Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the Late Antique Imagination

Jennifer Taylor Westerfeld

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780812296402
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Egyptian Ancient History
• Index: History

Throughout the pharaonic period, hieroglyphs served both practical and aesthetic purposes. Carved on stelae, statues, and temple walls, hieroglyphic inscriptions were one of the most prominent and distinctive features of ancient Egyptian visual culture. For both the literate minority of Egyptians and the vast illiterate majority of the population, hieroglyphs possessed a potent symbolic value that went beyond their capacity to render language visible. For nearly three thousand years, the hieroglyphic script remained closely bound to indigenous notions of religious and cultural identity.By the late antique period, literacy in hieroglyphs had been almost entirely lost. However, the monumental temples and tombs that marked the Egyptian landscape, together with the hieroglyphic inscriptions that adorned them, still stood as inescapable reminders that Christianity was a relatively new arrival to the ancient land of the pharaohs. In Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the Late Antique Imagination, Jennifer Westerfeld argues that depictions of hieroglyphic inscriptions in late antique Christian texts reflect the authors' attitudes toward Egypt's pharaonic past. Whether hieroglyphs were condemned as idolatrous images or valued as a source of mystical knowledge, control over the representation and interpretation of hieroglyphic texts constituted an important source of Christian authority.Westerfeld examines the ways in which hieroglyphs are deployed in the works of Eusebius and Augustine, to debate biblical chronology; in Greek, Roman, and patristic sources, to claim that hieroglyphs encoded the mysteries of the Egyptian priesthood; and in a polemical sermon by the fifth-century monastic leader Shenoute of Atripe, to argue that hieroglyphs should be destroyed lest they promote a return to idolatry. She argues that, in the absence of any genuine understanding of hieroglyphic writing, late antique Christian authors were able to take this powerful symbol of Egyptian identity and manipulate it to serve their particular theological and ideological ends.

Chapter 1
From Sign to Symbol in Roman Egypt

On the twenty-fourth of August in the year 394 C.E., a man stood before the north wall of the Gate of Hadrian on the island of Philae and carved three columns of rather crude hieroglyphic signs to the right of a now-mutilated relief depicting the Nubian god Mandulis (Figure 2). This ancient graffiti writer identified himself in his hieroglyphic text as Smet, son of Smet, the Second Prophet of Isis. In an accompanying Demotic inscription, he further described himself as “the scribe of the House of Writings (?) of Isis,” and he claimed to have carved his graffiti to honor Mandulis because that god had been favorable (“fair of face”) toward him. As a priest and scribe, Smet would have been uniquely capable of producing texts in both the ancient hieroglyphic and the more recent Demotic scripts. In fact, by the late fourth century he was likely one of only a handful of individuals in all of Egypt who possessed that ability.¹

This priestly scribe, chiseling his brief inscriptions into the stone of Hadrian’s Gate, stood unwittingly at a critical juncture in the history of Egypt’s already-ancient writing system; the three short columns of hieroglyphs he carved on that August day are considered by scholars to be the last known hieroglyphic inscription ever produced in Egypt.² Smet and his graffiti are thus a logical starting point from which to begin a discussion of hieroglyphs and their reception in late antique Egypt, for they raise two very critical questions. First, how did the knowledge of Egypt’s hieroglyphic writing system, in use for some three thousand years by the fourth century C.E., come to reside solely in the hands of Smet and his priestly brethren? And second, how and why did that knowledge finally die out? It is only in view of the obsolescence of the hieroglyphic script that we can begin to make sense of late antique attempts to “read” or otherwise interpret it. First, however, it is necessary to say a few words about the origins and nature of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and about the contexts in which they were used and studied. The following does not pretend to be a comprehensive account of Egyptian writing from the Predynastic period through to late antiquity; rather, it is intended to provide an overview of some of the key features of the hieroglyphic script, the practicalities of its use, and the circumstances leading to its eventual abandonment.

Figure 2. Hieroglyphic inscription of Smet, son of Smet (I.Philae.Dem. 436), from the Gate of Hadrian, Philae. Photo courtesy of Peter Dorman.

Origins of the Hieroglyphic Writing System

The term “hieroglyphic” is not a native designation for the Egyptian writing system but rather a term applied to that system by Greek visitors to Egypt.³ The Egyptians themselves referred to hieroglyphs as mdw nṯr, “god’s words,” a term that refers not to the sacral use of the script, but that rather reflects the long-standing belief that writing was the creation and gift of the god Thoth.⁴ Although hieroglyphs are often taken as the paradigmatic form of all ancient Egyptian writing, the hieroglyphic script was in fact just one of several scripts used at different times and in different contexts to record the spoken Egyptian language.

The development of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing took place in the late Predynastic and Early Dynastic periods (ca. 3250–2700 B.C.E.), a time of increasing social complexity when many of the defining characteristics and institutions of Egyptian culture first came into being. It has been suggested that the abundant rock art found along routes in the Eastern and Western Deserts may represent an early stage in the development of written communication in Egypt, as may the pictorial motifs and incised pot marks found on some types of Predynastic ceramics, but it remains unclear what specific meaning these various images held for their creators and viewers.⁵ Rock art, pot marks, and other types of figural representations may well have had some sort of communicative purpose, and some of the motifs employed therein resemble signs that later appear in the corpus of standardized hieroglyphic signs, but they cannot be considered to represent “writing” in the accepted modern sense of “visible speech.”⁶

