100 Hieroglyphs: Think Like an Egyptian
By Barry Kemp
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About this ebook
Egyptian culture is divided from us by several millennia, a lost people and a dead language. We can discover much about this fascinating civilization from its physical remains, but perhaps the greatest insights into the Egyptian mind come from Egyptian hieroglyphs. They reveal the priorities, concerns and beliefs of the Egyptians—a whole worldview. Unlike the Western alphabet, which is an arbitrary set of symbols not anchored in reality, each Egyptian hieroglyph denotes a concept central to Egyptian thinking. The language and its written form are intimately bound up with the imaginative world of the Egyptians.
Here, Barry Kemp presents 100 of the Egyptian hieroglyphs to provide access to this unique culture. Kemp takes us on a journey through the Egyptian mind, revealing not only aspects of day-to-day life in Ancient Egypt, but gradually building a picture of the historical and mythological references that were the cornerstones of Egyptian thought. This fascinating book helps us get inside a long-vanished world.
“A capsule key to the ancient Egyptian mind.”—Dr. Norman Hammond, The Times
“Kemp uses 100 hieroglyphs as a springboard for discussion of a range of topics . . . This clever premise works well . . . [an] enjoyable and informative volume.”—Times Higher Education Supplement
“This is most certainly a book that will challenge and reward.”—New World
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Reviews for 100 Hieroglyphs
11 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This was an amazing find for me. I ran into it at my local used book store and thought it would be a unique way to look at the Ancient Egyptian language and culture, since I would be able to see both at the same time. We often talk about how language influences culture and the other way around, but we never really get to see how it all started.Don't let the size of this book fool you, there is more information here than you would expect. Each of the 100 hieroglyphs is explored in a page or two, but that explanation is why the hieroglyph is as it is, which covers much of the culture of Egypt, from housing to phonetics.My only quarrel is that some of the hieroglyphs are more in depth than others. It is explained how most researchers believe the word "land" is pronounced - "ta", but many words like "mud" have no pronunciation with them. It would have been an all-encompassing experience to have included that, but then this book wasn't really meant as a dictionary, but of a study in language and culture.
Book preview
100 Hieroglyphs - Barry Kemp
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The idea for this book came from the fertile mind of George Miller; the carving of my unwieldy English into something more readable and accurate was the task of Bella Shand, both of them of Granta Books. Andy Boyce drew the hieroglyphs.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Timeline
Maps
Introduction
1 Land
2 Desert
3 Grain (of sand)
4 Life
5 Sun
6 Horizon
7 ‘To appear’
8 Water
9 Field/countryside
10 Papyrus column
11 Lotus
12 Tree
13 Province
14 Stela (standing block or slab of stone)
15 Plough
16 Sickle
17 Grain pile
18 Beer jug
19 Bull
20 Pig
21 Seth-animal
22 Red
23 Sparrow
24 Good
25 Serpent
26 House
27 Door
28 Mat
29 Cat
30 Fire
31 Wick
32 City
33 Wall
34 Mound
35 West
36 Cemetery
37 Pyramid
38 Mummy
39 Jackal
40 Road
41 Donkey
42 Chariot
43 Boat, travelling upstream
44 Sail
45 Sacred barque
46 Sky
47 Otherworld (Duat)
48 Star
49 Year
50 Moon
51 Eternity
52 Primaeval time
53 Spirit
54 King
55 Cartouche
56 Palace
57 To unite
58 Truth (Maat)
59 To be stable
60 To follow
61 Enemy
62 Bow
63 Man and woman
64 Razor
65 Unguent
66 To love
67 Sistrum
68 Baboon
69 To hear
70 Mouth
71 Body
72 Pustule
73 Ka
74 Ba
75 Heart
76 To be born
77 To come into existence
78 Child
79 Old man
80 Official
81 Sceptre of power
82 Scribal kit
83 Cylinder seal
84 Papyrus roll
85 Soldier
86 Craftsman
87 Gold
88 Bronze
89 Potter’s kiln
90 Balance
91 Cloth
92 To be pure
93 To be divine
94 Sacred
95 Festival
96 Statue
97 Wonder
98 Offering place
99 Protection
100 Wedjat (eye of wellbeing)
Note on sources
Index
About the Author
Copyright
TIMELINE
Dates for the earlier periods of ancient Egyptian history are still not settled, although the margins of variation are mostly within decades. The dates cited here are those of The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, edited by Ian Shaw (Oxford 2000).
