Egyptian Hieroglyphs (Remastered) Sleep Facts

Tonight, we quietly explore the rich and fascinating history of Egyptian hieroglyphs—a language of symbols that once adorned temples and tombs. Benjamin Boster gently guides us through their origins, meanings, and mysterious beauty. Happy sleeping!

Transcript

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast,

Where I help you drift off one fact at a time.

I'm your host,

Benjamin Boster,

And today's episode is about Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs were the formal writing system used in ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language.

Hieroglyphs combined ideographic,

Logographic,

Syllabic,

And alphabetic elements,

With more than 1,

000 distinct characters.

Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood.

The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing,

As was the proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet.

Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet,

The first widely adopted phonetic writing system,

Moreover owing in large part to the Greek and Aramaic scripts that descended from Phoenician.

The majority of the world's living writing systems are descendants of Egyptian hieroglyphs,

Most prominently the Latin and Cyrillic scripts through Greek,

And the Arabic and Brahmic scripts through Aramaic.

The use of hieroglyphic writing arose from proto-literate symbol systems in the early Bronze Age,

Circa the 33rd century BC,

Nakata III,

With the first decipherable sentence written in the Egyptian language,

Dating to the 28th century BC,

2nd dynasty.

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs developed into a mature writing system used for monumental inscription in the classical language of the Middle Kingdom period.

During this period,

The system used about 900 distinct signs.

The use of this writing system continued through the New Kingdom and Late Period,

And on into the Persian and Ptolemaic periods.

Late survivals of hieroglyphic use are found well into the Roman period,

Extending into the 4th century AB.

During the 5th century,

The permanent closing of pagan temples across Roman Egypt ultimately resulted in the ability to read and write hieroglyphs being forgotten.

Despite attempts at decipherment,

The nature of this script remained unknown throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period.

The decipherment of hieroglyphic writing was finally accomplished in the 1820s by Jean-Francois Chapayot with the help of the Rosetta Stone.

The entire ancient Egyptian corpus,

Including both hieroglyphic and hieratic texts,

Is approximately 5 million words in length.

If counting duplicates such as the Book of the Dead and the Coffin Texts as separate,

This figure is closer to 10 million.

The most complete compendium of ancient Egyptian,

The Vertebruch der Egyptian Sprache,

Contains 1.

5 to 1.

7 million words.

The word hieroglyph comes from the ancient Greek hieroglyphikos,

Meaning sacred carving.

A compound of hieros,

Sacred,

And glypho,

I carve in grave.

From the Ptolemaic period,

A third of the first centuries BC,

The glyphs themselves were called ta-hieroglyphika gramata,

The sacred engraved letters,

The Greek counterpart to the Egyptian term medu-netur,

Words of gods.

Greek hieroglyphos meant a carver of hieroglyphs.

In English,

Hieroglyph as a noun is recorded from 1590,

Originally short for nominalized hieroglyphic.

1580s was a plural hieroglyphics.

From adjectival use,

Hieroglyphic character.

Hieroglyphs may have emerged from the pre-literate artistic traditions of Egypt.

For example,

Symbols on Gersian pottery from circa 4000 BC have been argued to resemble hieroglyphic writing.

Proto-writing systems developed in the second half of the 4th millennium BC,

Such as the clay labels of pre-dynastic ruler called Scorpion I,

Nakata III,

A period circa 33rd century BC.

Recovered at Abydos,

Modern Umm al-Kahab in 1998,

Was a Narmer palette,

Circa 31st century BC.

The first full sentence written in mature hieroglyphs so far discovered,

Was found on a seal impression in the tomb of Seth Paribson at Umm al-Kahab,

Which dates from the 2nd dynasty,

28th or 27th century BC.

Around 800,

Hieroglyphs are known to date back to the Old Kingdom,

Middle Kingdom,

And New Kingdom eras.

By the Greco-Roman period,

There were more than 5,

000.