The earliest artifacts that clearly mark the origins of Egyptian writing derive from the Predynastic cemetery of Umm el-Qa’ab at Abydos, in Upper Egypt. Abydos was one of three major centers of power in the Predynastic period, alongside the cities of Hierakonpolis and Naqada, and the elite burials at the site attest to the developing social hierarchy and institutionalization of power that characterized the Predynastic. One of these elite tombs, designated U-j by its excavators, is distinguished by its size, its architecture, and the extensive assemblage of valuable grave goods it once contained. All these factors have led archaeologists to speculate that the tomb owner was an individual of some importance, perhaps a proto-king who presided over the growing regional influence of Abydos during the Naqada III period.⁷ Three classes of artifacts found in Tomb U-j seem to reflect early efforts at administrative record keeping: sherds of ceramic vessels bearing markings in ink, sealings (impressions left in clay by cylinder seals), and ivory tags or labels with incised symbols. Some of the signs on the tags seem to represent numerals, and others have been interpreted as indicating the place of origin of the material to which the label was originally affixed. Later labels from Abydos are explicitly royal in character, and close connections between the development of writing and the origins of the centralized, monarchical Egyptian state are commonly assumed.⁸

The earliest symbols depicted on the ivory labels from Tomb U-j do not yet represent a mature system for rendering continuous speech, and it has been suggested that they should be understood rather as “a marking system with a highly restricted scope of applications,” which “displayed formal features typical of later writing and emergent representation of language” and was oriented primarily toward expressing the names of persons and places.⁹

The Egyptian writing system continued to evolve over the next several centuries, expanding in both its functionality and in the range of sign forms it employed. By the late Second Dynasty (ca. 2690 B.C.E.), the hieroglyphic writing system was capable of expressing complete clauses with subject and predicate, and lengthier continuous texts began to appear in the Third and Fourth Dynasties. Most signs achieved their canonical form during the Early Dynastic period, and the corpus of hieroglyphs remained quite stable until the Ptolemaic period, when there was extensive experimentation with sign forms and many new signs were introduced.¹⁰

Types of Hieroglyphic Signs

In its classical Middle Kingdom form, the hieroglyphic script comprised some seven hundred distinct signs, conventionally divided by scholars into three categories: logograms or ideograms (signs that represent entire words), phonograms (signs that represent sounds), and determinatives or semagrams (signs that mark word breaks and provide metalinguistic information about the classification of the words to which they are attached). These categories are not absolutely fixed—the interpretation of a sign as an ideogram, phonogram, or determinative rests on its context—but these different types of signs combine to form syntactic units within the Egyptian writing system.¹¹

Ideograms are signs that represent whole words or concepts; so, for example, the Egyptian word for “house,” pr, can be written using the ideogram depicting the schematic floor plan of a house. A single stroke is written after or beneath the sign to indicate that it is meant to be read as an ideogram. Contrary to the views of late antique Neoplatonists like Plotinus, whose theories on hieroglyphic writing are discussed in Chapter 3, ideograms do not refer directly to reality, but to reality as mediated by language. That is, the ideogram for “house” refers not to the physical reality of a particular house or to some Platonic ideal of “house,” but to the specific Egyptian word for house, pr.¹² Being tied to the spoken Egyptian language gives individual hieroglyphs phonetic value, and the phonetic value of individual signs enabled the Egyptians to use the rebus principle to write words that were difficult to depict graphically, but that sounded like words that could be represented. So, for example, the house hieroglyph, with its phonetic value of pr, could also be used to write the homonymous verb of motion prı̉, “to go out” (Table 1).

Phonograms are signs that represent sounds, rather than entire words. As noted above, some signs can act as both ideograms and phonograms; so, in the first example in Table 1, the house sign serves as an ideogram, connoting the word pr, or “house,” while in the second example, the same sign acts as a phonogram with the phonetic value p + r. As the examples in Table 2 illustrate, phonograms may be “alphabetic” or monoconsonantal (representing a single consonant sound), biliteral (representing two consonants) or triliteral (representing three consonants). In theory, the corpus of monoconsonantal signs could have been used to spell out any word in the Egyptian language, and those signs were in fact commonly used to transliterate foreign names. The fact that purely “alphabetic” writing of this sort never became the norm in Egypt, however, suggests that the high value placed on the hieroglyphic script in Egyptian culture went beyond the script’s immediate communicative function.¹³

Table 1. Ideograms and the Rebus Principle

Hieroglyphic Sign(s)	Phonetic Value	Meaning
	pr	“house”
	prı̉	“to go out”

Table 2. Phonograms

Hieroglyphic Sign	Type	Phonetic Value
	alphabetic	b
	biliteral	m + n
	triliteral	ḫ + p + r

Determinatives make up the third major category of hieroglyphic signs. They do not convey phonetic information but stand at the end of a word to mark the word break. They also serve as classifiers, providing metalinguistic information about the semantic category to which the word belongs. So, for example, the walking legs sign is used to determine verbs of motion such as “walk” and “run,” while the house sign is used to determine words for types of buildings. Recent studies have drawn on insights from the field of semiotics to emphasize the range of culturally specific information that can be conveyed by determinatives and, conversely, the insight that determinatives ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on Translations
• Introduction. Confronting Pharaonic Egypt in Late Antiquity
• Chapter 1. From Sign to Symbol in Roman Egypt
• Chapter 2. Hieroglyphs, Deep History, and Biblical Chronology
• Chapter 3. Encoding the Wisdom of Egypt
• Chapter 4. Laws for Murdering Men’s Souls
• Chapter 5. Translating Hieroglyphs, Constructing Authority
• Conclusion. Hieroglyphs in the Late Antique Imagination
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index Locorum
• Subject Index
• Acknowledgments