The Writing Revolution

by Amalia E Gnanadesikan

  Despite the preponderance of hieroglyphs in the archaeological record – and their perennial mystique – hieratic was the common script of ancient Egypt and was used for both bureaucratic records and literary works. Most writing was done in hieratic; thorough knowledge of hieroglyphs, by contrast, would have been rare even among scribes. Since it was well adapted to being written in ink on papyrus, hieratic eventually came to be used for religious works as well, so that during the Third Intermediate Period (1070–650 BC) the papyri of the Book of the Dead were written in hieratic.

  Since hieratic was generally used for less formal purposes, the language used and the spellings employed tended to be less archaic than in hieroglyphic texts; so it is the hieratic texts that tell us of changes in the Egyptian language. From these texts we know that Middle Egyptian was succeeded in the spoken arena by Late Egyptian, the language of about 1600 to 650 BC. The form of the hieratic script itself was also more open to evolution, the needs of efficient record keeping favoring any change that allowed written signs to flow more easily from the scribe’s hand. Thus hieratic evolved over the centuries and eventually diverged into two styles, a “book hand” for literary and formal texts and a “chancery hand” for business and other mundane matters. With an absence of strong central government, the Third Intermediate Period saw the chancery hands of the now-separated Northern Egypt and Southern Egypt diverge into two increasingly cursive forms, eventually mutually unintelligible.

  With the reunification of the country under the twenty-sixth dynasty (672–525 BC) the northern style of writing was given official sanction in a form we now call demotic. Hieratic book hand continued to be used for religious texts; thus Clement of Alexandria described it accurately in about AD 200 when he gave it its modern name, meaning “priestly” or “sacred” in Greek. The demotic script (meaning “of the people”) was used for more mundane purposes and remained in use until the fifth century ad. The purposes to which demotic was put meant that there was no strong pull toward preserving antique forms of the language, and so it represents more closely the form of Egyptian spoken at the time, also known as Demotic.

  Though the ultimate root of demotic was the hieroglyphic script, demotic and hieroglyphic look completely different. Demotic did not look pictorial at all. The numerous abbreviations and ligatures it used make it now impossible to accurately transcribe texts in demotic into hieroglyphs or vice versa, while hieratic, on the other hand, always remained interchangeable with hieroglyphs. Demotic and hieroglyphic illustrate the opposing pressures in the evolution of a script: on the one hand a script should be easy to write, so as to enable rapid copying and recording of information. On the other hand, using a script preserves information for future ages, and if the script changes much, later generations will not be able to read it. (Modern software designers face the same problem.) The Egyptians resolved the tension by using different scripts for different purposes: the relatively unchanging hieroglyphs for eternal purposes, and the evolving hieratic and demotic for more temporal records.

  The twenty-sixth dynasty was followed by conquest at the hands of the Persians in 525 BC, and thereafter self-rule was never achieved for very long. By the Ptolemaic period (332–30 BC), when Egypt was ruled by Greek foreigners, hieroglyphs and even hieratic were increasingly the domain of the very few within the temples. The ruling elite used Greek, but demotic continued to be used for documents written in Egyptian and even occasionally for monumental inscriptions.

  In an attempt to consolidate his power, Ptolemy V co-opted the traditional cult of the pharaoh, having himself declared a god in all the temples of the land. The commemorative texts surrounding the event were written by Egyptian priests (none of the Ptolemaic officials spoke Egyptian) in 196 BC and set up on stelae with Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphic texts. And thus it is to Ptolemy V’s divine aspirations that we owe the Rosetta Stone, which was to provide the key to reading the Egyptian scripts.

