Читать книгу A History of Ancient Egypt - Marc Van De Mieroop - Страница 56

No one today speaks the ancient Egyptian language, and we can only reconstruct it through the documentation of the past. The written record of ancient Egyptian is spread over an enormous time span. It is clear that the language the writings rendered changed constantly due to both internal and external influences. Moreover, despite the great conservatism in writing, practical considerations pushed the Egyptians to adapt the script for its diverse usages, and they used several forms simultaneously. We cannot speak then of a single Egyptian language and script, but of multiple stages and various scripts.

Egyptian is an Afroasiatic language combining elements found in such North African language groups as Berber with Semitic characteristics. It stands alone within the languages of Africa because of its closeness to Semitic, which reflects the geographical location of Egypt. The history of the language needs to be pieced together from written evidence that did not mirror the changes immediately. We identify several stages. The Old Egyptian form, known primarily from official inscriptions, was relatively close to Middle Egyptian, which was written from around 2100 to 1750. Middle Egyptian became the classical language of Egypt, because authors used it to compose the literary works that Egyptians continued to copy out for centuries later on. It is the form of the language that modern students of Egyptian initially learn. In the New Kingdom starting around 1500, the Egyptians spoke the Late Egyptian form that gradually appeared in their business documents and letters. By the 7th century, Demotic took over, also mainly found in writings of daily use. In the 4th century AD, the Christians of Egypt began to write the Coptic form of the language, which survived as a vernacular into the 12th century and is still used in the liturgy today.

The changes in the script do not necessarily reflect changes in the spoken language, although we use the same terms to refer to the different stages of both. Four basic scripts appear: hieroglyphic and its derivatives hieratic and Demotic, which all use a mixture of logograms and phonograms, and Coptic, an alphabet. Hieroglyphic – a Greek term that means “sacred carved writing” – is pictorial and requires great care in writing. It was reserved for monumental and ornamental inscriptions until AD 395. Some less elaborate forms, which we call cursive hieroglyphs, appear in religious texts. Probably from the very beginning, scribes used a rapid way of writing hieroglyphs for everyday purposes. We call that script hieratic – a Greek term meaning “priestly” (Figure 2.7). From the early 1st millennium on some monumental inscriptions in hieratic script appear.

Figure 2.7 Hieratic script was a rapid form of hieroglyphic initially used for documents of daily use. The papyrus fragment here, 35 by 19 cm, contains a letter between two fan‐bearers of the king and a fragmentary record of the cultivation of pharaonic lands in year 16 of Rameses III. As papyrus was expensive, the reverse was used later for an account. The papyrus probably comes from the Memphis region. Metropolitan Museum of Art, O.C.3569.

Source: Museum Accession

In the mid‐1st millennium people also started to write Demotic – the Greek for “of the people” – a script that today requires specialist training to read as it has little obvious relationship to hieroglyphic or even hieratic, from which it descended (see Figure 1.6). The Egyptians used it to write business documents and literature, and gradually also religious and some monumental texts. After Alexander’s conquest of Egypt in the late 4th century, Greek became a parallel language of administration and literature. The famous Rosetta Stone, key to the modern decipherment of the hieroglyphic script, contains the same royal edict in hieroglyphs, Demotic script, and Greek (see Chapter 13).

Greek script also influenced the writing of Egyptian. The Coptic script, first attested in the 2nd century AD, was an alphabet that included vowels and was derived from the Greek, with seven signs borrowed from Demotic to indicate sounds not present in Greek. The earliest Coptic writings were magical spells whose correct pronunciation was important and which required an explicit indication of the vowels. Soon Coptic became the script of the Egyptian Christian church for religious purposes as well as for documents of daily practice. It continues to be used today and the knowledge of it was important for the decipherment of hieroglyphs in the 19th century AD (Figure 2.8).

Figure 2.8 In the first few centuries ad Coptic script was developed to write the last stage of the ancient Egyptian language, also called Coptic. The script was based on the Greek alphabet, with a number of letters added to it to render new sounds, and survives until today. Around 600 ad a weaver wrote the pottery ostracon (15 by 11 cm) shown here to request linen from a monastery. It was excavated in the Monastery of Epiphanius at Thebes. Metropolitan Museum of Art 14.1.157.

Source: Rogers Fund 1914

Because many texts were handwritten, all the forms of the script had their variants, which we call cursive and abnormal. The differences were temporal, regional, and also depended on who wrote. Reading Egyptian always involves a degree of decipherment and requires a good knowledge of the language, which itself constantly changed. Because all scripts except for Coptic rendered vowels only in special circumstances and no one speaks ancient Egyptian any longer, we are uncertain about how to vocalize words. Thus some speak of the god Re, others of Ra. Many Egyptological publications quote terms and titles by their consonants alone, which is disorienting to the beginner but reflects Egyptian practice.

In ancient Egypt writing always remained a restricted skill and the preserve of the privileged, most often men and some women attached to the court. We cannot estimate the literacy rate at any time, but it was certainly very low in the beginning and only gradually grew with the expansion of bureaucracies in the Old Kingdom. The esoteric character of writing gave those who knew it a special power. While many Egyptians may have seen inscriptions, only a few could understand them.