Hieroglyphics (literally 'sacred sculptures,' from hieros and glyphō), a term applied to the representations of objects used to express language, especially those which the ancient Egyptians, Mexicans, and other nations employed, for that purpose. The term hieroglyphs would, however, be more correctly applied to these figures. The number of those used by the ancient Egyptians was probably about 1700, and by means of them they were enabled to express all their ideas with correctness, clearness, and facility. They consist of representations of figures of men and women and their limbs; quadrupeds, birds, fishes, and reptiles; plants, trees, and flowers; celestial bodies; mountains, islands, stones, water; towns, buildings, rooms and parts of a house; fighting implements and sceptres; articles of furniture; musical instruments; mathematical figures; crowns and baskets; ships and their various parts, &c. Hieroglyphics were inscribed upon granite, basalt, porphyry, and sandstone; they were cut or painted upon wood and plaster; and they were written upon papyri, slabs of calcareous stone, and leather. A reed pen, qash, was used for writing upon papyri.
The palette used for holding the ink was usually a flat, rectangular piece of wood or ivory measuring about 2½ inches by 12. At one end of this two or more holes were hollowed out for holding ink. The colours most commonly used were black, red, and green; the first was made from vegetable, the second and third from mineral substances.
Inscriptions on Egyptian monuments are sometimes inlaid with colours, an attempt being made to imitate the natural colours of the animals and objects, representations of which are employed to form the inscription. The painted inscriptions which are found upon the inner coffins in the tombs of the 18th and 19th dynasty usually follow a conventional design; the number of colours used upon them being comparatively few, six at the most. But on the Ani papyrus in the British Museum as many as thirteen colours are used. On papyri they are usually drawn in outline in black. The rubrics and initial words are usually written in red. Hieroglyphics are written in horizontal lines or perpendicular columns, which are separated by lines drawn in black ink. Usually they are to be read in the direction in which they face, and are so arranged as to cover completely all the parts of the papyrus which were to be written on. Egyptian hieroglyphics are read in the order in which they are written; this order is sometimes broken for the sake of symmetrical arrangement.
Hieroglyphics are either phonetic or ideographic; the former class comprises signs which represent sounds, and the latter those which represent ideas. Phonetic signs are either alphabetic or syllabic. The hieroglyphic alphabet is as follows:
| a | h | ||
| â | h | ||
| â | χ | ||
| i | s | ||
| u | sh | ||
| b | q | ||
| p | k | ||
| f | k | ||
| m | t | ||
| n | t | ||
| l or r | th | ||
| r or l | t |
The earliest Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions known to us are filled with the alphabetic signs here given; this fact shows that so far back as 3800 B.C. the use of phonetic signs was well known and used. The other phonetic signs have syllabic values. A large number of the hieroglyphics are employed as ideographs, or representations of ideas. Every word in Egyptian has one determinative or more at the end of it. Thus, after the word for tree we have the picture of a tree, ; and after the word for dog we have the picture of a dog,
. An abstract idea, such as joy or gladness, was expressed by the figure of a woman beating a tambourine, or a man dancing, or by the figure of some object possessing it, as
, a jackal, to express the idea of cunning or craft;
, a seated man, signifying man, was applied to all relationships, functions, and offices of men, as âtf, 'father;' sen, 'brother;' mer, 'governor;' hen, 'priest;' bak, 'labourer:' the special meaning which it conveyed being shown by the phonetic groups which preceded it. In the same way all beasts, or objects made of leather, were expressed by a skin,
; all precious stones or objects made of the same, by o; all actions of moving, standing, or stretching, by two legs,
; and all actions in which the idea of strength was to be conveyed, by an arm and a stick,
. The number of these signs may be computed at about 150, and they resemble in their use those of the Assyrian cuneiform, in which, although to a more limited extent, the leading classes of thought were determined by a character prefixed or affixed to the phonetic group giving the particular idea. Thus, in the Assyrian, all names of men are preceded by a single upright wedge,
; all countries by
; names of horned cattle by
; and after the names of certain places, Babylon, for example,
