A (Very) Brief Introduction to Hieroglyphs
The language of the Ancient Egyptians was called by them
r ny Kmt, or
speech of the Black Land, and is called by us
Ancient or Classical Egyptian. It was written in a pictographic
script called hieroglyphics. Each individual symbol is
called a hieroglyph, or simply "glyph".
All of the 700 or so glyphs used by Classical
Egyptian have their origin in pictures of real objects, and most
retained their associations. Examples are
pr, the
word for "house", and
r,
the word for "mouth".
A more common approach was to use the sounds of the glyphs to spell
other words whose meanings were not related to the pictures.
So common was this, in fact, that a special symbol,
,
was added when a glyph was used as a picture, as
in the examples above. Some examples of sound spellings are
bw "place"
and
rn
"name".
Sound symbols could represent one, two or three consonants (it
doesn't seem that the Ancient Egyptians wrote the vowels of a word).
It was very common to combine 2- or 3-consonant glyphs with 1-consonant signs,
for example
nfr
"beautiful, good"
and
pr(i)
"to go out".
The word pr(i)
contains another type of glyph, called a determinative, to
indicate that this set of glyphs spells a word that refers in some way to
movement. Determinitives were very numerous and common. Some glyphs could
show sounds or serve as determinatives, as in the word
st
"place", where the sign for 'house' is being used not for its sound
but as a marker that this word refers in some way to a place. Determinatives could be combined in words, as in
nDs
"poor man, commoner", from the word
nDs
"small".
Egyptologists use a special alphabet to
transcribe the sounds
of Ancient Egyptian. In this system, the determinatives are not
written, which is why the two meanings of
nDs
are transcribed the same way (maybe the vowels of the two meanings were
different).
Within this basic system, there was room for lots of variety.
Words could be spelled in full or abbreviated in various ways,
mainly based on space and artistic considerations. Consider the
phrase
xwt nbwt nfrwt wabwt
"every2thing1 good3 and pure4"
(the numbers show the order of the Egyptian words), which is part of a
prayer for the
dead. In its fullest form, it might appear as
,
but it was commonly written in the form
,
leaving off grammatical endings (
)
marking the feminine plural,
determinatives (
),
and sound symbols (
)!
The scribes relied on our knowledge of Egyptian and of the general
prayer formula to fill in the "unessential" information.
