welcome back to another installment of vintage Egyptologist today we are going
to be introducing a topic that I know all of you are interested in hieroglyphs
by the end of today's video you're going to know the origin of the term
hieroglyph how to differentiate between hieroglyphs hieratic and demotic where
to start reading an ancient Egyptian inscription and the three different uses
of hieroglyphs within a text so let's begin with the most elementary aspect to
the topic today the terminology will use now almost everyone has heard of
hieroglyphs that goes back to the ancient Greek term
taw hero glue fika the sacred script and by glyph it really means the sacred
carved script of the ancient Egyptians and the ancient themselves called it
medu netcher divine words no matter what other scripts came into the Nile
Valley the Egyptians never abandoned hieroglyphs because it had religious
significance now hieroglyphs as the name implies are a sacred script a formal
script and they should be carved there are some painted hieroglyphs as well
that are made with the nice borders the the crisp edges internal details
individual hieroglyphs can be miniature works of art sometimes but if you need
to write a letter to someone or need to jot a note write a receipt the ancient
Egyptians wouldn't traditionally use hieroglyphs for that and as some of you
may know ultimately they had two forms of cursive script the words we use for
these go back I believe to Herodotus who described one as what we call hieratic
for his time it was the cursive script of priests it had been the standard
cursive that developed over time that had been in use for millennia by the
time Herodotus is writing but in his time it was an old-fashioned cursive so
only the priests learned it and by the time of Herodotus really by the middle
of the first millennium BCE there's an even more pared-down cursive that he
calls the popular script or demotic so same route as democracy demos "of the
people" so we technically think of Egyptian as having three scripts
hieroglyphic formal script hieratic the traditional cursive for a long period of
time and then demotic the cursive from let's say very roughly middle of the
first millennium BCE to about the middle of the first millennium CE when the
ancient scripts in Egypt die now how are those change over time to some extent
and hieratic the cursive changes over time it can date things according to
these changes and the study of these changes of the appearance of the signs
is called paleography so we'll talk a little bit more about paleography now
there are other forms of the script that don't get talked about quite so much
there's something that's in between hieroglyphs and hieratic what we might
call cursive hieroglyphs this is sometimes referred to as book script
because the Book of the Dead can be written in this book script so media
where you are writing the inscription or writing and ink is what really dictates
the script if you're going to carve in stone you will use hieroglyphs if you're
going to write a letter on papyrus you will use hieratic but then there's
also an element of development over time if you're writing a letter say in 200
BCE you will be using demotic in fact we
have evidence of priests probably from the Roman period still able to write a
pretty decent archaic form of hieratic we see an inscription like that that
Derchain published from the temples in the Wadi Hellal east of Elkab
where we work to introduce the topic of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs we have
to start with the three uses of a hieroglyphic assignment the first is
phonetic so most hieroglyphs that you see in
ancient Egyptian texts actually represent sounds so it might look like
an owl or a basket or a horned Viper but what they're actually writing are the
sounds represented by those signs so I'm going to give you one quick example that
I can do just sitting here and that is a human hand cut off essentially at the
wrist and when you see that human hand it is the sound D we call that a
uniliteral because it represents a single consonant there also bi and tri
literals that have two or even three consonants the second use of a
hieroglyphic sign is as an ideogram and what this means is that the hieroglyph
is functioning both phonetically and the meaning of the word is what that sign
actually represents so to take another example that I can use just sitting here
is the arm the human arm cut off a little bit above the elbow that is an
ayin sound that exists in modern Arabic and ancient Egyptian and other
afro-asiatic languages but not in English so we normally just write it as
an A although strictly speaking that's not what it is phonetically so the ayin
arm is used as the sound ayin in multiple many many many words but if you
have that same arm and you put a vertical stroke underneath
that means read it both phonetically as ayin but also what the word means that
stroke says we're talking about a physical arm and then finally the third
form of hieroglyphs a third usage we could say is as a determinative and a
determinative indicates the class to which a word belongs so for example if
we're talking about a verb of motion you use a pair of legs if you're talking
about Basenji tjesem dogs you would actually have a picture of a Basenji and
there are examples that look just like Narmer at the end of the word
and so that Basenji determinative Narmer at the end of a hieroglyphic word
doesn't add any phonetic meaning but it gives you a clue as to what that word
means the other really significant aspect of determinative in ancient
agents is that hieroglyphs do not have word breaks so when you see a line of
hieroglyphic text one word follows another without a space but if you learn
to recognize the determinative it is surprising how quickly you can pick up
on well this is a determinative so that must be the end of a word the
predominant writing direction for the ancient Egyptians is right-to-left
certainly for the cursive scripts that's really the only way they wrote with very
few exceptions I've seen a couple of graffiti where someone wrote hieratic