Scholars have long debated whether hieroglyphs were developed independently of any other script,

Or derived from cuneiform,

The earliest writing system in human history that developed to write Sumerian and Southern Mesopotamia during the late 4th millennium BC.

Scholars like Jeffrey Samson argued that Egyptian hieroglyphs came into existence a little after Sumerian script,

And probably were invented under the influence of the latter,

And that it is probable that the general idea of expressing words of a language in writing was brought to Egypt from Sumerian Mesopotamia.

Further,

Egyptian writing appeared suddenly,

While Mesopotamian had a long evolutionary history with antecedent signs,

Use,

And tokens for agricultural and accounting purposes as early as circa 8000 BC.

While there are many instances of early Egypt-Mesopotamia relations,

The lack of direct evidence for the transfer of writing means that no definitive determination has been made as to the origin of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt.

Since the 1990s,

The above-mentioned discoveries of glyphs at Abydos,

Dated between 3400 and 3200 BC,

Have shed further doubt on the classical notion that the Mesopotamian symbol system predates the Egyptian one.

A date of circa 3400 BC for the earliest Abydos glyphs challenges the hypothesis of diffusion from Mesopotamia to Egypt,

Pointing to an independent development of writing in Egypt.

Rosalie David has argued that the debate is moot,

Since if Egypt did adopt the idea of writing from elsewhere,

It was presumably only the concept which was taken over,

Since the forms of the hieroglyphs are entirely Egyptian in origin and reflect the distinctive flora,

Fauna,

And images of Egypt's own landscape.

Egyptian scholar Gamal Mokhtar argued further that the inventory of hieroglyphic symbols derived from fauna and flora used in the signs,

Which are essentially African,

And in regards to writing,

We have seen that a purely nilotic,

Hence African,

Origin not only is not excluded,

But probably reflects the reality.

Hieroglyphs consist of three kinds of glyphs.

Phonetic glyphs,

Including single-consonant characters that function like an alphabet,

Logographs,

Representing morphemes,

And determinatives,

Which narrow down the meaning of logographic or phonetic words.

As writing developed and became more widespread among the Egyptian people,

Simplified glyph forms developed,

Resulting in the hieratic,

Priestly,

And demotic popular scripts.

These variants were also more suited than hieroglyphs for use on papyrus.

Hieroglyphic writing was not,

However,

Eclipsed,

But existed alongside hieroglyphs.

Hieroglyphs continued to be used intermittently under Persian rule in the 6th and 5th centuries,

As well as during the ensuing Ptolemaic and Roman periods that followed after Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt.

It appears that the misleading quality of comments from Greek and Roman writers about the hieroglyphs came about at least in part as a response to the changed political situation.

Some believed that hieroglyphs may have functioned as a way to distinguish true Egyptians from some of the foreign conquerors.

Another reason may be the refusal to tackle a foreign culture on its own terms,

Which characterized Greco-Roman approaches to Egyptian culture generally.

Having learned that hieroglyphs were sacred writing,

Greco-Roman authors imagined the complex but rational system as an allegorical,

Even magical system,

Transmitting secret mystical knowledge.

By the 4th century AD,

Few Egyptians were capable of reading hieroglyphs,

And the myth of allegorical hieroglyphs was ascendant.

Monumental use of hieroglyphs ceased after the closing of all non-Christian temples in 391 by the Roman emperor Theodosius I.

The last known inscription is from Philae,

Known as the Graffito of Esmet-Achim,

From 394.

The Hieroglyphica of Horopallo,

Circa 5th century,

Appears to retain some genuine knowledge about the writing system.

It offers an explanation of close to 200 signs.

Some are identified correctly,

Such as the goose hieroglyph representing the word for sun,

Spelled S-O-N.

A half-dozen demotic glyphs are still in use,

Added to the Greek alphabet when writing Coptic.

Knowledge of the hieroglyphs had been lost completely in the medieval period.