  With the defeat of Cleopatra VII by Octavian (later Caesar Augustus) in 30 BC, control of Egypt passed to the Romans. As the religious scribes continued to use hieroglyphs for their own private purposes during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, we see an explosion in the number of hieroglyphic signs and the use of word-play in texts – a sort of ivory-tower effect, in which scholars delighted in multiplying complexities, freed from the need to communicate their meaning to the uninitiated. The number of attested hieroglyphs rose to over 6,000. This complexifying trend culminated in the third century ad, in which one surviving but persistently obscure text was written almost entirely in crocodile signs, and another largely with rams.

  Yet despite this apparent flowering, indigenous culture – and thus writing – languished, at times from neglect and at times from outright repression by the Romans. The last dated hieroglyphic text is inscribed on a wall of the temple at Philae, in the extreme south of Egypt, farthest from Rome. It dates from AD 394, three years after the Christian emperor Theodosius banned worship in pagan temples. Demotic outlived both hieroglyphic and hieratic, yet it too eventually succumbed: the last known demotic texts are graffiti, also at Philae, from AD 452.

  With the death of demotic, knowledge of the ancient Egyptian writing systems was lost for nearly fourteen hundred years. Yet the death of Egyptian writing did not imply the death of the Egyptian language, which continued to be spoken by the common people of Egypt, though not by the governing class. This stage of the language is Coptic, which means merely “Egyptian,” the term being used to describe both the phase of the Egyptian language that succeeded Demotic and the script it was written in. The Coptic script was adapted from the Greek alphabet. The twenty-four Greek letters were supplemented with eight letters (later reduced to six) borrowed from demotic and used to represent sounds in Egyptian that did not occur in Greek.

  The first use of the Coptic script seems to have been in the first century AD for writing magical incantations. Since the Greek alphabet shows a word’s vowels, the first writers of Coptic may have borrowed Greek characters in order to convey more precisely the magical words, leaving no possibility for mispronunciations that would cause the backfiring of the spell. The use of the Coptic alphabet only became well established in the third century, however, and later with the death of demotic it became the only way the Egyptian language was recorded.

  The rise of the Coptic script is associated with the spread of Christianity in Egypt. In its first two centuries, Egyptian Christianity remained an urban Greek phenomenon, but in the third century AD it became established among the native population and took on a distinctively Egyptian flavor. The new Egyptian Christians were mostly commoners; they knew neither Greek nor the demotic script, but they wanted to read the Christian scriptures for themselves. The script that came to hand for the purposes was Coptic.

  It has been surmised that the choice of Coptic over the indigenous Egyptian scripts was part of the Christians’ rejection of their pagan past. The feeling must have been mutual – the priests presiding over the dying temples would never have wanted to share their treasured knowledge of hieroglyphs or of hieratic with the Christian upstarts. However, the connection between demotic and paganism would have been relatively tenuous; by then any connection between hieroglyphs and demotic was completely imperspicuous and may well have been forgotten. Yet very few ordinary folk could have read demotic at the best of times, as the scribes’ profession was a highly exclusive one. As previously illiterate Egyptians began to read the new scriptures, a simple 32-character alphabet based on Greek would have been easier to learn, both for the native Egyptians and for their Greek-speaking missionaries.

  Coptic is indeed much easier to learn than hieroglyphs or their descendants. A script of 500 signs simply is harder to memorize than one of 32. Yet the hieroglyphic script, once learned, is not hard to read. The reinforcing effect of phonetic complements and of word-final determinatives makes a line of hieroglyphs easy to scan. Modern Egyptologists find, by contrast, that the few attempts made in Greco-Roman times to wri
te Egyptian alphabetically using only uniconsonantal hieroglyphic signs are quite difficult to make out. Similarly, the earliest uses of the Greek alphabet for Egyptian are also hard to read, in part because Greek did not yet use spaces between words.

  The Coptic script continued to be used by native speakers of Coptic Egyptian until the eleventh century. Thus Coptic literature extended the written attestation of the Egyptian language for several more centuries: from its first hieroglyphic beginnings in the late pre-dynastic or early dynastic period, the Egyptian language was written down for over four millennia. This is a world record that has yet to be surpassed, and it provides a valuable case study of the changes that occur in a language over time. The Coptic stage of the language is, however, the only one for which the vowels are attested.

