Hieroglyph

“ Opposite her sits the dog which we saw on page 13c. Here (in sign 7) , as on page 13c, the hieroglyph of the dog is combined with a Cimi sign, and this hieroglyph is repeated in 8 with the sign c, which is so closely allied to Cimi.
For the third group the god A should have been represented with the woman, as is proved by sign 11 so peculiarly combined with r as a superfix. To this hieroglyph a is added, doubtless referring to the good days, as if merely to fill space.
The hieroglyphs of the fourth group do not, I think, convey a clear idea as to which deity belongs here. ”

“ In modern lists the signs are classified according to the nature of the objects they depict, as human figures, plants, vessels, instruments, &c. Horapollon’s Hieroglyphica may be cited as a native work, but its author, if really an Egyptian, had no knowledge of good writing. His production consists of two elaborate complementary lists: the one describing sign-pictures and giving their meanings, the other cataloguing ideas in order to show how they could be expressed in hieroglyphic. Each seems to us to be made up of curious but perverted reminiscences eked out by invention ”

“ FOOTNOTES:
1 See Introduction to the German translation of the Ebers papyrus, by Heinrich Joachim, Berlin, 1890.
2 The Egyptians had three different kinds of writing: the hieroglyphic, the hieratic, and the demotic. The hieroglyphic style, which is the most ancient and is chiefly to be found on monuments and in religious texts, consists of figures representing every kind of object; the hieratic or sacerdotal style is an abbreviation of the hieroglyphic writing; the demotic or popular style, the least ancient, resulted from further abbreviations of the hieratic. ”

“ Should there be any remains of sculpture on such a stone, it becomes a lithoglyph or a hieroglyph; and if the nature and end of this sculpture be quite incomprehensible to the adepts, they may term it a cryptoglyph, and thus dignify, by a sort of title of honour, the abso [4] luteness of their ignorance. It were a pity if any more ingenious man should afterwards find a key to the mystery, and destroy the significance of the established nomenclature. ”

“ Our brains, as a clever writer has expressed it, are like the rocks of the Sinaitic valley, all covered over with inscriptions written there by the long caravans of Thought. Each impression received upon the brain through the medium of the senses leaves there a hieroglyphic inscription, which, although invisible under the microscope, is nevertheless material and real. Why should not these hieroglyphs of the parent brain reappear in the brain of the child?—fainter and less decipherable to the eyes of the memory, yet not so faint as to be wholly lost. ”

“ Beside the remains of the picture symbols, the demotic writing employs seventeen simple phonetic symbols and some fifty symbols of syllables. The hieroglyphic and hieratic modes of writing are called on the monuments the "writing of the gods," the demotic is "the writing of the books." For us the difficulty of the hieroglyphics is materially increased by the fact that the Coptic language in the form [Pg 208] accessible to us is removed by thousands of years from the form of words represented by the hieroglyphics of the old and new kingdom. ”

“ Hieroglyphics, in their primitive form, are scarcely to be considered in any case as simply a mode of expressing an oral language: they may be a direct and independent representation of our thoughts, that is, of recollections, or sentiments, or intentions, collateral to the representation of the same thoughts by the language of sounds. We find, in many of the Egyptian monuments, a double expression of the same sense: first, a simple picture, for instance, of a votary presenting a vase to a sitting deity ”

“ It was called men, and sometimes the chessboard is preceded by an owl, the phonetic sign of m, and followed by a zigzag line, the phonetic sign of n. Such complementary hieroglyphs [Pg 58] are intended primarily to show with greater precision the pronunciation of men, and they are known by the name of complements.
Phonetic hieroglyphs are often followed by a representation or ideograph of the object referred to. Such explanatory representations and ideographs are called determinatives, because they help to determine the precise value of the preceding hieroglyph. ”