left-to-right it doesn't look very pretty it's not great hieroglyphs on the
other hand are exceptional they can be written left to right right to left or
in vertical columns so they really function as an element in the decoration
in fact the ancient Egyptians probably wouldn't understand our use of the term
annotation or decoration for them it's all visual
all communication there's a verb say shehai - write but it can also mean
to draw it can even mean to paint and to put on makeup so when you see a
hieroglyphic text and you know it can be read either left-to-right or
right-to-left and if it's in columns it's always from the top to the bottom
but the question is where do you start and this is actually really easy you
always read toward the faces if John and I were hieroglyphs in inscription let's
say war on either side of a doorway and they love to do that to make it
symmetrical you would read John from left to right but you would read me from
right to left and sometimes they will have an inscription that begins let's
say in the middle of a doorway and reads in one direction on the one side and
another direction in the other and there might be an ankh sign right in the
middle that you would read with each text in each direction I think we should
be able to find an example oh absolutely yes that's very common on doorways what
are so-called false doors because there were doors for the spirit to receive
offerings like the ka-spirit of the deceased ancient Egyptian is the longest
continuous tradition of writing in world civilizations thus far its origins go
back as far as 3250 BCE during the reign of a king named scorpion and this
is a story we will tell in detail later he probably called himself Scorpion
know you're the first ruler of dynasty 0 it's really about that time that we see
the proto-writing turning into true early hieroglyphic script in the
earliest phase of the Egyptian language we call it old Egyptian this is the
language of autobiographical tax of the third fourth fifth and sixth dynasties
and also the Pyramid Texts which themselves are pretty archaic by the
first time they are tested at the end that's dynasty during the Middle Kingdom
we called the phase of the language middle Egyptian what's really
interesting about this is that we see middle Egyptian obviously beginning even
before the old Egyptian textual tradition is dead and then late Egyptian
that we traditionally say really begins to enter the written tradition around
the time of amenhotep ii through Akhenaten in the middle of 18th dynasty
we actually get late Egyptian isms showing up even as early as say the the
late old kingdom kind of early middle Egyptian so to put this into terms that
we can kind of understand in this world it's as if you took an abbreviation OMG
and it somehow made it into a law so was tend to be a higher register much more
formal language where's what you're gonna text on your phone is going to be
much more colloquial so as the Egyptian language goes forward you have more and
more representations of the colloquial language in writing but then there are
other genres like laws or historical inscriptions where you really expect the
language to be formal but those two registers can exist simultaneously it's
both chronological and it depends on the formality of what you're saying it does
so so this is something that's usually referred to as diglossia so in other
words in ancient Egypt if I wrote a letter in very nice late Egyptian during
the reign of Ramses the second about 1250 BCE that would be completely normal
wouldn't phase anyone it would be totally acceptable expected proper but
if I wrote a letter in old Egyptian if I tried to mimic the formulations of let's
say one of those first Intermediate Period letters to the dad from around 20
100 BCE or so that would shock people that would seem very strange it would be
like texting in the style of the King James Bible and yet at the same time if
I have religious treatise and then I have a say our quotation out of an
earlier religious text I might bring that old register of the language in and
it would be completely proper it would be acceptable and when you look at the
script you can have that same level of formality versus informality you until
very late in Egyptian history would not see hieratic carved on a temple wall
as an original that's supposed to be on the temple in fact are there any
examples where the first script on a temple wall is hieratic I know there
are those Dhokla steely faith begins and I believe it begins in the first
millennium BCE that you really start to see more formal monuments made with
hieratic as the script the monument but already really the classic period for
this is in the Middle Kingdom already beginning around 2,000 BCE we do start
to see the development of lapidary hieratic this hybrid cursive
hieroglyphic script you might it's almost like it's a it's a cursive script
that has aspects of hieroglyphic orthography introduced into it so you
can write it relatively quickly you don't have to be trained as a how
glyphic scribe but it still imparts an aura of the formality that hieroglyphs
always bring with them one of the things we should point out is that students
nowadays you know everyone learns hieroglyphs first when you learn to read
and write Egyptian but it's not what it would have
been first weekend yeah as far as we can tell for antiquity you would first learn
cursive because that's what you would need if you made a receipt if you wrote
a letter to someone if you signed your name on something etc so we we have
evidence that Rock inscription sites of the number of people who are probably
entirely literate when it comes to day-to-day life even even writing
complex letters possibly even legal documents etc but when they have to say
I'm going to write this in hieroglyphs because I have some time on my hands I'm
going to try to carve this sometimes the carving doesn't look that great because
they're a little bit uncertain as to what hieroglyphics on or what
hieroglyphic group matches the hieratic they want to transcribe in hieroglyphs