is affixed. In the Egyptian system, however, the determinatives are always placed after the phonetic groups, and are more numerous. The Chinese system of writing approaches still more closely to the Egyptian, 242 radicals, as they are called, but really determinatives, being placed after other groups and symbols, which indicate the special idea intended. In this last language the radicals are generally placed to the left, except in those instances in which they enclose the phonetic or special groups. In the Egyptian hieroglyphs every word not expressing an abstract idea, such as the verb 'to be,' or the grammatical forms and pronouns, is accompanied by its determinative, and is incomplete without it. The following examples will illustrate the use of determinatives in Egyptian:
| sesh, | a bird's nest. | |
| uaa, | a boat. | |
| hebs, | clothes. | |
| aneb, | wall. | |
| ket, | little. | |
| tebhu, | to pray. | |
| sexsex, | to run away. | |
| nehes, | to awake. |
SPECIMENS OF ALPHABETIC AND SYLLABIC HIEROGLYPHIC CHARACTERS.*
| an eagle, A. | leg of a stool, Âlâ. | ||
| an arm, Â. | a house, H. | ||
| a reed, Â. | a sieve, χ. | ||
| a calf, Uâ. | a garment, Ūa. | ||
| a heron, Ba. | a lion, R or L. | ||
| a leg, B. | a mouth, L or R. | ||
| a cerastes, F. | a pen, M. | ||
| a wild fowl, Tá. | a weight, Mâ. | ||
| a vase, Tá. | a hole, M. | ||
| a viper, T. | an owl, M. |
* The first found of hieroglyphic type was cut in England from drawings by the late Mr Bonomi. For the hieroglyphics used in this article we are indebted to Messrs Harrison, printers, London.
| 9 | 1000 | ||
| 10 | 10,000 | ||
| 20 | 100,000 | ||
| 30 | 1,000,000 | ||
| 100 | 10,000,000 |
The personal pronouns are: nuk or ānuk, 'I'; entuk (masc.), entut (fem.), 'thou'; entuf, 'he'; entus, 'she'; entuten, 'you' (plur.); entusen, entu, 'they.' The personal suffixes are ā, 'I,' k, 'thou' (masc.), t, 'thou' (fem.); f, 'he,' s, 'she'; n, 'we'; ten, 'you'; sen, set, 'they.' The Egyptian verb has no tenses, moods, voices, conjugations, or personal endings. The exact meaning of a verb must be gathered from the context or the syntax of the sentence. The Egyptian verb is often accompanied by one of the following auxiliary verbs: āu, 'be'; un, 'be,' 'to arise'; ārī, 'do'; āhā, 'stand'; tā, 'give.'
Considered as one of the most ancient written languages, Egyptian throws great light upon comparative philology, the relative antiquity of various words and locutions, the general construction of language itself, and the development of picture-writing into the abstract ciphers of sound, called letters. During the 19th dynasty, or about 1400 B.C., many Semitic words were introduced into the language by the success of the Egyptian arms in the East, and such words as bata for Beth, 'a house,' makaturu for Migdol, 'a tower,' and others, appear; they are, however, rare and few in number compared to the body of the language.
The invention of hieroglyphs, called Neter kharu, or 'divine words,' was attributed to the god Thoth, the scribe of the gods, and lord of the hieroglyphs. Pliny attributes their invention to Menou. The literature of the Egyptians was in fact styled Hermaic or Hermetic, on account of its supposed divine origin, and the knowledge of hieroglyphs was, to a certain extent, a mystery to the ignorant, although universally employed by the sacerdotal and instructed classes. To foreign nations the hieroglyphs always remained a mystery, although Moses is supposed to have been versed in the knowledge of them (Philo, Vita Moysis). The Greeks, who had settled on the coast as early as the 6th century B.C., appear not to have possessed more than a colloquial knowledge of the language; and although Solon, 538 B.C., is said to have studied Egyptian doctrines at Sebennytus and Heliopolis, and the doctrines of Pythagoras are thought to have been derived from Egypt, these sages could only have acquired their knowledge from interpretations of hieroglyphic writings. Hecataeus (521 B.C.) and Herodotus (456 B.C.), who visited Egypt in their travels, obtained from similar sources the information they have afforded of the language or monuments of the country. Democritus of Abdera, indeed, about the same period (459 B.C.), described both the Ethiopian hieroglyphs and the Babylonian cuneiform, but his work has disappeared. After the conquest of Egypt by Alexander, the Greek rulers began to pay attention to the language and history of their subjects; and Eratosthenes, the keeper of the museum at Alexandria, and Manetho, the high-priest of Sebennytus, drew up accounts of the national chronology and history from hieroglyphic sources. Under the Roman empire, in the reign of Augustus, one Chæremon, the keeper of the library at the Serapeum, compiled a dictionary of the hieroglyphs; and both Diodorus and Strabo mention them, and describe their nature. Tacitus, later under the empire, gives the account of the monuments of Thebes translated by the Egyptian
Under the rule of the Ptolemies in Egypt the values of the hieroglyphs were systematically changed. Thus , became m;
, nes, became n, and so on. The various forms of the same vowel were confused with one another, and many changes between consonants took place.