Early attempts at decipherment were made by some,

Such as Dulnun al-Misri and Ibn Wahshiyya,

9th and 10th century respectively.

All medieval and early modern attempts were hampered by the fundamental assumption that hieroglyphs recorded ideas,

And not the words themselves.

As no bilingual texts were available,

Any such symbolic translation could be proposed without the possibility of verification.

It was not until Athanasius Kircher in the mid-17th century that scholars began to think the hieroglyphs might also represent sounds.

Kircher was familiar with Coptic and thought that it might be the key to deciphering the hieroglyphs,

But was held back by a belief in the mystical nature of the symbols.

The breakthrough in decipherment came only with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon's troops in 1799.

As the stone presented a hieroglyphic and a demotic version of the same text in parallel with a Greek translation,

Plenty of material for falsifiable studies in translation was suddenly available.

In the early 19th century,

Scholars such as Sylvestre de Saussy,

Johann David Ocherblad,

And Thomas Young studied the inscriptions on the stone and were able to make some headway.

Finally,

Jean-François Champollion made the complete decipherment by the 1820s.

In a letter he wrote,

".

.

.

It is a complex system,

Writing figurative,

Symbolic and phonetic all at once,

In the same text,

The same phrase,

I would almost say in the same word.

" Visually,

Hieroglyphs are all more or less figurative.

They represent real or abstract elements,

Sometimes stylized and simplified,

But all generally perfectly recognizable in form.

However,

The same sign can,

According to context,

Be interpreted in diverse ways,

As a phonogram,

Phonetic reading,

As a logogram,

Or as an ideogram,

Semagram,

Determinative,

Semantic reading.

The determinative was not read as a phonetic constituent.

But facilitated understanding by differentiating the word from its homophones.

Most non-determinative hieroglyphic signs are phonograms,

Whose meaning is determined by pronunciation,

Independent of visual characteristics.

This follows the rebus principle,

Where,

For example,

The picture of an eye could stand not only for the English word eye,

As in E-Y-E,

But also for its phonetic equivalent,

The first person pronoun,

I.

Phonograms formed with one consonant are called uniliteral signs,

With two consonants,

Biliteral signs,

And with three,

Triliteral signs.

24 uniliteral signs make up the alphabetic elements.

Egyptian hieroglyphic writing does not normally indicate vowels,

Unlike uneiform,

And for that reason has been labeled by some as an abjad,

I.

E.

,

An alphabet without vowels.

Thus,

Hieroglyphic writing representing a pintail duck is read in Egyptian as Sa,

Derived from the main consonants of the Egyptian word for this duck,

S,

Aleph,

And T.

Note that Aleph,

Or two half rings opening to the left,

Sometimes replaced by the digit 3,

Is the Egyptian Aleph.

It is also possible to use the hieroglyph of the pintail duck without a link to its meaning,

In order to represent the two phonemes,

S and Aleph,

Independently of any vowels that could accompany these consonants.

And in this way,

Write the words Sa,

Son,

S-O-N,

Or when complemented by other signs detailed below,

Sa,

Keep,

Watch,

And Sachu,

Hard ground.

For example,

The characters S,

Aleph,

The same characters used only in order to signify,

According to the context,

Pintail duck,

Or with the appropriate determinative Son,

S-O-N,

Two words having the same or similar consonants.

The characters Sa,

As used in the word Sau,

Keep,

Watch.

As in the Arabic script,

Not all vowels were written in Egyptian hieroglyphs.

It is debatable whether vowels were written at all.

Possibly,

As with Arabic,

The semi-vowels,

W and J,

As in English,

W and Y,

Could double as the vowels U and I.

In modern transcriptions,

An E is added between consonants to aid in their pronunciation.

For example,

N-F-R,

Nefer,

Or good,

Is typically written N-E-F-E-R.

This does not reflect Egyptian vowels,

Which are obscure,

But is merely a modern convention.

Likewise,

The Aleph and Ah are commonly transliterated as Ah-Ey,

As in Raw.

