HIEROGLYPHICS 



2793 



HIEROGLYPHICS 



Greeks fancied that they dealt only with re- 

 ligious topics and were understood only by 

 the priests, have claimed the attention of 

 scholars for centuries, and still present some 

 extremely interesting problems. 



Pure picture-writing is a very simple and 

 primitive matter. If the savage wishes to 

 represent a man, a bird or an arrow, he simply 

 draws rude pictures of those objects; and these 

 may be understood by anyone, irrespective of 

 his language. Thus, an Eskimo could "read" 

 the picture-writing of an Aztec as well as he 

 could that of his neighbor. But pure picture- 

 writing serves but few purposes, while it in- 

 evitably suggests the need for a more practical 

 system of representing ideas. Thus the ideo- 

 graphic uniting, or ideograms, as the picture- 

 writing is called, gives place to symbols which 

 represent sounds, either alphabetic or syllabic; 

 and when the latter have completely super- 

 seded the former, writing in its modern sense 

 has been achieved. 



The Egyptian Symbols. Presumably the 

 Egyptian hieroglyphics were originally pure pic- 

 ture-writing, but the gap between that and the 

 combination of ideograms with phonetic sym- 

 bols must be bridged by the imagination, for 

 the very earliest inscriptions extant, which date 

 perhaps from 5000 B.C., contain both forms. 

 Some of the symbols yield their meaning at the 

 first glance ; a man, a woman, are easily distin- 

 guished; so is a child, when it becomes evident 

 that the figure is engaged in sucking its thumb. 

 But general nouns, such as mankind, must be 

 represented, and this is done by drawing both 

 a man and a woman. Abstract ideas called for 

 more ingenuity, but even here most of the signs 

 are very clear, if the system is understood. 

 Thus a man in the attitude of prayer means 

 not just "a man praying," but worship; a pair 

 of legs represented walking; an outstretched 

 arm with a stick, strength. Side by side with 

 these there existed the phonetic symbols, prob- 

 ably developed originally by taking short words 

 containing one dominant consonant sound to 

 represent that consonant. 



But the complications of Egyptian hiero- 

 glyphic writing did not cease even there. So 

 long as the only writing to be done consisted 

 of carefully carved inscriptions on obelisks or 

 tombs, it was possible to preserve the original 

 pictorial form of the symbols, whether these 

 were ideographic or phonetic. But when writ- 

 ten language came into mofe common use for 

 literary and commercial purposes, the picture- 

 writing was too cumbersome. Gradually from 



the hieroglyphs, therefore, there was evolved 

 the so-called hieratic, or priestly, writing,' in 

 which the earliest Egyptian books have been 

 preserved. This hieratic writing shows but 

 faint traces of its original pictorial character, 

 and even these were lost in the demotic form, 

 which developed between the eighth and the 

 fourth centuries B. c. The name, which means 

 common or popular, in which we may trace the 

 English word democratic, was given it by the 

 Greeks because when they first came into close 

 contact with the Egyptians this latest form of 

 writing was employed for everything except re- 

 ligious literature. With the introduction of 

 Christianity into Egypt the use of the old writ- 

 ing forms declined, and no inscriptions are to 

 be found in any of the three styles after the 

 middle of the fifth century B. c. 



Throughout the Middle Ages and well into 

 modern times no interest was felt in these old 

 hieroglyphics, but from the seventeenth century 

 scholars made occasional efforts to decipher the 

 inscriptions. The problem seemed insoluble, 

 however, until discovery of the famous Rosetta 

 Stone' threw light upon it. This stone, found 

 in 1799 by an officer in Napoleon's army, con- 

 tains an inscription, relative to the coronation 

 of Ptolemy V, in three forms in Greek, in the 

 late Egyptian demotic, and in hieroglyphs, the 

 Greek version closing with the statement that 

 it was a translation of the two preceding in- 

 scriptions. The hieroglyphic text was badly 

 mutilated, but at length a French scholar, Fran- 

 c.ois Champollion, hit upon the proper clue and 

 discovered the phonetic value of many of the 

 signs. Later discoveries confirmed the theories 

 of Champollion, and an immense literature on 

 the subject of hieroglyphics ' has resulted from 

 the more recent studies of scholars. There now 

 exist dictionaries and grammars of the language 

 of the hieroglyphs, but the subject is by no 

 means a closed one to-day. 



An interesting fact about the hieroglyphs con- 

 cerns the direction of the writing. This was 

 not, as in most writings, fixed, but depended on 

 the whim of the writer or the shape of the ma- 

 terial to be inscribed. Sometimes hieroglyphics 

 were to be read from right to left, less com- 

 monly from left to right ; while frequently they 

 were to be read vertically downward. 



The Cuneiform inscriptions and also the writ- 

 ing of the Chinese developed from an original 

 pictorial form, and in some of the letters which 

 make up the alphabets of European peoples 

 the primitive ideograms may be traced (see 

 ALPHABET and the various letters, A, B, c, etc.). 



