolated and altered.

Pathway to the Latin Alphabet

Hieroglyphs -> Hieratic -> Paleo-Semetic -> Phoenician ->

Greek -> Latin

Pathway to the Arabic Abjad

Hieroglyphs -> Hieratic -> Paleo-Semetic -> Phoenician ->

Aramaic -> Nabatean -> Arabic

So why didn’t the Egyptians entirely phoneticize their writing system? To simply put it, the writing was holy. Also, the Egyptians are renowned for being hardcore traditionalists. That is when we compare it to the traditionalists of any other civilization that existed. To the Egyptians the Greco Romans or the Mesopotamians were too chaotic and changed up stuff too often too much. Possibly no other culture expression stayed continuous and stable as much as the Egyptians did. The foreign peoples in the peripheries of Egypt had no sentimental, religious, or a cultural connection to the writing – thus they only applied the technological essence that was within the Egyptian script(s).

The Hieroglyphs were in the longest continuous usage in the entirety of human history, from circa 3200 BC (Naquada III culture) to AD 537 (The end of the Isis cult with the closing of Philae).