Map 1. The Middle East
Map 2. Egypt
INTRODUCTION
There must be about the same number of people in the world today who have a working knowledge of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing as there were literate people in ancient Egypt at any one time. Several books published in recent years are aimed at teaching people the first steps in reading hieroglyphs. This book, however, is not an instruction manual; rather, it introduces 100 hieroglyphs as a set of entry points into the world and mindset of the ancient Egyptians.
Egyptian hieroglyphs are one of the earliest recorded steps in the creation of the written word, a remarkable invention central to the development of a complex society. Hieroglyphic writing uses pictures, like some other early scripts, inviting the view that writing began as a codified artistic representation of the visible world. Scenes on Egyptian tomb and temple walls of, say, country life or religious rituals sometimes integrate text and picture so closely that the whole scene is like an enlarged hieroglyph, particularly as artistic conventions for hieroglyphs and drawings were the same, with humans, animals and objects rendered in outline in a precise way, and with the rules of perspective often ignored.
Streams of hieroglyphs are not like a piece of cinefilm or a strip cartoon, however. Only a relatively small number of hieroglyphs – ideographs – are pictures of the idea being communicated. Most of the signs require the instantaneous mental substitution of concepts that are quite different from the represented image – the sounds of letters, singly or in groups. They reveal a mental ability to override first impressions of what a picture ‘stands for’, and to construct instead a system of meaning with its own integrity. Hieroglyphic writing, just like all full writing systems, is the product of a highly sophisticated level of brain processing. There is nothing naïve about it.
Some phonetic signs express single sounds, like letters of an alphabet; others express two or three sounds. A more limited set of signs, known as determinatives, can be added to the end of a noun or verb to place that word into a more general category. A good example of a determinative is a pair of walking legs, added to the end of verbs of motion. Hieroglyphic writing requires a constant shifting back and forth between symbol and sound value, the Egyptians mixing these values together to form word-shapes. These shapes instantly gave their meaning to Egyptian readers without it being necessary for them to break words down into their component parts. People who nowadays learn hieroglyphs pick up this facility quickly. (They also quickly get used to the fact that Egyptians normally wrote from right to left – as reflected in the spelling of words in this book – although in certain decorative contexts a left-to-right order was followed and the hieroglyphs themselves were reversed.)
For example, the main sign in (niwet), which means ‘city’, both conveys its sound value and acts as a determinative (see no. 32). The single stroke is added to emphasize that its core meaning is being referred to – that it is an ideograph – and so could also be said to be acting as a determinative (for the category ‘signs as ideographs’), while the sign a picture of a small cake that writes the single letter t, indicates that it belongs to the feminine category. Apart from a similarly sounding word for ‘underworld’ used in specialized mythological texts, the main sign is not used to write any other word. It is, however, normally added to the names of towns and cities as a determinative, to show to what general category of phenomena, namely towns, the names belong.
‘City’, where the dominant sign is a simplified plan of crossing streets, is an easily recognizable symbol of a city or town. The verb ‘to love’, (meri), by contrast, uses a sign depicting an agricultural hoe in no way related to the concept of love. Although it has not yet been identified in texts, there must have been a word for hoe that had two dominant consonants, m + r. A convention developed that other words in which m + r were prominent, including the verb ‘to love’, should be written with the hoe hieroglyph. From familiarity, on seeing the sign for hoe in a certain context – for example, in temples where the king was ‘beloved’ of the local god – an Egyptian would immediately read the word ‘love’.