The language of the hieroglyphs is most nearly represented by Coptic. Coptic is a name given to the Egyptian language written with the letters of the Greek alphabet, and a few signs borrowed from the demotic forms of some of the hieroglyphs. The Bible was translated into Coptic early in the 3d century A.D., and the greater part of this work, indispensable for the proper study of the hieroglyphs, has come down to our time. Coptic literature is chiefly theological, and the texts are full of Greek words. The forms of Egyptian words as given in the hieroglyphs are often considerably modified in Coptic; many of the changes are caused by phonetic decay. The Coptic language ceased to be spoken about a century ago. See COPTS.
In Egyptian the noun has two genders, masculine and feminine; feminine nouns usually end in t. Plural nouns end in u or iu, and are generally followed by . In Egyptian nouns have no declensions, and the cases are expressed by particles placed before nouns. Adjectives have no grammatical forms to indicate degrees of comparison. The following are the principal Egyptian numerals:
| 1 | 5 | ||
| 2 | 6 | ||
| 3 | 7 | ||
| 4 | 8 |
priests to Germanicus; but after his time the knowledge of them beyond Egypt itself was exceedingly limited, and does not reappear till the third and subsequent centuries A.D., when they are mentioned by Ammianus Marcellinus, who notes the translation of one of the obelisks at Rome by one Hermapion, and by Julius Valerius, the translator into Latin of the apocryphal life of Alexander, who gives that of another. Heliodorus, a novelist who flourished 400 A.D., describes (iv. 8) a hieroglyphic letter written by Queen Candace. The first positive information on the subject is by Clement of Alexandria (211 A.D.), who mentions the symbolical and phonetic, or, as he calls it, cyriologic nature of hieroglyphics. Porphyry (304 A.D.) divides them also into cœnologic or phonetic and enigmatic or symbolic. Horapollo or Horus-Apollon, who is supposed to have flourished about 500 A.D., wrote two books explanatory of the hieroglyphs, a rude, ill-assorted confusion of truth and fiction, in which are given the interpretation of many hieroglyphs and their esoteric meaning. After this writer all knowledge of them disappeared till the revival of letters. At the beginning of the 17th century these symbols first attracted attention, and about 1650 Athanasius Kircher, a learned Jesuit, pretended to interpret them by vague esoteric notions derived from his own fancy, on the supposition that the hieroglyphs were ideographic—a theory which barred all progress, and which was held in its full extent by the learned, till Zoega in 1787 first enunciated the proposition that the ovals or cartouches contained royal names, and that the hieroglyphs, or some of them, were used to express sounds. More monuments were known, and more correct ideas had begun to dawn on the European mind; and the discovery by the French, in 1799, of the Rosetta Stone, a slab of black basalt, having inscribed upon it, first in hieroglyphics, secondly in demotic or enchorial (a cursive popular form of writing extant at the period), and thirdly in Greek, a decree of the priests of Egypt assembled in synod at Memphis, in honour of Ptolemy V., gave the first clue to the decipherment. The first attempts were made upon the demotic text by Silvestre de Sacy with some success, but it was soon discovered that the demotic was not purely alphabetic. Crude notions of the ideographic nature of the hieroglyphs prevailed till Dr Young, in 1818, first gave out the hypothesis that the hieroglyphs were used as sounds in royal proper names. He was led to this conclusion by tracing the hieroglyphs through the cursive hieratic to the more cursive demotic; and, as this last was known to be alphabetic, he inferred that the corresponding hieroglyphic signs were also alphabetic. In this manner he came to the conclusion that the first hieroglyph in the name of Ptolemy in the
Rosetta Stone (a door) represented a P, the second (hemispherical) a T; the third (a loop) he supposed to be superfluous; the fourth (a lion) he read OLE; the fifth and sixth, the syllable MI; and seventh, the back of a seat, an S. Unaided by bilingual monuments, he essayed to decipher the name of Berenice, and altogether established the value of five hieroglyphs as letters out of two names, but was unable to proceed further. Champollion (q.v.), in 1822, by means of an inscription found on an obelisk at Philæ, which had at the base a Greek inscription, recognised the name of Cleopatra, and by comparison with that of Ptolemy, at once proved the purely alphabetic, not syllabico-alphabetic nature of the signs. Extending the principle, he read by its means the names of the Greek and Roman, and finally those of the native monarchs.
