More than picture writing
The word “enigmatic” in the title reflects an older view. For many centuries hieroglyphs were thought to be a symbolic code, and Greek and Renaissance writers often claimed that each picture carried a deep spiritual meaning. That idea turned out to be wrong, and the reality is both simpler and more subtle. Hieroglyphs are a true writing system that records the Egyptian language. They contain pictures, but most signs stand for sounds, much as letters do.
How the system works
Egyptian writing uses three kinds of sign, often combined within a single word.
Sound signs (phonograms). About two dozen signs each represent a single consonant, and they work rather like an alphabet. Others stand for two or three consonants together. Vowels were not written, so modern readers do not know exactly how words were pronounced; scholars reconstruct approximate sounds with help from Coptic, the later form of the language, and from foreign transcriptions.
Word signs (logograms). Some signs represent a whole word or idea. The sign of a sun disc can mean “sun” or “day”, for example, and is usually marked with a stroke to show that it is a word sign.
Classifiers (determinatives). Signs placed at the end of a word give no sound but show the category of meaning, such as a seated person for a man, a pair of legs for movement or a roll of papyrus for abstract ideas. They help the reader tell apart words that are spelled with the same consonants.
A typical word thus combines sound signs spelling the consonants, followed by a classifier. This mixture of sound and meaning is what made the system hard to decode, because earlier attempts assumed it had to be one or the other.
Direction and appearance
Hieroglyphs could be written in rows or in columns and in either direction. The reader tells the direction by looking at which way the animals and people face: they look toward the start of the line. Signs are grouped into neat blocks, with attention to balance and spacing, so that the text looks like a design. On monuments the signs were carved or painted with great care, and the number of signs in use rose from several hundred in the Middle Kingdom to thousands in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, when scribes created new forms for scholarly and religious reasons.
The Egyptians called the script the “words of the god”, which reflects its sacred use. The name “hieroglyph” comes from Greek, meaning sacred carving.
Uses
Hieroglyphs belonged mainly to monuments and religious texts. They covered temple walls, tomb chambers, statues, obelisks and coffins, and they recorded royal names, rituals and funerary spells. A famous feature is the cartouche, an oval ring around a king’s name. The inscriptions on temples, discussed in the survey of temple architecture, made the building a text as much as a structure.
For everyday purposes Egyptians used a cursive form called hieratic, written with a reed brush on papyrus, and from about the seventh century BCE a still more cursive form called Demotic. Administration, letters and literature were typically written in these forms, as were scientific texts such as the medical papyri treatments and the Rhind papyrus mathematics. Hieroglyphs were also written on papyrus, notably in funerary texts like the funerary spell collection known as the Book of the Dead.
The earliest known signs, some of them probably phonetic, appear around 3300 BCE on small labels from a tomb at Abydos, which makes this one of the oldest known writing systems, though it is not clear which of Egypt and Mesopotamia produced writing first. Compared with cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia, the Egyptian system stayed visually pictorial for its entire history.
Loss of the script
The last securely dated hieroglyphic inscription is a graffito at the temple of Philae from 394 CE. As Christianity spread and the temples closed, fewer people could read or write the script, and by the early medieval period knowledge of it had vanished. Coptic, written in a Greek-based alphabet, preserved the spoken language of late Egypt.
The Rosetta Stone and decipherment
The breakthrough came from a black stone found in 1799 by French soldiers at Rosetta, in the Delta, during Napoleon’s expedition. The Rosetta Stone carries a decree of 196 BCE, issued in the name of Ptolemy V, written in three scripts: hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek. Because the Greek could be read, scholars had a parallel text for the others. The stone passed to Britain after the French defeat in Egypt and is in the British Museum.
Progress was gradual. The English scientist Thomas Young recognised that the oval rings enclosed royal names and identified some sound values. The French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion went much further. He knew Coptic, compared the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra from other inscriptions, and showed in 1822 that hieroglyphs combined sound signs with meaning signs. His work opened up the reading of Egyptian texts. Details of this process are covered in the article on the stone and decipherment, and the same sort of breakthrough is seen with Maya glyph decipherment centuries later.
Legacy
Signs from the Egyptian system, via earlier alphabets in Sinai and the Levant, are thought to have contributed to the shapes of the first alphabets, a story linked to the consonantal alphabet. Today hieroglyphs allow scholars to read tombs, temples and royal decrees directly, and they still attract many readers who simply enjoy deciphering a cartouche for themselves.