Hieroglyphs (21 page)

For the archaeologist in Egypt there is no escape from hieroglyphs, as even in the most difficult excavations in Pharaonic contexts textual information will always be found, even if it is a simply a small ring bezel bearing a royal cartouche. The types of information from the archaeological and textual records can highlight different aspects of the life-story of a site. The city of Saı¨s is well known from 101

religious texts and votive statuary of Dynasty 26. At this time, the major cult centre of the goddess Neith here was administered by a series of powerful local governors and there were temples to Atum, Osiris, Hathor, and perhaps Sobek, among others. In addition, a statue records the construction of a sacred lake with information about its exact size, there was a special place for the rearing of the Sacred Cow of Neith, and sarcophagi attest to an important necropolis area. None of these places has been located archaeologically and it is likely, in fact, that buildings such as the Neith Temple have been totally removed from the site. On the other hand, recent archaeological work has discovered that there are two major city zones at Saı¨s, that human occupation here goes back to the Neolithic Period (
c
.4500 bc) and that there is a substantial Late Ramesside settlement at the site. None of these things is clear from the texts. Together, however, the two types of investigation fill out the history and life of the ancient city from earliest times to the modern day. The combined evidence can supply information as
phs

diverse as the influence of the river on the city (from
ogly

geoarchaeological investigation) to the presence of the collaborator
Hier

Wedjahorresne at Saı¨s in the Persian Period (from the hieroglyphic text on his statue). For the Egyptologist with an interest in piecing together each part of the jigsaw, each nugget, whether inscribed in stone or written in the delta mud, is treasure.
9
Texts and art, the objects and monuments, work together to provide us with a picture of the past society and its people.

102

Chapter 7

Hieroglyphs in the

modern world

An exhibition called ‘Time Machine’ at the British Museum in 1994 brought together ancient and modern art, using Ancient Egypt as the inspiration for contemporary art. An etched zinc plate by David Hiscock showed the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone extruded to form a modern barcode, implying that they were both linked by their common encoded information which could be understood only if the reader had the key. The barcode requires a computer program and a piece of hardware, whereas the Rosetta Stone requires a knowledge of hieroglyphs to ‘crack the code’. Such is the power of the image of the Rosetta Stone that it has come to represent the key to Egyptian hieroglyphs, despite the fact that the hieroglyphs on it were written in the Ptolemaic period, by which time the picture writing was remote even by Egyptian standards.
1

The power of the inscribed stone comes directly through to us from Egypt, when, in the Late Period, ‘magical’ statues were set up in the precincts of temples, covered in hieroglyphs which recorded magical spells to cure scorpion and snake bites, to drive away the terrors of the night, and to have the gods and their minions provide protection. Water poured over the stone and hieroglyphs was collected to be used internally or externally; a touch of the stone could heal. It was not necessary to read the text, simply to believe in its power. This power can be seen earlier, when kings handed out 103

gifts to their courtiers, such as jars of ointment to celebrate the Sed-festival of Pepi II. The alabaster vessels were inscribed with the king’s name on the side, perhaps to enhance the rejuvenating power of the ointment. Oyster shells, real and made of precious metals, were handed out to courtiers of Senrosret I during the Middle Kingdom. The king’s name was inscribed on them to enhance the health-giving powers of the shell, whose name in Egyptian meant ‘wholeness’. During Dynasty 18, rings made from relatively cheap faience had the names of Amunhotep Nebmaatre and Akhenaten, Smenkhare, and Tutankhamun on the bezels.

Small, beautifully made cosmetic jars bear the names of Tiye and Amenhotep, with the names almost acting as amuletic devices.

The objects are reminders of the king and invoke his power, using the hieroglyphic script. The detail of the text was not important and the plaques put into the foundation deposit of the temple at Tell el-Balamun have such careless writings of the name of Sheshonq III and such abbreviated titles for the priest, Hor,
phs

that the
y can hardly be read.2

ogly

Hier

Sometimes hieroglyphs are used for symbolic decoration: walls have framing borders of
ankh
-signs,
was
-sceptres, and
djed
-signs bringing ‘life, power, stability’; a cartouche-shaped box of Tutankhamun has his name inlaid on the lid. Further, all Egyptian amulets could be regarded as hieroglyphs, spelling out the names of the powers they invoke.

Nevertheless, the most accessible texts were those written in hieratic, not hieroglyphs, and it may be the lack of the

‘power-decoration’ in the hieratic script that accounts for the retention of the hieroglyphic script. Even in modern times, we have retained the original use to which hieroglyphs were put and turned them into decorative features, so that we can write our own names, print them onto T-shirts and use their visual qualities.

Even scholars have indulged in this game of paradox, however, because in modern studies hieratic originals are usually transcribed into hieroglyphs to be studied by students. It would be much easier 104

for people to learn hieratic from the start, as this would provide a wide range of texts, relating to a wider social group, than texts written in hieroglyphs. After all, Chinese characters are learnt successfully by millions of people, so there is no reason why hieratic and Demotic should be considered difficult. The script of hieratic was somewhat neglected from the palaeographical study of Georg Möller in 1909–12 (
Hieratische Paläographie
) to the new version by Ursula Verhoeven, perhaps mainly due to the problems of the exact reproduction of the texts. The same problems applied to Demotic but, with the introduction of digital technology, it is now possible to make some of these texts more quickly and cheaply accessible, as has been done for the Demotic Dictionary Project, the Tebtunis (Greek) papyri at Michigan University, or the Deir el-Medina hieratic ostraka. They can be viewed on the web and so are
Hi

instantly accessible to anyone with access to the Internet.
3

eroglyp

hs in th

Hieroglyphs in translation

e modern w

In the modern world, the communication of Egyptian texts to us is made possible in many ways, based on the platform of scholarship of the last two hundred years. There have been great strides in
orl

translating Egyptian texts into modern languages, though this has
d

brought another range of choices of communication. The natural inclination in translation is to transpose into a meaningful modern phrase while maintaining a balance with the original ancient text.

This can result in either a complete paraphrase or an extremely stilted, literal translation which is difficult to understand. The skill in translation is finding a balance, so that the Egyptian rhythm and sentence structure can be maintained, while the sense can also be readily understood. Fashions in English language have also changed, but some forms of English seem more appropriate to some of the Egyptian material than others, in particular ‘Authorized Version’ English – that is, the English of the King James version of the Bible from 1611. The group of scholars who translated the Bible at this time built on other earlier attempts, in particular Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament (1526) and the Pentateuch (1530).

105

They removed anachronisms such as the ‘breeches’ of Adam and Eve from the Geneva or ‘Breeches’ Bible of 1560 and retained the poetry and drama of the texts.
4
Egyptian translations have also gone through this process of refinement, but as many hieroglyphic texts are already ‘archaic’, more archaic language in translation seems justified. There are controversial areas of understanding, particularly in ‘historical’ matters or often at key moments of a tale, but every person who comes to an Egyptian text will bring to it something of their own experience and will ultimately understand something specific to them from it. Perhaps the greater their experience of Ancient Egypt, the more accurate is their translation, just as for any foreign culture and language. As was the case for the early decipherers, permutations which get to the nub of a text only become apparent after a time.

Below are just four examples of translations of the same Hymn to the Aten from the tomb of Ay at Tell el-Amarna (
c
.1330 bc). They
phs

demonstrate the possible variations in flavour, but, interestingly, all
ogly

of them respond to the poetical nature of the text.

Hier

Splendid you rise in heaven’s lightland,

O living Aten, creator of life!

When you have dawned in eastern lightland,

You fill every land with your beauty.
5

Miriam Lichtheim, 1976

You rise in perfection on the horizon of the sky, living Aten, who started life.

Whenever you are risen upon the eastern horizon

you fill every land with your perfec
tion.6

W. K. Simpson, 1972

Thou arisest fair in the horizon of Heaven, O Living Aten, Beginner of Life. When thou dawnest in the East, thou fillest every land with thy beauty
.7

Cyril Aldred, 1991

106

Let your holy Light shine from the height of heaven, O living Aten,

source of all life!

From eastern horizon risen and streaming,

you have flooded the world with your beauty.
8

John L. Foster, 1998

The continued academic study and analysis of texts, not just to provide translations like those above, will continue to advance the scientific knowledge of Egyptian and the detailed knowledge of aspects of the civilization.

Learning Egyptian hieroglyphs

Hi

Interest in Ancient Egypt in our own time has sparked a need and
eroglyp

desire to learn the ancient language and for people to be able to
hs in th

read the texts for themselves. Through the medium of television, the availability of comparatively cheap travel to Egypt, educational
e modern w

courses at all levels, and a plethora of books about the subject of Egypt, the past is accessible in a way in which it never has been before. To some extent, anyone can now easily find the means to
orl

write their name in hieroglyphs informally or, with a little more
d

effort, find an evening class, a teaching book, or even a web-page to help them develop the language skills a little further. Some people are more focused and organized and in Britain, for example, there are local groups of like-minded people who meet regularly and arrange talks and lectures. Some people attend reading groups to read hieroglyphs for fun and because they want to know what the Egyptians wrote about. It is probably true that more people in the world today have a smattering of Egyptian hieroglyphs than was the case at any one point in Egyptian history. More present-day people have visited some of the most sacred places in Egypt than ever could or did in Ancient Egypt. Hieroglyphs are a globally recognized symbol for Ancient Egypt and with the promise of a space probe being named in hieroglyphs, who can guess how far they will permeate universal consciousness?

107

Of course, this cannot happen without the momentum of texts to read and these are less readily available than teaching aids. In addition, texts with good translations also need to be made available so that beginners can see where they might be going and have guidance along the way. In this respect, the publication of material on the web and on CD-ROM is ideal as it suits the pictorial nature of the script much better than other conventional methods of publication. In fact, the ability of the web and of computers to reproduce hieroglyphs easily and cheaply is almost the technical revolution for which hieroglyphs have been waiting. A text only needs to be compiled once and then it is available a million times.

To this end, several institutions have been working on the publication of material. Museums have started to use the web as a means of providing access, both to the displayed collections and their reserve material. The high-quality photographs of inscribed objects can be used as ready-made learning material. Even though the availability of whole collections on the web is a long way off,
phs

simply because of the actual working hours needed to put all the
ogly

information together, a good corpus is already available from the
Hier

Louvre, the Cairo Museum, the Metropolitan Museum and the Petrie Museum, to name only a few. In addition, the European Union-funded Champollion Project opened up Egyptian resources by putting 15,000 objects from European museums onto CD-ROM, including photographs of objects, catalogue data, and hieroglyphic texts. The eventual home of projects like this is in cyberspace. This will allow researchers on the web to have access to the material and some of them will have contributions to make to cataloguing or understanding the objects.

More complex than this basic copying of texts has been the work pioneered by Peter Der Manuelian in computer digital epigraphy.

The facsimile copying of tomb and temple wall scenes has largely been done by hand for the last 150 years, either by the use of photographs or working directly from the wall, sometimes onto paper or plastic. The results have been spectacular, particularly in the work of Norman and Nina de Garis Davies in the Theban 108