It was soon seen that the same hieroglyphs as those employed in these names were extensively used in the texts for words, and these words turned out in most instances to be analogous to the Coptic. Although the discoveries of Champollion were received by many of the learned in Europe with distrust, yet his method of research was slowly adopted by Rosellini and Salvolini in 1832, and subsequently extended methodically by Lepsius in 1837, and by Bunsen, Hincks, De Rougé, Birch, Goodwin, Chabas, Brugsch, and others.
The method of interpretation adopted has been strictly inductive, the value of the characters being deduced from the equation of sounds, or homophones of similar groups. The meaning of the groups or words has been determined by examining all known instances in which they occur in passages capable of being interpreted, that of the ideographs by observing the form of the symbols; many of them have been made out from the pictures which they explain, or the phonetic groups which accompany them. A careful comparison has been instituted with corresponding Coptic forms when they exist. In short, a careful principle of induction has been applied to the study of the hieroglyphs.
The discovery of another trilingual inscription, that of the tablet at San or Tanis, recording a synodical act of the priests in the reign of Ptolemy Euergetes II., 238 B.C., has confirmed the results obtained by Egyptologists, the meaning of almost all the words having been previously determined; while the power of reading all documents and inscriptions afforded by their researches has resulted in the resuscitation of a knowledge of the history, science, and literature of the ancient Egyptians. The study has long passed into the category of a recognised branch of oriental learning, and the researches have assumed a more critical form. This has been owing to the number of students and the abundance of the material which exists. The doubts with which the interpretations were at first received have succumbed to the conviction that nothing but a logical system of interpretation could have obtained such results. Whatever doubt, in fact, may exist as to the minor details and more delicate shades of language, all the grammatical forms and three-fourths of the words of the old Egyptian language have been established.
The hieroglyphs stood in the same relation to the other two forms of the characters, called hieratic and demotic, as type does to handwriting. Their use was chiefly for official inscriptions on public or private monuments, religious formulae and prayers, and rituals or Hermetic Books (q.v.). The most remarkable hieroglyphic inscriptions are the texts found inscribed upon the pyramids of Pepi, Teta, and Unas; that of Una, recording the conquest of the lands of the negroes at the time of the 6th dynasty; that in honour of Khnumhep at Benihassan, recording the investiture of his family with the order of the gold collar; the campaigns of Almès against the Hykshos at El-Kab; the annals of Thothmes III. at Karnak; the campaign of Rameses II. against the Khita, and the treaty with them; the account of the tanks for gold-washings in the reigns of Seti I. and Rameses II. at Kouban and Redesich; the invasion of Egypt in the reign of Menephtah by the allied forces of the Libyans and other people of the basin of the Mediterranean; the star-risings on the tomb of Rameses V.; the journey of the ark of Khons to Bakhtan, in the reign of Rameses X.; the account of Camlyses and Darius on the statue of the Vatican; the already-cited synodical act of the priests in honour of Ptolemy Euergetes II.; and that of the priests assembled at Memphis, on the Rosetta Stone, in the reign of Ptolemy V.; the sepulchral tablets of the family of Pasherentpah, and the long series of sepulchral tablets of the bull Apis found in the Serapeion, recording the birth, installation, and death of the bulls from the 18th dynasty to the Persians.