“ Those who would like to trace the processes by which one alphabet has been developed must be referred to Dr. Taylor’s great work, from which I have abstracted so much.
For the sake of convenience Egyptian scribes developed [220] a hieratic writing from the hieroglyphics. Strangely enough this was twice accomplished, the early Hieratic was truly cursive and much bolder than the later and more delicate, though less modified Hieratic. The former was invented before the period of the Hyskos or Shepherd Kings, and the latter, or Theban Hieratic, arose in the succeeding Ramesidan dynasty. ”

“ Warburton, from an attentive perusal of what Clemens Alexandrinus had said on the subject, had, in fact, concluded, in a way highly creditable to his acuteness, that hieroglyphics were a real written language, applicable to the purposes of history and common life, as well as to those of religion; and that, among the different sorts of hieroglyphics, the Egyptians possessed those which were used phonetically, or alphabetically, as letters ”

“ We bend our attention to one and to another. We let them group themselves casually, as they will, in their random way, writing their own gnomic hieroglyphics, in their own immense and primeval language, as the earth-mothers heave them up from the abyss or draw them down ”

“ It is necessary to look closely to distinguish on the smooth walls the hieroglyphic inscriptions, the rows of little figures, little owls, little jackals, that tell in a lost language the history of ancient peoples. ”

“ Take, for instance, the letter pp in Landa's alphabet, ### : here are evidently the traces of a face. The same appear, but not so plainly, in the sign for x, which is ### . Now, if we turn to the ancient hieroglyphics upon the monuments of Central America, we will find the human face appearing in a great many of them, as in the following, which we copy from the Tablet of the Cross at Palenque. We take the hieroglyphs from the left-hand side of the inscription. Here it will be seen that, out of seven hieroglyphical figures, six contain human faces. ”

“ Therefore, while to the unlearned it conveys no meaning, it is read as absolute nonsense by the ecclesiastical archæologist, simply because it is worked in a language of undeciphered hieroglyphics—unknown to the worker—meaningless, reminding us of the Græco-Egyptian inscriptions, of which the pictured words seem to have been copied at random for their prettiness, or the Arabian lettering on some of the ancient Sicilian textiles, which is nonsense. ”

“ They are, however, in one sense, hieroglyphics, being tolerably accurate delineations of men, animals, and instruments. If we are right in our conjectures, the value of the Rosetta stone is incomparably greater than has been imagined. We have no need of hieroglyphics: Roman and Egyptian monuments are full of them. But a primitive alphabet, probably the earliest ever formed in the world, and illustrating an important link in the history of writing,—the adaptation of signs to words,—is certainly a discovery very interesting to any philosophical mind. ”

“ So copious an alphabet would have been a continual source of error. The characters, therefore, thus applied, were soon fixed, and the Egyptians practically confined themselves to particular hieroglyphics in writing certain words.
"Out of bad comes good."ToList
Hieroglyphic writing was employed on monuments of all kinds, on temples as well as on the smallest figures, and on bricks used for building purposes. ”

“ Egyptian inscriptions show both ideographs, hieroglyphics and alphabetic signs, as there is usually a word spelt out in syllables or letters, and at the end of it the complete word shown as a little picture. The hieroglyphics altered into a style of writing which was not so pictorial about the nineteenth century B.C., and although alphabetical symbols were actually used as early as 4,000 B.C., yet it was very many years later than this that they became of general use. ”

“ Thus, while (with the faculty which transformed alphabetic writing into hieroglyphics) the capacity of abstraction gained by the first practice remains, hieroglyphic reading is of itself a deaf reading and a dumb writing. It is true that the audible (which [pg 084] is in time) and the visible (which is in space) , each have their own basis, one no less authoritative than the other. ”

“ Egyptian hieroglyphics and cuneiform inscriptions yet remained, for the most part, but confusion of ornament and meaningless signs. Some little advance, it is true, had been reached during the latter part of the eighteenth century, as to the signification of certain hieroglyphic characters, but these were as yet but conjecture; a groping in the dark, with no means to verify, uncertain, unassured. ”