Ancient Egyptian was a living oral language and most hieroglyphs represent the sounds of consonants and certain emphatically expressed vowels. More weakly spoken vowels, which changed with different grammatical usage, were left unwritten, as in modern standard Arabic. Because Egyptian words were not fully written out and the language is dead we cannot speak it as an ancient Egyptian would have done. Too many nuances of pronunciation are lost. We know approximately what sound each of the hieroglyphs stands for and this gives us a rough framework that we can transfer to our own alphabet, a process called transliteration. It is a convention to render transliterations in italic. Many of the consonant sounds are the same as in English, but Egyptian contained a few sounds that require special alphabetic letters. It used four degrees of vocal strength in letting out the ‘h’ sound, distinguished in transliteration by h, and There are two ‘a’ sounds, rendered as and the former more or less the English a, the latter with a glottal sound often heard in Arabic, and two versions of ‘k’, k and again a glottal-like version. The transliteration signs and w stand for a firm ‘i’ or ‘y’ and a positive ‘w’; and represent approximately the sounds ‘sh’, ‘dj’ and ‘th’. The absence of most vowels means that we have to get used to seeing a word like (pr), which means ‘house’, and saying to ourselves ‘per’. Each transliteration in this book is followed by a simple English rendering, in brackets.
Buried within the hieroglyphic system is an alphabet. This has been put to good use by tourist jewellery shops in modern Egypt which offer to ‘write your name in hieroglyphs’ (and then cast it beautifully in a silver or gold pendant). This may be fun, but no ancient Egyptian would have used hieroglyphs in this way. When writing foreign names, Egyptians broke them down into syllables and used a set of hieroglyphs modified for this particular purpose. They did not spell names alphabetically as we do. It is tempting to assume that an alphabet is an easier system to learn and to use than hieroglyphs, but this is not necessarily true. A Western alphabet, although consisting of far fewer signs, is an arbitrary set of symbols not anchored in a representation of the world around us. The great advantage, however, of an alphabetic script is that it can be used to write any language and is not grounded in one specific culture, whereas Egyptian hieroglyphs are so intimately bound up with the ancient Egyptian language that they cannot as a full system be used to write any other language.
Hieroglyphic writing is in itself an introduction to how Egyptians thought. It is not the product of a brief period when people sat down and drew up a large table, in which signs and their phonetic values and pictorial meanings were arranged logically, with attempts to avoid duplication and to fill gaps. Instead the system looks like an accumulation of habits based around a few principles, enriched by idiosyncratic personal selection and subject to the processes of extinction and divergent growth that complex systems display over long periods of time. It is full of inconsistencies and usages that surprise us. But, despite this, it worked beautifully. When scribes sought to improve it, they simply added new variants.
The evidence for the earliest stages of hieroglyphic writing is incomplete. At least as far back as 4000
BC
people making pottery scratched individual symbols onto the surface of jars, probably to mark ownership. There is a general reluctance to see this as writing, any more than watching traffic lights change or interpreting facial expressions can be said to constitute reading, even though information is being transmitted. In 1988, many small bone and ivory tags inscribed with groups of signs, usually one or two simple pictures followed by a numeral, were discovered in a tomb at Abydos dating to around 3150
BC
, a century and a half before the 1st Dynasty. These are the earliest examples of writing so far found in Egypt; the signs, even though few in number, seem to follow rules and can be linked to hieroglyphic signs of later periods. From the beginning of the 1st Dynasty short texts appear, using quite an extensive set of signs, which no one doubts are examples of proper hieroglyphic writing. The texts are brief and record the names of kings, important events and elements of the administrative system. They have proved insufficient, however, for charting the detailed development of the writing system, hieroglyph by hieroglyph. We have to wait another five or six centuries, until the latter part of the Old Kingdom, to encounter narrative texts (carved in stone) of any significant length and examples of texts written on papyrus – by this time the system had reached a mature stage. All of the translations of texts used in this book date to no earlier than this period.
Many of the written sources – stories, useful advice on how to live contained within manuals of instruction written by famous sages, love poems, private letters – communicate with us fairly directly. Other sources are philosophical speculations about the nature of existence, written by priests. They created in intricate detail an ‘Otherworld’ in which the forces that governed existence – especially the sun-god – struggled to keep the universe in equilibrium. The ‘Book of the Dead’, a collection of utterances or spells, was one popular religious text that equipped the spirit of its dead owner with knowledge to navigate safely through this complicated and dangerous realm.