  After the Islamic conquest of the seventh century, the Coptic language was officially replaced by Arabic and was eventually retained only by the minority that remained Christian. After the last texts written by native speakers in the eleventh century, it continued to be spoken by a dwindling number of people until at least the late seventeenth century. It is still used as a liturgical language, though not a conversational, everyday language. In that liturgy, however, a few letters with very ancient roots are still being used.

  After the death of demotic, all knowledge of how to read the papyri and inscriptions of the ancient Egyptians was lost. The only surviving knowledge of ancient Egyptian times was that passed on to the West by Greek and Roman writers and by the Egyptian historian Manetho, who wrote in Greek. In the process, the principles of how the hieroglyphic script had worked became confused. It was thought that hieroglyphs represented ideas expressed allegorically through pictures. Thus a goose was reported to mean “son” because geese were devoted to their off-spring. (Actually, the bird is a duck, , and it is a biconsonantal sign for z-, which meant “son,” the phonological value of the sign being based on the word for “duck,” zt or zt.) There was a germ of truth here in that some logograms were used to denote ideas related to the object represented, as could mean hrw, “day,” as well as rc, “sun,” and could also serve as a determinative with other words relating to time. But the allegory explanation proved to be more misleading than helpful.

  As scholars of the Renaissance rediscovered classical authors, they also learned about Egypt, a strange land of crocodiles and hippopotamuses, gods and goddesses, divine kings, and mysterious carved writings. Clearly much ancient wisdom lay locked in those meticulously carved pictures. Early attempts at decipherment accepted the idea of mysterious symbolism in the hieroglyphs, often reading meanings into the signs by a process much resembling free association.

  By the end of the eighteenth century, little true progress had been made. It had been surmised – correctly – that the rings, or “cartouches,” in hieroglyphic texts encircled royal names, and that the direction of writing could be determined from the way the figures faced. The Coptic language had become known to Western scholars, although its potential usefulness in deciphering hieroglyphs had not.

  Then in 1799 the stimulus to further progress was found. Napoleon Bonaparte had arrived in Egypt the previous year with an expedition of military troops, engineers, and scholars, bent on wresting the country from the Ottoman Empire and on unlocking the secrets of its splendid past. On August 20, 1799, a group of soldiers working on the foundations of a military fort near the town of Rosetta (now Rashid) uncovered a large black stone covered with three kinds of writing, one of which was Greek.

  The 762-kg Rosetta Stone (figure 3.3) was passed along to Napoleon’s scholars, who saw immediately that the stone might have great significance in the attempt to decipher hieroglyphs. The inscription was written in Greek, in hieroglyphs, and in an unfamiliar script now known to be demotic. The assumption was that the three scripts said the same thing, and that the Greek version could be used to decipher the hieroglyphic and demotic texts.

  While stationed in Egypt, the French fleet suffered a severe defeat at the hands of the British navy, with the result that the Rosetta Stone was carried off to England as a war trophy and ended up in the British Museum, where it can still be seen today. Luckily, the French scholars had already made ink rubbings of the stone and sent them to various distinguished European scholars. Later the English made additional copies in the form of plaster casts and engravings. Although they had lost the Rosetta Stone, Napoleon’s scholars brought back from Egypt a wealth of information, drawings, and artifacts, inspiring a wave of “Egyptomania” which engulfed France and much of Europe. Deciphering the mysterious hieroglyphs became a scholarly obsession.

