EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS

With the foregoing references to some of the most venerable documents that have yet come to light, we may leave Assyria for Egypt, no longer a land of marvel and of mystery, with its past hidden as the sources of the great river of which that land is "the gift" were long hidden. For the discovery of the key to that past, and of the vast waters that feed the Nile, alike lie within the present century. Till then the veil of Isis hung over the significance of the inscriptions on coffin, sepulchral box, stele, tomb, obelisk, and temple, and over the interpretation of characters written on papyri rolls centuries before the foundations of Athens were laid. Of these records, be it noted, Death, which sweeps away man and the memory of him from his fellows, has been more than aught else—in Egypt, and indeed, all the world over, but notably in Egypt—the preserver. And this because there all that appertained to the departed was guarded with the most jealous care. The tomb, as often elsewhere, was modelled on the plan of the house, and supplied with utensils, food, and drink, or adorned with the painted representations of these things on the walls, for the needs of the ka, or double, sahn, or spirit, or some other of the eight Egyptian ontological divisions of the individual.

Like the other pictographic systems already surveyed, the Egyptian interests us because it has preserved the traces of its origin, adding its "cloud of witnesses" to the identity of the several stages of development marking the scripts of all literate peoples. Until very recently, its chief interest lay in the belief that it is the parent of the family of alphabets of the civilised world; but, as will be shown later on, the theory is no longer tenable. Although the earliest known examples of Egyptian hieroglyphs (Greek hieros, "sacred," and glypho, "to carve," so called in the belief that they were used solely by the priests) contain alphabetic characters, they have come down as highly elaborated types of picture-writing, the changes in which during the long period covered by the records being so slight that, to cite Professor Whitney, "it is like a language which has never forgotten the derivations of its words, or corrupted their etymological form, however much it may have altered its meaning." Therefore, although the Egyptians had developed alphabet-signs five thousand years b.c. they never advanced to the stage of their sole and independent use, partly because of the conservative instincts of the race, which, fostering veneration for the old, was reluctant to alter anything, and partly because, as Professor Flinders Petrie has pointed out, their "treatment of everything was essentially decorative, the love of form and drawing being in Egypt a greater force than amongst any other ancient people. Babylon and China, from want of sufficient artistic taste, allowed their pictorial writing to sink into a mere string of debased and conventional forms; the Egyptians, on the contrary, preserved the purely pictorial and artistic character of their hieroglyphs to the end. The hieroglyphs were a decoration in themselves; their very position in the sentence was subordinate to the decorative effect. The Egyptian could not be guilty of the barbarism seen on some of the Assyrian sculpture, where inscriptions were scrawled right across the work without regard to design. So far was this idea carried that many words or ideas were represented by two distinct characters, one wide and the other narrow and deep, so that the harmony of the design should not be broken by an unsuitable element. The result was that the Egyptians were rewarded by having the most beautiful writing in the world." (Egyptian Decorative Art, p. 4.)

This writing exists in three groups of characters (Fig. 45): (a) Hieroglyphic, (b) Hieratic, (c) Demotic. The demotic is derived from the hieratic, and the hieratic from the hieroglyphic.

(a) Pictogram, ideogram, and phonogram—in other words, signs representative of word, idea, and sound—make up the seventeen hundred hieroglyphs which, in the older signs, preserve the traces of their origin in rude picture-writing. They were chiselled on stone of various kinds, cut or painted on wood or plaster, and written on papyrus or skin; the characters being arranged in vertical columns.

With the quickened zeal of modern excavators discoveries come apace, so that before these words are printed, some additional find, throwing all others into the shade, may come to light. Such, for example, would be the production of epigraphic evidence as to the sojourn and oppression of the Israelites in Egypt, and their escape from that "house of bondage." For a long time the earliest known example of hieroglyphic writing which the Gizeh and Ashmodean Museums could show (each institution possessing fragments of the relic) was a mutilated stele or monumental tablet to the memory of Shera, a priest or grandson of Sent, the fifth king of the Second Dynasty, which, adopting Professor Flinders Petrie's chronology, flourished about four thousand five hundred years b.c. In this record three alphabetic characters are employed to spell that monarch's name. But in November 1897, Dr. Borchardt reported the important discovery that the royal tomb found by M. de Morgan in the spring of that year at Nagada, situated opposite Coptos, a little north of Thebes, is that of Menes, the founder of the First Dynasty, whose date Professor Flinders Petrie fixes at 4777 b.c., "with a possible error of a century." Calcined remains of the body are now in the Gizeh Museum, and, among other objects, the broken fragments of an ivory plaque which, when joined, showed the ka name of Aha (the ka being the "double" or "other self" of the deceased which abode with the mummy), and, attached thereto, the name MN = Menes, borne by the Pharaoh during his lifetime. Assuming that Dr. Borchardt's interpretation is accepted by Egyptologists, it proves that the hieroglyphic system of writing was then already fully developed. It may be remarked, incidentally, that among the remains of the pre-dynastic race discovered by Professor Flinders Petrie in 1895, in the district north of Thebes, no hieroglyphs or traces of other writing were found. There was evidence of knowledge of metals, but not of the potter's wheel. It therefore seems probable that writing came in with the First Dynasty, which, according to M. de Morgan, was descended from Chaldean Semites.

