The White River Valley Herald

The Incredible Complexity of Hieroglyphs




An example of hieroglyphic writing on a wall in the Karnak temple of Amun-Ra, Egypt, at night. Even after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, it took more than 20 years to translate the strange system of sounds, syllables, and determinants. (Wikipedia Commons / Steve F-E-Cameron)

An example of hieroglyphic writing on a wall in the Karnak temple of Amun-Ra, Egypt, at night. Even after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, it took more than 20 years to translate the strange system of sounds, syllables, and determinants. (Wikipedia Commons / Steve F-E-Cameron)

Many a tourist in Egypt, upon seeing a wall of an ancient temple covered with weird symbols, might briefly wish to impress his guide and fellow tourists by declaring casually Oh yeah, I can read that. It would be just too cool!

The Rosetta stone, which describes a tax exemption for Egyptian priests, was key in deciphering ancient hieroglyphics and is today on display in the British Museum. (Wikipedia Commons / Matija Podhraški)

The Rosetta stone, which describes a tax exemption for Egyptian priests, was key in deciphering ancient hieroglyphics and is today on display in the British Museum. (Wikipedia Commons / Matija Podhraški)

In fact, Egyptian writing, known as hieroglyphs, had become indecipherable by the sixth century. Ancient Egyptian pagan civilization had pretty much decayed, and Christian civilization had taken over. Greek writing had come into general use. For the next 1300 years hieroglyphs were a mystery.

In Egypt they were seen everywhere–on walls, tombs, ancient monuments and on long-buried scrolls–but nobody knew what they said. Hieroglyphs were tantalizing, because most of the symbols were, by themselves, pictures of recognizable things such as birds, snakes, women, men, children, kings, ropes, fish, houses, doorways, feathers, leopards, furniture, body parts, plants and food. But their meaning was unknown.

It seemed that we would never be able to read hieroglyphs, but many charlatans claimed they could. They formed cults and even religions based on their alleged knowledge of the great mystical secrets of the past as gleaned, they said, from old Egyptian. But, in relatively recent times, hieroglyphs were finally deciphered, we knew what the inscriptions really said, and a lot of faces went red.

It was partially luck. In 1799, when Napoleon occupied Egypt, French soldiers in the Egyptian town of Rosetta discovered a stone inscribed not only in hieroglyphs but also in ancient Greek, a well-known language. Assuming that the inscriptions said the same thing, a number of scholars tried to decipher the hieroglyphs, but the task was difficult. They succeeded in figuring out only one or two words, and only a few sounds. Why So Difficult? One reason for the difficulty, as scholars learned later, is that hieroglyphic symbols can represent not only sounds (like an alphabet), but also whole syllables, and whole words. To further confuse matters, there are additional symbols, known as “determinants” that are silent, but are crucial to allowing the reader to determine what is meant in the script.

These were necessary because written Egyptian had few vowels, and many different words were spelled the same. If it were English, we might not know whether “sbr” stands for Subaru or saber, but it would be clarified if immediately following the sound-depictions there were a depiction of a car or a sword.

Another difficulty was that the Egyptian language, and the hieroglyphs used to write it, lasted over 3000 years. It changed and evolved a great deal during that period. In earliest hierodynasties glyphic writing, each picture was more likely to represent a word or thought. It is only later that they also began to represent syllables and sounds. Finally, there emerged a set of around 25 characters-an alphabet-that represents specific sounds. Any tourist in Egypt today can buy jewelry with his or her name depicted phonetically with these alphabetical symbols.

The ancient Egyptians themselves never reformed their writing into a strictly alphabetical system. Instead, hieroglyphs evolved over the millennia into a highly complex mixture of different types of symbols that indicated sounds, syllables, whole words, and determinants, not to mention other signs that denote singular, plural, masculine, feminine, and whether a thought was active or passive, actual or hypothetical, past, present or future. It rendered the deciphering extraordinarily difficult. Champollion The first person to untangle hieroglyphs was a young French linguistic genius named Jean- Francois Champollion. Working in the 1820s, Champollion finally deciphered the parallel inscriptions on the Rosetta stone, and outlined the full structure and grammar of ancient Egyptian writing.

