Читать книгу A History of Ancient Egypt - Marc Van De Mieroop - Страница 55

The invention of hieroglyphic writing as it would be used for millennia in Egypt took place in late Predynastic and Early Dynastic times. It made the rendering of the sounds and meanings of the spoken language possible, although writers did not aim at a complete recording of all elements of speech. Especially the earliest inscriptions were terse and only indicated the essential concepts of a message. They did not provide grammatical forms or all the components of a sentence in the spoken language. We do not know whether or not people spoke a common language throughout Egypt at the time writing was invented, although it is clear that they wrote only one language.

The hieroglyphic script contained two basic types of signs: those that indicate a word through meaning (we call them logograms or ideograms) and those that indicate a word or part of it through sound (we call them phonograms). The same sign can have both functions, and oftentimes the ancient scribe drew a short vertical stroke underneath a sign to show that it should be read as a logogram. Hieroglyphic signs are pictorial and their origins lie in drawings from which one can often extrapolate meaning. The picture of the sun ⊙ can mean “sun” and semantically related words such as “day.” The pronunciation of the word was not indicated at all, and one could only read the logogram aloud if one knew the language recorded. Some such signs were never pronounced. A group of them were what we call determinatives. They appeared after almost every word to clarify its nature. For example, when the determinative of a man followed the logogram that indicated the basic idea “to write,” it indicated “scribe”; when the determinative representing a roll of papyrus followed the sign, it meant “writing.” Determinatives were very common in ancient Egyptian writing, guiding the reader in choosing the right meaning of the logographic signs.

Logograms by themselves can convey much information, but they allow room for error. They also cannot render most names, which were central to the earliest inscriptions, or nonfigurative notions such as “good” or “to desire.” Thus the Egyptians developed a set of signs that could be read phonetically, containing one to three consonants. They did not indicate the vowels that accompanied the consonants, and each sign had multiple readings. The sign for the consonant m, for example, could represent the syllables ma, me, mi, etc. Among the phonograms are 24 signs that cover the consonants of the Egyptian language. Theoretically these could be used to write out any word, as in an alphabet. Those are the signs that shops in Egypt today use to write out tourists’ names in hieroglyphs. But the ancient Egyptians never limited themselves to those. They saw them on the same level as signs that record two or three consonants, such as nr or nfr with any combination of vowels. Phonograms appear in the earliest inscriptions to write out dynasty 0 or dynasty 1 royal names. We speak of the palette of Narmer because of the appearance of the n’r and mr signs in the serekh. Our understanding of these early writings is restricted, however. Narmer’s name appeared in inscriptions from all over Egypt and Palestine, and multiple ways to write it out existed. We may be mistaken in our reading of it.

The earliest inscriptions show little else than the royal name, but in the mid‐1st dynasty they become more elaborate. From the reign of King Den, around 2900, derive many labels that contain multifaceted statements (Figure 2.6). One of them shows the king’s name in the serekh written with the phonograms d and n. The right side of the label is lined with the sign for year and next to it is a depiction of the sed‐festival, which we read as a year name. The label also gives the name of an official, Hemaka, and his title “seal bearer of the king of Lower Egypt,” and it indicates that oil was involved in the transaction recorded. The reading of such a label is still highly impressionistic as it merely shows names, titles, and words without indicating their grammatical relationship. In the 1st dynasty the order of signs was also very loose, and modern decipherers have to read them by analogy with what would make sense in later Egyptian texts. But the uses of writing certainly increased and the first known roll of papyrus, with no signs on it, comes from the tomb of Hemaka.

Figure 2.6 On this label of ebony wood, 8 by 5.5 cm, the upper right panel shows King Den during the sed‐festival. Wearing the double crown, he both sits in a booth and runs in an area delineated by six markers. The vertical text on the left side includes the king’s name and that of Hemaka, seal bearer of the king of Lower Egypt. The label mentions a kind of oil and a building processing it, and was originally attached to an oil container. British Museum. London.

Source: The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource

Perhaps the first preserved continuous sentence in Egyptian script that indicates all elements of the spoken language appears on a sealing of the reign of Peribsen of the mid‐2nd dynasty, “Sealing of everything of Ombos (Naqada): He of Ombos (i.e., the god Seth) has joined the Two Lands for his son, the Dual King Peribsen.”² It shows a fully developed script, but not the final stage of hieroglyphs’ evolution. The number of hieroglyphic signs varied over time. While initially one or two thousand appeared, they were reduced to some 750 in the Middle Kingdom when spellings became institutionalized in schools. In the Greek and Roman periods, however, scribes created many new signs for religious and monumental texts (see Special Topic 2.2).

Why did the Egyptians invent writing? The earliest preserved records were administrative in character, keeping track of the movement of goods, and it is logical that a state of Egypt’s size and complexity required a flexible system of accounting that could keep information on the nature of goods, their quantities, provenance and destination, the people in charge of them, and the date of the transaction. In Babylonia, where writing originated around the same time, bureaucratic concerns are obvious in the earliest texts, and many scholars suggest the same impetus in Egypt. But others stress how important display was in the earliest Egyptian inscriptions. The visual commemorations of the unification of Egypt, the tomb steles inscribed with nothing but the serekh, and many other inscriptions of the 3rd millennium have no bureaucratic goal, but honor the gods and the king. Throughout Egyptian history the hieroglyphic script was prominently displayed to celebrate someone or something. The glorification of the king may have been one of the driving forces in the script’s invention. If not, it was certainly soon adopted for that purpose.