Hieroglyphs are inscribed in rows of pictures arranged in horizontal lines or vertical columns.

Both hieroglyph lines,

As well as signs contained in the lines,

Are read with upper content having precedence over content below.

The lines or columns,

And the individual inscriptions within them,

Read from left to right in rare instances only,

And for particular reasons of that.

Ordinarily,

However,

They read from right to left,

The Egyptians' preferred direction of writing.

Although,

For convenience,

Modern texts are often normalized into left-to-right order.

The direction toward which asymmetrical hieroglyphs face indicate their proper reading order.

For example,

When human and animal hieroglyphs face or look toward the left,

They almost always must read from left to right,

And vice versa.

As in many ancient writing systems,

Words are not separated by blanks or punctuation marks.

However,

Certain hieroglyphs appear particularly common only at the end of words,

Making it possible to readily distinguish words.

The Egyptian hieroglyphic script contained 24 uniliterals,

Symbols that stood for single consonants,

Much like letters in English.

It would have been possible to write all Egyptian words in the manner of these signs,

But the Egyptians never did so,

And never simplified their complex writing into a true alphabet.

Each uniliteral glyph once had a unique reading,

But several of these fell together as Old Egyptian developed into Middle Egyptian.

For example,

The folded cloth glyph seems to have originally been an S,

And the doorbolt glyph a TH sound,

But these both came to be pronounced S,

And the TH sound was lost.

A few uniliterals first appear in Middle Egyptian texts.

Besides the uniliteral glyphs,

There are also the biliteral and triliteral glyphs,

To represent a specific sequence of two or three consonants,

Consonants and vowels,

And a few as vowel combinations only in the language.

Egyptian writing is often redundant.

In fact,

It happens very frequently that a word is followed by several characters writing the same sounds in order to guide the reader.

For example,

The word nfr,

Nefer,

Beautiful,

Good,

Perfect,

Was written with a unique triliteral that was read as nfr.

However,

It is considerably more common to add the triliteral,

The uniliterals for f and r.

The word can thus be written as nfr plus f plus r,

But one still reads it as merely nefer.

The two alphabetic characters are adding clarity to the spelling and the preceding triliteral hieroglyph.

Redundant characters accompanying biliteral or triliteral signs are called phonetic complements or complementaries.

They can be placed in front of the sign,

Rarely,

After the sign,

As a general rule,

Or even framing it,

Appearing both before and after.

Ancient Egyptian scribes consistently avoided leaving large areas of blank space in their writing and might add additional phonetic complements or sometimes even invert the order of signs if this would result in a more aesthetically pleasing appearance.

Good scribes attended to the artistic and even religious aspects of the hieroglyphs and would not simply view them as a communication tool.

Notably,

Phonetic complements were also used to allow the reader to differentiate between signs that are homophones or which do not always have a unique reading.

Finally,

It sometimes happens that the pronunciation of words might be changed because of their connection to ancient Egyptian.

In this case,

It is not rare for writing to adopt a compromise in notation,

The two readings being indicated jointly.

For example,

The adjective bnj,

Swede,

Became bnr.

Besides a phonetic interpretation,

Characters can also be read for their meaning.

In this instance,

Logograms are being spoken,

Or ideograms,

And semagrams,

The latter,

Are also called determinatives.

A hieroglyph used as a logogram defines the object of which it is an image.

Logograms are therefore the most frequently used common nouns.

They are always accompanied by a mute vertical stroke indicating their status as a logogram.

In theory,

All hieroglyphs would have the ability to be used as logograms.

Logograms can be accompanied by phonetic complements.

Determinatives,

Or semagrams,

Semantic symbols specifying meaning,

Are placed at the end of a word.

These mute characters serve to clarify what the word is about,

As homophonic glyphs are common.

If a similar procedure existed in English,

Words with the same spelling would be followed by an indicator that would not be read,

But which would fine-tune the meaning.