But more interesting, for the light thrown on early Egyptian thought, than inscriptions on stele or plaque are the copies of portions of the sacred literature entitled "Chapters of the Coming Forth by Day," and also the "Chapters of Making Strong the Beatified Spirit," but commonly known as the Book of the Dead. This venerable embodiment of human conceptions about an after life, and of human hope and consolation this side the grave, contains the hymns, prayers, and magic formulÆ against all opposing foes and evil spirits, to be recited by the dead Osiris (the soul was conceived to have such affinity with the god Osiris as to be called by his name) in his journey to Amenti, the underworld that led to the Fields of the Blessed. It lies outside both our scope and space to give an account of the contents of the several chapters, and, fortunately, the entire text, translated by Dr. Wallis Budge, with admirable facsimiles of illustrations, is within the reach of a moderate purse. But one curious and prominent feature should have reference, because it shows the persistence of barbaric ideas about names as integral parts of things. (On this subject, see the author's Tom Tit Tot; an Essay on Savage Philosophy in Folk-Tale, 1898.) The Osiris has not only to be able to recite the names and titles of the gods, but of every part of the boat, "from truck to keel," as the nautical phrase goes, in which he desires to cross the great river flowing to Amenti. And then, before he can enter the Hall of the Two Truths—that is, of Truth and Justice, where the god Osiris and the forty-two judges of the dead are seated—the jackal-headed Anubis requires him to tell the names of every part of the doors, posts, and woodwork generally. These correctly given, the soul declares its innocence in language whose moral tone has never been surpassed, while it throws a light on the virtues and vices of old Egyptian society which makes clear how poor a guide to the past are its monuments compared with its literature.

The age of the composition of this remarkable book is unknown. But so old is it that the earliest copies we possess show that when they were made, some six thousand years ago, the exact meaning of parts of the text had become obscure to the transcribers. Fragments of it have been found in those ancient tombs, the Pyramids; chapters or long extracts were written on stone and wooden coffins; but after the expulsion of the Hyksos, or Shepherd Dynasty, by the kings of Thebes, about 1580 b.c., papyrus came more into use for the purpose.

One of the most superbly-illustrated examples is that known as the Papyrus of Ani, belonging to what is called the Theban recension of the text, which was much used from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Dynasty (1587-1060 b.c.). It will suffice, as evidence of the magical qualities attributed to the written word, to quote the following from the seventy-second chapter, as translated into sonorous English by Dr. Wallis Budge:—

"If this writing be known (by the deceased) upon earth, and this chapter be done into writing upon (his) coffin, he shall come forth by day in all the forms of existence which he desireth, and he shall enter into (his) place, and be not rejected. Bread and ale and meat shall be given unto Osiris, the scribe Ani upon the altar of Osiris ... there shall wheat and barley be given unto him; there shall he flourish as he did upon earth, and he shall do whatsoever pleaseth him, even as do the gods who are in the underworld, for everlasting millions of ages, world without end."

Under Dr. Wallis Budge's editorship, the Ani papyrus has recently been supplemented by the issue of facsimiles and translations of papyri and other texts connected with the Book of the Dead. Among these is a Book of Breathings, written in a late hieratic, and dating from late pre-Christian times. It contains a ritual to be said by the priest for or over the dead, and teaches belief in a resurrection of the body and a state of material bliss on earth. "Thy soul shall live," and, so runs the text, "thy corruptible body shall burst into life, and thou shalt never decay." ... "Grant that his soul may go into every place wheresoever it would be, and let him live upon earth for ever and ever."

Up to a point the story of Egyptian writing illustrates the stages of development of writing generally so clearly that its recital, even at the cost of some repetition, will be helpful, and the more so as it falls into line with the story of other scripts.

"It goes without saying" that the representation of an object was a simple matter enough, the rudest draughtsmanship sufficing for a picture that should tell its own meaning at a glance. But as soon as the need arose to graphically express ideas, for example, such as vice and virtue, time and space, health and sickness, symbolism came in. To the illustrations of this supplied by the scripts already dealt with may be added a few examples from Egyptian ideography, into which, at the stage that we first meet it, the whole system of hieroglyphics may be said to have become modified. The bee was a symbol of kingship and also of industry; a roll of papyrus denoted knowledge; an ostrich feather, justice, because these feathers were supposed to be of equal length; a palm branch, one year, because that tree was popularly believed to put forth a fresh branch every new moon—although, as Mr. Gliddon suggests, a more plausible reason is in the annual cutting of the lower leaves close to the trunk. The ideograph for a priest was a jackal—not, as may be cynically hinted, because of his "devouring widows' houses," but because of his watchfulness; for a mother, a vulture, because that bird was believed to nourish its young with its own blood. Thirst was represented by a calf running towards water; power by a brandished whip; and battle by two arms, the one holding a shield and the other a javelin. Among the Dakotah Indians combat is indicated by two arms pointed at each other. The ideograph for night, a star pendant from a curve, is like the Ojibwa; while among the ancient Mexicans night was represented by a semicircle with eyes, as stars, attached to it. Signs for hunger, thirst, supplication, and so forth, among both Innuit Indian and ancient Egyptian—as indeed many other signs among peoples, both in the old world and the new, whose writing has not reached a purely phonetic stage—have that correspondence to be expected when things common to all men are graphically represented (Fig. 46). Running water, for example, remains necessarily a pictograph, but water depicted in connection with rites represents, by one symbol or another, the varying nature of the latter. Both in Egypt and Mexico it is represented flowing from a vessel, the Egyptian ideograph having a kneeling figure with arms uplifted, as if in adoration or gratitude. There appears, also, some resemblance between the symbol for negation between these two, but this has the doubt attaching to all metaphysical interpretation of signs.

Obviously, this presentment of ideas through graphic designs into which metaphor often bordering on enigma had to be read, implied good memories and clear grasp of association on the part of the interpreter. Any doubt or ambiguity, with resulting confusion, as to the meaning of the symbol, rendered it worse than useless. Hence the addition of "determinants," concerning which something was said when treating of the Chinese script (see p. 85). These are of two classes—the special and more numerous, whose use was confined to one word or idea; and the general, numbering about two hundred, which, like the Chinese "keys," refer to whole groups of words.

But ideas have to be arranged in sentences, and these are made up of nouns, adjectives, verbs, and other parts of speech for which symbolism, however ingenious, can make no provision. Moreover, while the characters are limited in their application, the ideas to be expressed graphically are ever growing, and hence, in course of time, there are not enough symbols "to go round." A way of escape opened itself, and thereby led to an invention undreamed of, when recourse was had to the use of pictures of things which were different in sense, but the names of which had the same sound; in other words, to the pictorial pun known as the rebus (see p. 79). As an amusing instance of the formation of a compound phonogram out of syllabic signs, Canon Taylor quotes from an inscription of Ptolemy XV. at Edfu, in which, as he says, "it seems not impossible to detect a faint flavour of ancient Egyptian humour. The name of lapis lazuli was khesteb. Now the word khesf meant 'to stop,' and the syllable teb, 'a pig.' Hence the rebus 'stop-pig' was invented to express graphically the name of lapis lazuli, which is figured by the picture of a man stopping a pig by pulling at its tail." Probably the Canon is right, but in western lands that action is often intended to make the pig move on. Another example of the rebus occurs in the name of Osiris, which in Egyptian is Hesiri (Wallis Budge gives it as Ausir). The god, on this showing, is represented, presumably, by a figure on a seat, hes, and by an eye, iri. But with the constant revision of interpretations by Egyptologists, it behoves us to quote with caution. There is a stock illustration as to the adoption of the supposed picture of a lute (used by the Egyptian scribes to denote "excellence"), as a phonogram to express the word nefer, "good." But it seems that what was thought to be a lute is the picture of a heart and windpipe!

At last, we know not when, and we cannot, speaking of Egypt alone, guess where, there dawned upon some mind the fact that all the words which men uttered are expressed by a few sounds. Hence, what better plan than to select from the big and confused mass of ideograms, phonograms, and all their kin, a certain number of signs to denote, unvaryingly, certain sounds?