  As it turned out, the Rosetta Stone was something of a disappointment. The hieroglyphic version of the text was badly damaged. The other undeciphered text, demotic, appeared more promising. A sensible place to start was with the names, which could be assumed to read roughly the same in Greek as in Egyptian. Lining up the names would thus be more an exercise in transliteration than translation. In 1802 the French scholar Sylvestre de Sacy was able to identify where in the demotic texts the names Ptolemy and Alexander occurred. His pupil, the Swedish Johan Åkerblad, went on to identify the rest of the proper names, finding that the names were spelled out phonemically and that the same phonemic signs were used elsewhere in the text. From a knowledge of Coptic and the values of the letters occurring in the proper names, he was able to identify a number of recognizably Egyptian words in the demotic text. Unfortunately, this convinced him that demotic was entirely alphabetic in nature, a conclusion that hindered further progress on his part.

  In 1814 the Englishman Thomas Young was the first to observe a similarity between some demotic signs and certain hieroglyphic signs, leading him to suppose that demotic used logograms as well as alphabetic signs. Later, in examining newly published funerary documents, he concluded that the hieroglyphic script had evolved into hieratic and further into demotic. Thus the two Egyptian scripts on the Rosetta Stone were related to each other, and to a third form of Egyptian writing.

  Figure 3.3 The Rosetta Stone, with inscriptions in hieroglyphs, demotic, and Greek. Found in 1799 by Napoleon’s soldiers at Rashid (Rosetta) in Egypt, the stone sparked hopes for a decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. The inscriptions date from 196 BC and record a decree affirming the divinity of Ptolemy V. Image copyright © British Museum/Art Resource, NY.

  If the personal names were spelled out phonologically in the demotic text, then perhaps they were done similarly in the hieroglyphic text, since even a primarily logographic script needs some way to spell out the names of foreigners. The only surviving name in the hieroglyphic text is that of Ptolemy Young ascribed phonological values to the signs (some correctly, some incorrectly) and to those of a cartouche from a different inscription naming the Ptolemaic queen Berenice. Beyond this he failed to go, as he was sure that most hieroglyphic inscriptions were logographic or ideographic. Phonological use of hieroglyphs was, he thought, restricted to the spelling of foreign names, and he believed that the cartouche signaled that this unusual type of spelling was being used.

  The Frenchman Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) was the one to make the decisive breakthrough. Champollion was inspired from a young age by the challenge of Egyptian decipherment. He studied Coptic, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Aramaic in his determined attempt to break the code, trying meanwhile to avoid being drafted into the army long enough to do so. Like Young, Champollion was able to identify the name of Ptolemy on the Rosetta Stone. In 1822 he received a copy of another bilingual inscription, that of an obelisk from Philae, containing both the name Ptolemy and the name Cleopatra, that of several Ptolemaic queens. The great usefulness of this pair of names was that they had signs (and sounds) in common. Thus Champollion was able to assign phonological values to the signs more accurately than Young had.

  He then went on to other cartouches, filling in values that he had so far deduced, and then guessing the rest of the signs once the name looked recognizable. In this way he identified the spellings o
f Alexander, Berenice, Caesar, and Autocrator, the Greek version of Caesar. So far all of these were names of the Greco-Roman period and did not undermine Young’s assumption that phonological spelling was confined to foreign names.

  Yet Champollion himself was beginning to doubt this assumption. He had counted the hieroglyphic signs on the Rosetta Stone and gotten 1,419. If hieroglyphs each represented a word, why was the number so much larger than the 486 words in the Greek text? The words must be written with more than one hieroglyph apiece.

  The breakthrough came as Champollion was studying the cartouche The last two signs he knew to stand for [s]. The first sign looked like a sun, and Champollion knew that the Coptic word for sun was pronounced [re], not unlike English ray. This led him to suspect that the name was that of Rameses, reported by Manetho as the name of many pharaohs of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties. That would mean that the sign stood for [m]. (Actually, it is a biconsonantal m-s, but since the s was repeated as a phonetic complement Champollion’s further inferences were not thrown off by this mistake.) Another text had the cartouche beginning with an ibis, which Champollion knew from Greek sources to be the symbol of the god Thoth. This gave thoth-mes, or Tuthmose, a pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty.