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

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