That was the birth of the Alphabet, one of the greatest and most momentous triumphs of the human mind. The earliest phonograms represented syllables, not individual letters, the distinguishing signs for vowels and consonants being of yet later introduction; in fact, some alphabets, notably the Hebrew and other Semitic, have no true vowels, but only distinguishing marks, diacritical points as they are called, to denote them. To recapitulate, we have 1, picture-writing; 2, ideograms; 3, phonograms representing words; 4, phonograms representing syllables; 5, alphabetic characters. From their four hundred verbal phonograms and syllabic signs the Egyptians of a remote age—for it is literally true "that the letters of the alphabet are older than the Pyramids"—appear to have selected at the outset forty-five symbols for alphabetic use, but the rare occurrence or special use of some of these caused a further reduction to twenty-five letters. "All that remained to be done was to take one simple step—boldly to discard all the non-alphabetic elements, at once to sweep away the superfluous lumber, rejecting all the ideograms, the homophones, the polyphones, the syllables, and the symbolic signs to which the Egyptian scribes so fondly clung, and so to leave revealed in its grand simplicity the nearly perfect alphabet, of which, without knowing it, the Egyptians had been virtually in possession for almost countless ages." (Taylor, i. 68.) That step they never took, but continued the use of eye-pictures side by side with that of ear-pictures, instead of passing to the use of fixed signs for certain sounds.

(b) The cursive writing known as Hieratic was an abridged and conventionalised form of the hieroglyphic. The use of the latter became mainly restricted to monumental and kindred purposes, while the hieratic was employed by the priests in copying literary compositions, notable among which was the Book of the Dead, papyrus being the material most commonly used. This was made from the byblus hieraticus or Cyperus papyrus, a plant which flourished in the marshy districts of the Nile. There it has long been extinct, and is now found only in Sicily. It would seem to have served as many useful purposes to the ancient Egyptians as the bamboo serves to-day to the Chinese and other Orientals. "The roots were used for firewood, parts of the plant were eaten, and other and coarser parts were made into paper, boats, ropes, mats, &c." In preparing it for writing material, the outer rind was removed and the pith then cut into strips; which were laid side by side, with another set of strips across them fastened by a thin solution of gum, thus forming a sheet, which was pressed, dried in the sun, and polished to a smooth surface. The sheets were often joined to make a roll, which was sometimes above one hundred feet long and varied in width from six to seventeen inches. The finest papyri of the Book of the Dead are about fifteen inches wide, and, when they contain a tolerably large number of chapters, are from eighty to ninety feet long. Dipping his reed, which was either bruised at the end to make it brush-like, or cut, pen-like, to a point, in the ink-wells of his stone, wooden, or sometimes ivory palette, which was often dedicated to the god Thoth, "lord of divine words," the professional scribe wrote the text in varying colours, chiefly black or red, but also in other tints imitative of the subject dealt with, as blue for sky, yellow for woman, and so forth.

The earliest known specimen of hieratic writing is a papyrus containing chronicles of the reign of King Asa, whose date, according to a moderate estimate of Egyptian chronology, is about 3580 b.c. To the same period the most perfect literary work which has come down to us is usually assigned, although the copy preserved in the BibliothÈque Nationale in Paris, whither it was brought by M. Prisse d'Avennes from Thebes, seems to have been written between 2700 and 2500 b.c. This valuable relic, commonly known after its donor as the Papyrus Prisse, is entitled the "Precepts of Ptah-Hetep," and its contents justify the judgment of Dr. Wallis Budge, that "if all other monuments of the great civilisation of Egypt were wanting, it alone would show the moral worth of the Egyptians, and the high ideals of man's duties which they had formed nearly five thousand five hundred years ago."

(c) The Demotic or Enchorial characters preserve but slight traces of their derivation from picture-writing. As the term hieratic (Greek hieratikos, sacerdotal) denotes the class by whom that writing was used, so the terms demotic (Greek demotikos, of the people) and enchorial (Greek enchorios, of the country) denote that this writing was in popular use, being adapted to the purposes of daily life. It appears to have come into use about 900 b.c., and so continued till the fourth century of our era. It has been shown that in the time of Darius and other rulers of the AchÆmean dynasty, proclamations and documents of general importance were set forth in three languages—Babylonian, Medic, and Persian. So, in the time of the Ptolemies, who inherited the Egyptian possessions of Alexander the Great and ruled in the Nile Valley till it fell under the sway of Rome, all matters of public importance were made known in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek characters. The hieroglyphic was called the "writing of divine words"; the demotic, "writing of letters"; and the Greek, "writing of the Greeks."