Elegantly Digitized Tomb Painting of a Royal Barge
(The steering oar looks exactly like the hieroglyphic determinative of a steering oar.)
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Meaning, Sound, and Symbol. We end with a closer examination of how two non-alphabetical writing systems actually work: Classical Middle Egyptian and Literary Chinese. The goal is to provide more extended and memorable examples of the kinds of processes only briefly mentioned above. Both of these scripts are popularly misunderstood to be “picture languages.” They do involve pictures. However the point to note is that both are linked ultimately to the sounds of the spoken language, and therefore both are able to function as full writing systems, in which it is possible to write grocery lists, love letters, or college exams.
The examples here will show you how these writing systems function. Despite their superficial differences from each other, and despite the profound differences in the spoken languages that they are used to represent, the principles driving the writing systems are surprisingly similar. In each case the “picture” element —called a “determinative” for Egyptian or a “radical” for Chinese— is combined most of the time with a “sound” element so that the two disambiguate (clarify) each other, and can reflect spoken language clearly enough to function as full writing systems.
In Egyptian the set of phonetic elements makes up an alphabet, plus a few additional multi-sound signs. In Chinese the set of phonetic elements makes up an extended and desperately inefficient syllabary. Both systems are difficult to learn, but in both cases, the abundance and pictorialism of the written forms came to have calligraphic possibilities that made each of them somewhat more than merely a writing system.
1. Egyptologists have long used several special letters when representing the sounds of Egyptian. The following more convenient equivalencies are used here to replace them: ꜣ=a, ı͗=i, ꜥ=o, ḥ=hh, ḫ=x, ẖ=xx, ś=s, š=sh, ḳ=q, ṯ=ch, ḏ=j.
2. In this essay all Egyptian signs are given in left-to-right order. In ancient texts they could go in either direction —the glyphs with faces all looked toward the beginning of the text— in rows or columns. Glyphs were spatially blocked to make pleasing clusters when they happened to fall together, so one wrote a combination like 𓆓 𓏏 𓋰 in a single stack, read from the top down, never spread in a row, as here. Most computers don't understand this … yet.
Egyptian had an alphabet of consonantal signs, some of which apparently represented back-of-the-throat, vaguely belch-like hard breathing noises that don't exist in English. In order to make Romanized spelling line up with Egyptian ones, some transcriptions, including the one here, use vowel signs, but these letters actually stand for consonants or, in some cases, for glyphs that Egyptians wrote but did not pronounce —they were merely place-holders to which different vowels might be added. (Since nobody speaks ancient Egyptian any more, it doesn’t matter how you pronounce it. Suit yourself.)
Egyptian writing also used shortcut signs that represented more than one consonant together, (called “biliteral” and “triliteral” signs) and signs that represented meanings directly (called “determinatives”), although these last could not usually be used alone. To write in less space or more quickly, one used a biliteral or triliteral sign; to lengthen the text, one wrote the individual alphabetic signs, or used both the alphabetic signs and the bi- or triliteral signs! A conventionalized determinative usually followed, carrying a more or less direct picture of the meaning involved. Thus, although vowels were not shown, the redundancies made the connection to the spoken form unambiguous to ancient speakers.
Unfortunately, some biliteral or triliteral signs could represent more than one set of consonants, and therefore often increased confusion rather than clarifying things. For example, the triliteral sign 𓌂 could be used as a shorthand sign for three quite different combinations of consonants:
In such cases, one or more redundant letters of the “original” spelling, or even a determinative (or both!) nearly always had to be added to the triliteral sign, since otherwise the reader might not know which value of 𓌂 was intended.
Since vowels were not written, spoken words sometimes differed in ways not shown by the written glyphs. In such cases the use of determinatives or the choice among various spellings sometimes became the conventional way to tell words apart which actually differed in vowels in spoken Egyptian. Sometimes related verbs and nouns were differentiated this way. For example:
Actually this is true of our earlier examples (the ones with the triliteral 𓌂) too:
Finally, sometimes alternative spellings of the same item were used simply because in context one spelling was better looking than another. Often this was a matter of fitting a space better. To illustrate this, here is an example of the sort of problem a scribe might face:
An Egyptian Aesthetic Problem
Problem: Egyptians were particularly keen on the decorative use of writing. The following two sentences need to be the same length to fit decoratively on two sides of a door. Make the two sentences the same length so that they will fit around the door. Here are some available alternative spellings.
| Left Side of the Door “The peasant hears a voice.” | ||
|---|---|---|
| sjm hears | sxt-y peasant | xrw voice |
| 𓂈 𓅓 | 𓇏 𓏏 𓏭 𓀀 or 𓋴 𓐍 𓂋 𓇏 𓇌 𓀀 |
𓊤 or 𓊤 𓅱 or 𓐍 𓂋 𓊤 |
| The peasant hears a voice. | ||
| Right Side of the Door “The leader has power over the peasants.” | ||
|---|---|---|
| sjm have power over | xrp leader | sxtyw peasants |
| 𓌂 𓅓 or 𓌂 𓅓 𓀜 |
𓌂 𓌂 𓂋 𓊪 or 𓐍 𓂋 𓊪 𓌂 |
𓇏 𓀀 𓏪 or 𓇏 𓏏 𓏭 𓅱𓀀 𓏪 |
| The leader has power over the peasants. | ||
Solution: Select a longer spelling for one or more words in the first sentence or a shorter spelling for the second, until they match. (My Egyptian is remarkably limited, so the sentences make a stunningly stupid door inscription. The world has its little imperfections.)
Comment: As a writing system, Egyptian, although it was a complete and flexible system of writing (and not merely “picture writing”), was not very efficient compared with modern systems. It may have had special staying power, however, because of its intimate relation to art (and magic). Among the system’s special strengths were its good looks and its ability to be gracefully arranged to fill spaces in paintings and inscriptions. (In contrast, try to figure out how you would arrange the English translation of that stupid text on two sides of a door!)
Egyptians also exploited the system’s ability to borrow hieroglyphics from art motifs and to lend hieroglyphics back into art. Thus 𓊯, for example, is a determinative showing a table of offerings, but may also be used in art as a picture of such a table. Similarly, the signs 𓊝, 𓊟, 𓊛, 𓊦, and 𓊡 are all derived from river boats or parts of them, but when boats are represented in painting, parts of them are often deliberately patterned after the conventionalizations of these hieroglyphic signs. For example, notice the steering oar 𓊦 in the elegantly digitized tomb painting of an Egyptian royal barge.
Among its other “strengths” in the eyes of some of its users may have been the fact that the Egyptian writing system was so mysterious and complicated that hieroglyphic literacy was able to remain largely a monopoly of professional priests and scribes! But something useful does not remain secret forever, and by late times a popularized “demotic” or “people’s” script was in wide use. But that’s another story.
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