The sources that depict the Otherworld took much knowledge for granted, and did not lay out a system of religious thought. The Egyptians, familiar with the details, found no need for simple explanation of this complex world. They felt enriched by alternative explanations laid side by side, accepting an ambiguity and incompleteness of knowledge. Although they argued legal cases in courts of law, they did not apply an adversarial style – which aims for a single correct verdict – to speculative knowledge. So the gods simultaneously displayed human fallibilities subject to weaknesses of body and conduct, while representing philosophical ideals, such as justice, truth, evil and power, and the fundamental elements of the universe. Reading Egyptian religious texts can be a bewildering experience as we try to enter a distinct cultural mindset.
The single ideographic hieroglyphic signs provide us with one way of exploring the unique Egyptian world. They do not paint a complete picture, however, for not all significant areas of experience were covered by their own distinctive hieroglyph, and many important words and concepts used a dominant sign which was based on phonetic similarity rather than direct representation, as explained earlier with the verb ‘to love’. Nonetheless, a choice of 100 hieroglyphs presents an initial sketch of the ancient Egyptian world from specifically Egyptian concepts and knowledge. If we want to think like an Egyptian we need to think hieroglyphs.
Here, I have created an album of snapshots of what it was like to be an ancient Egyptian. Part of that experience is recreated in the order in which I have presented the hieroglyphs. Modern conventions encourage us to index a broad field of knowledge in alphabetic order, even though this is conceptually arbitrary. The Egyptians did not attach the same degree of importance to the initial letters of words. One long text, written around 1000
BC
by the ancient scholar Amenemope, sets out a scheme of knowledge in the form of a word list. He provides no explanations for the individual words, but they are arranged according to a progression of association. Sometimes association runs smoothly, but sometimes large jumps occur. His list begins with words for sky, water and earth, moves through categories of people, towns of Egypt, and types of buildings and agricultural land, and finishes up with a list of an ox’s body parts. I have not emulated his order, not least because I have included categories of experience (such as ‘to come into existence’) whereas Amenemope confined himself to concrete nouns. But I have tried to follow a flow of associations, beginning with the visible world around the Egyptians, just as Amenemope did.
Ancient Egyptian civilization ran its course in roughly 3000 years, from around 3000
BC
until a time within the life of the Roman Empire. The familiar images of ancient Egypt – pyramids, Tutankhamun, animal mummies and temples such as Edfu that have survived almost complete – belong to different periods within this span and are not necessarily typical outside these periods. I have largely ignored time distinctions, though, and have drawn examples from the full breadth of Egyptian civilization, to develop a picture of a society that was different from any other.
My main concession to the long time-span covered is to tie some examples to the scheme of Egyptian dynasties. Ancient Egypt was ruled by hereditary kings (Pharaohs) from a succession of royal families, or dynasties. The dynasties were set in order and numbered from one to 30, not long after the last dynasty had departed, by an Egyptian priest named Manetho. He lived under one of the Greek-speaking kings who succeeded Alexander the Great (who had conquered Egypt in 332
BC
). Two thousand years later, Manetho’s scheme remains useful in a rough-and-ready way. Modern historians group the dynasties into broader periods: the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, the New Kingdom and the Late Period, separated by three Intermediate Periods of divided rule and sporadic internal warfare.
I invite you to share my fascination with a society that existed before anything remotely modern intruded. Ancient Egypt shows how far a civilization can go not only without complex technology, but also without many of the ideas and systems of belief that we are inclined to accept as the bedrock of modern civilization. We understand the beginnings of the universe in a way that was unimaginable to the Egyptians, but the question ‘Why?’ remains unanswered, and turns many to religion just as it did the Egyptians. Personally, I feel good about modern dentistry, ambiguous about government interference in everyday life, horrified by the magnification of the scale of hatred and killing that has happened in my lifetime and that of my parents. The ancient Egyptians wondered why the world was such a chaotic, unharmonious place. I wonder the same and am just as bewildered as they were. Ancient Egypt provides us with a measure of how far, and how little, the world has progressed in the last few thousand years.
1. LAND
The heart of Egypt was and still is the floodplain of the river Nile,