Hieroglyphics

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ The laburnum had grown wild, like all the trees and shrubs, and some of its black, straggling boughs brushed the pane, and of dark, windy nights while we sat together and talked of art and life we would be startled by the sudden violence with which those branches beat angrily upon the glass. ”

“ There is nature-knowledge and there is man-knowledge; there is scientific experience and there is vital experience. Let the reader track down this contrast into his own inmost being, and he will understand what I mean.
All modes of comprehending the world may, in the last analysis, be described as Morphology. The Morphology of the mechanical and the extended, a science which discovers and orders nature-laws and causal relations, is called Systematic. The Morphology of the organic, of history and life and all that bears the sign of direction and destiny, is called Physiognomic. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Limited as is the number of stones that we have to draw from, it will be found that certain symbols are continually recurring, as certain letters or syllables or words would recur in any form of writing. Thus the human eye appears four times and on as many different stones, the 'broad arrow' seven times, and another uncertain instrument eleven times. The choice of symbols is evidently restricted by some practical consideration, and while some objects are of frequent occurrence, others equally obvious are conspicuous by their absence. ”

“ The origin of the word is the idea of which the word is, among other things, the symbol. That particular area of the brain which made it possible for us to utilize the symbols of our ideas became fit for the purpose, first, through gestural relationship with the motor-centers in the brain. More searching inquiry shows that in all right-handed persons the speech-center is localized in the left hemisphere of the brain; left-handed persons have it in the right. Stone implements made by early man demonstrate that we have been right-handed for many thousands of years at least. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ THE fixity of the crystalline and other physical properties of minerals is turned to account by being made the means of classifying such objects. To use the language of Aristotle,39 Classification is the architectonic science, to which Crystallography and the Doctrine of External Characters are subordinate and ministerial, as the art of the bricklayer and carpenter are to that of the architect. But classification itself is useful only as subservient to an ulterior science, which shall furnish us with knowledge concerning things so classified. ”