Hieroglyphic

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It was recognised on these principles that the original hieroglyphics, based on the prime elements of geometry, corresponded to the constitutive and essential laws of forms, determined by alternating or combined movements, which, in their turn, were determined by equilibratory attractions. Simples were distinguished from composites by their external figures; and by the correspondence between figures and numbers it became possible to make a mathematical classification of all substances revealed by the lines of their surfaces. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Dishevelled hair might represent "grieving," because in the time of trouble the hair of the head would be apt to be disturbed and uncared for. At a later date these ideographic hieroglyphics or pictures representing ideas, by a process of development from the basis of pure primitive picture writing, or by the association and suggestion which one thing gave to another or to other things, or by a species of conventionalization, came to represent sounds;—not letters but words or parts of words. ”

“ We won't go into the question of printed and not printed, written or not written, because it is obvious that the visible symbols by which literature is recorded have nothing to do with literature itself. In the beginning all literature was a matter of improvisation or recitation and memory, and hieroglyphics, writing, printing are mere conveniences. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ And when ingenious innovators took prominent curves and angles of these drawings to express the things, and so invented hieroglyphics, no doubt busy men with a large correspondence found advantage in it! ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Symbolical, tropical, or ideographic hieroglyphs, in which case the hieroglyph was not designed to stand for the object represented, but for some quality or attribute suggested by the object. Thus, heaven and a star meant night; a leg in a trap, deceit; incense, adoration; a bee, Lower Egypt; the heart, love; an eye with a tear, grief; a beetle, immortality; a crook, protection. Such hieroglyphs are called ideographs, and [Pg 54] are perhaps the most difficult to interpret, inasmuch as they stand for abstract ideas. ”

“ In another place blackened, worn-out window-sills, with delicate sculptures now scarcely discernible, seem too weak to bear the brown clay pots from which springs the heart’s-ease or the rose-bush of some poor working-woman. Farther on are doors studded with enormous nails, where the genius of our forefathers has traced domestic hieroglyphics, of which the meaning is now lost forever. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Morphology then is not only a study of material things and of the forms of material things, but has its dynamical aspect, under which we deal with the interpretation, in terms of force, of the operations of Energy. And here it is well worth while to remark that, in dealing with the facts of embryology or the phenomena of inheritance, the common language of the books seems to deal too much with the material elements concerned, as the causes of development, of variation or of hereditary transmission. ”

“ Living shapes. Every visible thing has a shape. A rock, a pyramid, a scaffolding round a house has a shape; but you cannot say that they are alive. Now this thing was alive. This thing bore perhaps no closer relation to the shape of a live being than to the shape of a rock, a pyramid or a scaffolding. ”

“ In Morphology we should not speak of Gestalt or fixed form, or if we do we should understand by it only a momentary phase of Bildung. Form is of interest not in itself but only as the manifestation of the inner activity of the living being. Over development, he says elsewhere, there presides a formative force, a bildende Kraft or Bildungstrieb, which works out the idea of the organism. Living things, in his view of them, strive to manifest an idea. They are Nature's works of art—and so, incidentally, they require an artist to interpret them. ”

“ In all the crystallisations there is one ‘momentum’ of formation—the centre, from which all the parts emanate perfectly well-balanced and complete in themselves. The elements of which all artistic works, whether natural or produced by men, are composed, are the straight line and the waving line. With these elements we can obtain the three principal conditions of every work of art—symmetry, proportion, and direction. ”

“ When we examine those instances of nature’s workmanship which we can take to pieces and understand, we find them in the highest degree artificial in our own sense of the word. Take, for example, the structure of an eye, or of the skeleton of an animal,—what complexity and what artifice! ”

“ Accordingly, form is one of the least important elements to be considered in determining a homology. "Nature," he wrote in one of his early papers, "tends to repeat the same organs in the same number and in the same relations, and varies to infinity only their form. In accordance with this principle I shall have to draw my conclusions, in the determining the bones of the fish's skull, not from a consideration of their form, but from a consideration of their connections." ”

“ What sense besides vision suggests to us the idea of her figure? And even in objects which we can reach, what is that circumstance in the sense of vision which suggests to us that the colour belongs to the sphere, except that we see the colour where we see the sphere? If we do not see figure, we do not see position; for figure is the relative position of the parts of a boundary. If we do not see position, why do we ascribe the yellow colour to the sphere on our left, rather than to the cube on our right? ”

“ The names of natural bodies, animal, vegetable, mineral, are of the second class; for they excite aggregates of sensible ideas, and at the same time may be defined (as appears from the writings of natural historians) by an enumeration of their properties and characteristics. Thus likewise geometrical figures have both ideas and definitions. The definitions in both cases are so contrived as to leave out all the variable particularities of the ideas, and to be also more full and precise, than the ideas generally are in the parts that are of the permanent nature. ”

“ The formation of a morphological classification is therefore a logical process, the purpose of which is to throw the facts of structure into the smallest possible number of general propositions, which propositions constitute the definitions of the respective groups. ”

“ In a word the whole of Geometry is an appeal to the Imagination in which the geometer says to us, "I know that my propositions are not exactly true except with respect to invisible, ideal, and imaginary figures, planes, and solids. These ideas, therefore, you must endeavour to imagine. In order to relieve the strain on your imagination, I will place before you material and visible figures about which my reasoning will be approximately true. ”

“ Importance of the Study of Morphology.—The study of morphology is of high importance in biology, and even more so in anthropology. And since the organism is a harmonic whole, in which the parts and their functions are closely interrelated, any external anomaly leads us to assume that there are corresponding anomalies of the internal organs, and hence, functional anomalies; hence also, in man, psychic anomalies. ”