“ Enigmatic hieroglyphs include all those wherein one object stands for some other object. Thus, a hawk stands for a solar deity; the bird ibis, for the god Thoth; a seated figure with a curved beard, for a god.
Fourthly. Phonetic hieroglyphs, wherein each hieroglyph represents a sound, and is therefore called a phonetic. Each phonetic at first probably stood for a syllable, in which case it might be called a syllabic sign. Thus, a chessboard represents the sound men; a hoe, mer ”

“ Ever since man first scratched hieroglyphics upon an ostracon, or scribbled with sepia upon papyrus, he must have wondered, as we wonder to-day. I suppose that we DO know a little more than they. We have an arc of about three thousand years given us, from which to calculate out the course to be described by our descendants ”

“ The age of the most ancient pictographs and hieroglyphics can only be conjectured, but all give certain indications that they are many centuries old, and the difference between the work of the ancient and the later race leads the observer to believe that the older hieroglyphics were made by a people far superior to those who came after them, and who left no record in symbols, as we have said, with the exception of crude representations of animals and reptiles. ”

“ It amounts essentially to that which in ordinary life we call 'memory of persons,' and follows almost naturally from a careful study of the manuscripts. For, by frequently looking tentatively at the representations, one learns by degrees to recognise promptly similar and familiar figures of gods by the characteristic impression they make as a whole or by certain details, and the same is true of the accompanying hieroglyphs. ”

“ If the picture and the hieroglyphic together lead to such various results, we may easily conceive what wild work would be made by an attempt to interpret a pictorial representation alone.
We hesitate to assign to the inscriptions discovered in these ruined cities the true character of hieroglyphics; that is, of a system of symbols by means of which, independently of oral tradition, the ideas of one generation could be conveyed to another. But our readers would probably prefer to have Mr Wilson’s matured judgment to our own conjectures. ”

“ The hieroglyphics, whether carved or written, and no matter what their position or what the material upon which they are inscribed, are invariably of the same nature, though it is noticeable that those on some monuments are finer cut, more intricate, and display a higher art than others. ”

“ They are abstract, and often almost symbolic in their characterization of form, and it is not difficult to imagine how letters and written language became naturally evolved through a system of hieroglyphics, starting from the unsystemized but irrepressible tendency of the human to record his linear ideas of rhythm on the one hand, or his impressions of nature on the other. ”

“ These are in Latin letters, for henceforth I shall use the Coptic letters for real Coptic words only, and not, as Champollion has done, for hieroglyphic words, as that only creates confusion. After this comes a short sketch of the hieroglyphic grammar, and I intend to give a selection of groups of hieroglyphics, as the foundation of a lexicon; more to secure for myself the priority of classification than even remotely to supply the need of a lexicon, which I cannot think of at present. ”

“ Traditions and considerations of a nature unintellegible to modern science, induced or justified the selection. The discovery of the mode of reading the hieroglyphics enables us to take a more certain ground in the inquiry. ”

“ Is the snail in his head-ornament to be understood as the sign for retarded motion?
The second figure is the wounding serpent deity H, likewise represented here as feminine, with a lock of hair; the copal pouch hangs from her neck, her nose-peg resembles a flower as on page 19a. A bird is sitting on her head and is devouring a piece of an animal's body; we have already met this representation in the preceding Tonalamatl. Hieroglyph 6 designates the deity H, 7 (Imix-Kan) probably denotes the devouring of the flesh and sign 8, which is an Ahau with a prefixed knife, may also refer to this. ”

“ The same dim obscurity, with scarcely an exception, hangs over the primeval inhabitants of every other country; and if we lift up the mysterious curtain which has so long fallen over and concealed the past, we only obtain glimpses of obscure hieroglyphics ”

“ At Dakki in Nubia there is an inscription of the Ptolemies, over the principal entrance, that [Pg 30] occupies a place evidently connected with the architecture; and on each side of this is a tablet of hieroglyphics, nearly similar one to the other. Now it struck me on the spot, that these, being nearly of the same length as the Greek tablet, might possibly contain a translation. I therefore referred to a letter in Mr. Bankes’s possession, containing some fifty explanations of hieroglyphics from Dr. ”