Retort chemistry and retort rhetoric would thus be distinguished.

A number of determinatives exist.

Divinities,

Humans,

Parts of the human body,

Animals,

Plants,

Etc.

Certain determinatives possess a literal and a figurative meaning.

For example,

A roll of papyrus is used to define books,

But also abstract ideas.

The determinative of the plural is a shortcut to signal three occurrences of the word.

That is to say,

It's plural,

Since the Egyptian language had a dual sometimes indicated by two strokes.

Rarely,

The names of gods are placed within a cartouche.

The two last names of the sitting king are always placed within a cartouche.

A filling stroke is the character indicating the end of a quadrat that would otherwise be incomplete.

Some signs are the contraction of several others.

These signs have,

However,

A function and existence of their own.

For example,

A forearm where the hand holds a scepter is used as a determinative for words meaning to direct,

To drive,

And their derivatives.

A doubling of a sign indicates it's dual.

A tripling of a sign indicates it's plural.

The vertical stroke indicates that the sign is a logogram.

Two strokes indicate the dual number,

And the three strokes indicate the plural.

The direct notation of flexional endings.

Standard orthography,

Correct spelling in Egyptian,

Is much looser than in French.

In fact,

One or several variants exist for almost every word.

One finds redundancies,

Omission of graphemes which are ignored whether or not they are intentional,

Substitutions of one grapheme for another such that it is impossible to distinguish a mistake from an alternate spelling,

Errors of omission in the drawing of signs which are much more problematic when the writing is cursive,

Hieratic writing,

But especially demotic where the schematization of the signs is extreme.

However,

Many of these apparent spelling errors constitute an issue of chronology.

Spelling and standards varied over time,

So the writing of a word during the old kingdom might be considerably different during the new kingdom.

Furthermore,

The Egyptians were perfectly content to include older orthography,

Historical spelling,

Alongside newer practices,

As though it were acceptable in English to use archaic spellings in modern texts.

Most often,

Ancient spelling errors are simply misinterpretations of context.

Today,

Hieroglyphists use numerous cataloging systems to clarify the presence of determinatives,

Ideograms,

And other ambiguous signs in transliteration.

Egyptian hieroglyphs were added to the Unicode Standard in October 2009,

With the release of version 5.

2 which introduced the Egyptian hieroglyphs block uplus13000-uplus1342f.

As of 2013,

Four fonts,

Egyptus,

New Gardener,

NotoSensEgyptian Hieroglyphs,

And JSESH font,

Support this range.

Another font,

Sago UI Historic,

Comes bundled with Windows 10 and also contains glyphs from the Egyptian hieroglyphs block.

The Egyptian hieroglyph format controls Unicode block is uplus13430-uplus1345f.

It was added to the Unicode Standard in March 2019,

With the release of version 12.

0.

The total number of distinct Egyptian hieroglyphs increased over time,

From several hundred in the Middle Kingdom to several thousand during the Ptolemaic Kingdom.

In 1928 and 29,

Alan Gardner published an overview of hieroglyphs,

Gardner's Sign List,

The basic modern standard.

It describes 763 signs in 26 categories,

A to Z roughly.

Georg Müller combined more extensive lists organized by Historical Epic,

Published posthumously in 1927 and 1936.

In Unicode,

The block Egyptian Hieroglyphs 2009 includes 1,

071 signs,

Organization based on Gardner's List.

As of 2016,

There is a proposal by Michael Everson to extend the Unicode Standard to comprise Müller's List.

Thank you for watching.

Reviews

A riveting account, made me stay awake as it was so interesting though!

I heard…..zzzzzzzz

Thanks, Benjamin! Worked like a charm as “they” say. 😁😁

Wonderful as always. Thank you so much for your gift of communication in crafting your recordings. ✨🙏🏼💜💜😊✨

Very nice. Slept so well. I used it to go back to sleep when i woke in the middle of the night and it worked again!