How would one represent something like ‘belief’ or ‘knowledge’? There are possibilities, but none of them quite so clear as representing physical objects such as houses or mouths. Why not continue in this vein and represent everything by means of a picture of the object in question? Well, for one thing, this does not work in the case of abstract nouns. In practice when signs are used in this way, they often occur alongside a single vertical stroke as follows: Thus the character for ‘ house’ in Egyptian is clearly a house in plan (on the left below), and the character used to represent ‘ mouth’ looks like a mouth (on the right below). Such signs do of course exist in Egyptian. where an object is denoted purely by means of a picture, or ideogram, of that object. It was not the only writing system used to record Egyptian, but is the most widely known on account of its use in monumental inscriptions, such as the following funerary stela, currently held in Manchester.Īt first glance it may appear that Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is an entirely ideographic writing system, i.e. Hieroglyphics were one of the writing systems used to record the Ancient Egyptian language, for approximately three millennia until the practice finally died out in the first few centuries CE. Before exploring some possible links in future blog posts, for those who are not necessarily familiar with the Egyptian writing system, I thought in this blog post I would lay out some of the basic principles of the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system. A priori it therefore seems plausible that there should be a link, either genetic or typological, between the Egyptian writing system and that of the early north-west Semitic alphabetic writing systems. The fact that these three writing systems do not (in principle at least) record vowels is at odds with other notable second millennium BC writing systems, namely Linear B (for Greek) and (non-Ugaritic) cuneiform, which do record vowels.
Met Museum New York, Rogers Fund, 1915 ( ).
This is the same characteristic in Phoenician and Ugaritic writing systems that I am investigating for my part in the CREWS project.ĭetail from coffin of Khnumnakht, Middle Kingdom. I wanted to do this because Middle Egyptian hieroglyphics omits almost entirely the writing of vowels. It was a very rich experience, and it certainly improved my knowledge of Middle Egyptian. Last week I had the pleasure of participating in the Bloomsbury Summer School in Egyptology, where I developed my reading in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
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