At the outset, Champollion could see that the Greek inscription on the Rosetta stone contained the names of Queen Cleopatra and King Ptolomey. He also noted that in the parallel hieroglyphic inscription some words were encircled in frames. He guessed that the frames indicated great importance, and that they probably corresponded to the names of the royal personages. Since “Kleopatra” and “Ptolomis” have some sounds in common, and each repeats some sounds in itself, Champollion was able to confirm the hieroglyphic signs for p, t, a, o, l and deduce a few others such as k and s.

One of Champollion’s great advantages was his knowledge of Coptic, a language descended from ancient Egyptian. While Coptic is quite different from the original Egyptian language, it gave Champollion some understanding of the structure of ancient Egyptian, and offered clues to many ancient Egyptian words.

With the sounds that he had discovered in the Rosetta stone, by working tirelessly to apply them to other hieroglyphic inscriptions, by using the parallel Greek inscription on the Rosetta stone, and by inspired conjectures regarding other words, Champollion laboriously unveiled the ancient Egyptian writing system.

His discoveries countered the assertions of many cultists and charlatans, as well as the theories of earlier scholars, so his work tightened the jaws of many “experts” and made Champollion many enemies. Nevertheless, his achievement was undeniable. When applied to the countless surviving hieroglyphic inscriptions, it opened the book of history covering ancient Egypt and the Near East.

The Egyptian Legacy

Egypt was one of the longest-lasting nations of history. After historians learned to read hieroglyphs, they were able to reconstruct much the history of the Egyptian kingdom starting about 3000 BC. The history began with the first ruler who united the country, through the early when the pyramids were built, to the expansion of Egyptian rule into the Near-East, to the glorious reign of Queen Hatshepsut, the conquests of King Tutmose, civil wars, occupations and outside incursions, down to Egypt’s last ruler, the famous Cleopatra, in 30 BC.

The body of ancient Egyptian writing is immense. It contains some of humanity’s oldest literature, including tales with moral messages that the Egyptians used to teach young people. Perhaps the most famous is the Story of Sinhue, regarding an Egyptian who goes abroad, has many adventures, and returns to live out his old age in his native land. It is a study of character and morals, often compared favorably with works by Shakespeare.

And there is voluminous historical material and countless religious writings, including the much quoted Book of the Dead, which discusses the human soul and its eventual fate. The Hymn to the Sun by the Egyptian king Akhnaton, ranks with some of the world’s great poetry, and was probably the inspiration behind the 104th Psalm.

There were writings on medicine, science, architecture and art, all bespeaking a highly civilized people who exercised a profound influence on neighboring cultures including Greece and, through the Greeks, on us.

Thought Patterns

Many psychologists believe that the advent of writing created a revolution in the patterns of human thought. Humans instinctively assimilate knowledge through impressions and absorption of complex images. Such images contain much simultaneous data and detail. But writing is different. It is linear and conveys data not simultaneously, but in sequence.

Writing forces the mind first to absorb the sequence and then to put the bits together later. Of course, the spoken language also forces the mind to do the same thing, but lots of reading and writing makes a person do it in a big and systematic way. This generates a yet greater capacity for analysis and systematic reasoning.

Since Egyptian hieroglyphs were so complicated and convoluted, Egyptian writing was very difficult to learn. Those who could read and write fluently were a small percentage of the population-estimated at one percent. They were the scribes who became indispensible not only for their ability to keep records and to retrieve accumulated knowledge, but for their ability to think, and for their high level of competence that always comes from thinking well.

Along with large landowners and military leaders, the scribes were a dominant social class throughout most of Egyptian history. They had their own patron deity, known in Egyptian as Dihuty and as Thoth in Greek–the god of reckoning and learning. The scribes preserved the remarkable accumulated knowledge of the ancient Egyptians. By the time Rome made Egypt part of the Roman empire in 30 BC, the country’s intellectual influence had already been widely diffused throughout the ancient world.


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