In connection with the hieroglyphics are two forms of writing them in common use, first the hieratic writing, or a cursive form of hieroglyphic. The number of these written characters is fewer than that of the hieroglyphs, the generic determinatives being more employed, and the vocalic complements of the consonants being constantly written in order to distinguish similar forms. This writing was more extensively used than the hieroglyphic, being employed for state papers, legal documents, memoranda, accounts, religious books, rituals, and all the purposes of private and public life. Books were generally written in hieratic. It commences as early as the 4th or 5th dynasty, and terminates only about the 3d or 4th century of our era. At the earliest period it is occasionally written perpendicularly, but it was afterwards only written horizontally, and has generally portions in red ink, corresponding to our initial illuminated letters or rubrics. Many scholars hold it proved that the hieratic alphabet gave rise to the Phœnician, and have traced the Phœnician alphabet from hieratic sources (as in our article ALPHABET, Vol. I., where on page 187 the hieroglyphs, the hieratic characters, and the Phœnician alphabet will be seen side by side). Others still affirm that the precise source of Phœnician writing remains involved in obscurity. The second kind of hieroglyphic handwriting was the demotic. It is, like all cursive hands, more difficult to decipher than the hieratic. It was used as far back as the commencement of the 26th dynasty, or the 6th century B.C., and continued in use till the 3d century A.D. This was the last native form of writing in Egypt, the early Christians having introduced the Greek alphabet, with a few characters borrowed from the demotic. This script is rarely used for public monuments, although it appears on the Rosetta Stone; but it was universally employed for contracts, public documents, and occasionally for religious formulae, owing to the decreasing knowledge of hieroglyphics. At the time of Clement it was the first learned by beginners. With it the Greek language began to appear in public use.
Besides the Egyptian hieroglyphics there are those of the Aztecs or Mexican, which were developed to a stage far above the rude picture-writing of the hunting tribes of American Indians. The system was mainly pictorial, but had made important advances toward attaining phonetic value, especially in the picture-names of persons and places. The simplest kind is where a name meaning 'bird-mountain' is represented by a bird and a mountain; another stage is where a personal name of five syllables is represented by five pictures, each representing a thing whose name corresponds to one syllable of the person's name. After the Spanish conquest, the Franciscans used the Mexican symbols for teaching Christianity. Thus in the Lord's Prayer in Latin, , a flag, pronounced Pantti, was used for the syllable Pa;
, a stone, Tetl for tê, the two expressing Pater;
, a cactus fruit, Nochli, for Noch; and a stone,
, as above for te: these four groups expressing Pater Nochte, or Noster; and so forth. Some of the missionaries complained of their difficulties when overwhelmed by converted Mexicans giving their confessions written in this puzzling manner. Some have absurdly affirmed, indeed, that all the Mexican manuscripts are monkish impostures. The most important—religious, administrative, his- torical—are on parchment or on maguey paper. The Toltec symbols of Central America were different in their method from those of Mexico. —The term hieroglyphic was also used by the writers of emblemata or devices, symbolising Gnostic sentences taken from the Greek and Latin poets, and having no relation to Egyptian hieroglyphs. —In recent times, too, the astrological almanacs have had their symbolical representations and supposed prognostics of future events, which they called hieroglyphs.
Zoega, De Origine Obeliseorum (fo. Rome, 1797); Young, Archæologia (1817, vol. xvii. p. 60); Encyclop. Britannica (8th ed.); Champollion, Précis du Système Hiéroglyphique (1824), Grammaire Égyptienne (1841-61), Dictionnaire (1841); Lepsius, in the Ann. del' Instituto Arch. (1828); Birch, Introduction to the Study of the Hieroglyphics (1857); Brugsch, Grammaire Démotique (Berlin, 1855), Wörterbuch (1867-68), Grammatik (1872); De Rougé, Étude d'une Stèle Égyptienne (1858); Chabas, Papyrus Maquique d'Harris (1861); Zeitschrift f. ägypt. Spr. che (1863-74); Bunsen, Egypt's Place (vol. v. 1867); Wallis Budge, First Steps in Egyptian (1895). For the principal works relating to hieroglyphic literature, see Ibrahim Hilmy, Bibliography of Egypt and the Soudan (2 vols. Lond. 1886-87). —For American picture-writing and Mexican hieroglyphics, see Schoolcraft's works; Kingsborough, Mexican Antiquities (1831-48); E. B. Tylor, Anahuac (1861); Im Thurn, Among the Indians of Guiana (1883). See also the articles ALPHABET, CHINA, EGYPT, WRITING.