I was listening to a podcast today about the collapse of the Bronze Age. In it they had a reading of a scroll (that was apparently) commissioned by Ramses III describing a battle with the “sea people”. Fascinating stuff. But the narrative flowed as it was a contemporary account.
It got me wondering how much of ‘reading’ hieroglyphics is open to interpretation and more importantly, how hard would it be to learn to read their written language so I could decide for myself.
Is there a translation guide somewhere? Would it be as hard as, say, learning Chinese (for the average American)?
Obviously other people have learned to read hieroglyphs, so there is no reason you couldn’t with due time, effort and guidance. Seek out a human tutor if you can.
The Ramses III account would be the ones at Medinet Habu. These were written to tell the story of what a fantastic and victorious ruler RIII was, and it sounds that added PR sheen was properly captured in the translation.
I made an attempt to learn hieroglyphics many years ago. It got boring pretty quickly.
There is no easy translation guide. Each glyph represents a particular sound. Several sounds together make up a word. To read the language you have to know the syntax and vocabulary of the spoken language.
I also tried once to learn Chinese characters. Hieroglyphics are different to Chinese characters, where every character represents a particular concept. I understand that you can decipher the meaning without speaking the language. Indeed, the same text can be read by speakers of many different languages.
I know only a little bit about either system, but from my limited experience I’d say that Chinese is far easier.
Absolutely not. Egyptian includes plenty of logograms and determinatives as well as phonogrammatic signs, so it is impossible to simply “sound out the words”. (Not to mention the fact that vowels were not written, and some phonetic signs represent two or three consonants, not one.) It is not even close to alphabetic writing.
ETA: there are textbooks, like Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs
To be precise, hieroglyphics are a rebus language. You have to sound out the pictures to make the words.
If you were to write English according to the same principles, then a picture of a leaf would represent the letters LF. Note - vowels are ignored. A picture of a toe would represent the letter T. So you might write the word LIFT as leaf-toe. However, you would also write the word LEFT as leaf-toe. In order to distinguish between homophones, you could insert ideograms, they aren’t spoken but convey a meaning. A picture of a compass could express the concept of direction. So leaf-toe-compass means LEFT and not LIFT. There again, a leaf might actually mean leaf, in which case you could put a little dash beside the picture
Probably similar gains you’d get from learning any other language, musical instrument, magic trick, reliable karaoke standby-by, recipe for a dozen unannounced guests -
[ul]
[li]sense of achievement[/li][li]window into another culture or way of thinking[/li][li]means of de-stressing / unwinding after work[/li][li]meet new people[/li][li]bragging at parties[/li][li]self-discipline[/li]
[/ul]
All good things, Lucas Jackson. Try your hand - you may love it, and no one will break your legs if you don’t.
I made a stab at learning hieroglyphs at an evening class some years ago. I didn’t get very far and I seem to remember Honorific Transposition being the concept that finally persuaded me this was not for me. As others have said, hieroglyphs are mostly phonetic where the sounds of the things depicted make up the syllables of a word (though there are also ‘determinatives’ which hint at meaning rather than sound). However, if the hieroglyph depicted something of religious significance, it was given top billing at the front of the word regardless of the syllable order. Much of the text seemed to be ceremonial where the act of writing it was of more importance than passing on information.
I don’t know about hieroglyphics, but if you are interested even casually in cuneiform (or even if you’re not), this lecture is worth watching.
Irving Finkel is an expert in cuneiform at the British Museum (and certainly looks the part!), a real expert with a lot of enthusiasm, and a bit of a ‘character’.
This. Before I took a trip to Egypt a couple of years ago, I bought a basic learner’s book on how to read hieroglyphics. I never got very far, but I did manage to spell out and recognize names in cartouches when I saw them carved on steles or temple pillars.
My wife passed her language requirement in college with Middle Kingdom hieroglyphics. She had no knowledge of them being she started studying them in school.
It’s true that the first step would be to learn the twenty-something unilateral signs and the hundred or so bilateral signs, and so on; (it’s true that most words contain phonograms, though I still would not describe the script as “alphabetic”-- “rebus” seems a good way to put it), but even if it were alphabetic, I agree with Allen that “hieroglyphic is nothing more than the way the ancient Egyptians wrote their language. To read hieroglyphic, therefore, you have to learn the Egyptian language.”
It should be noted though that the Egyptian language for which the hieroglyphs were used to write down the spoken language in Egypt is not Arabic, the language spoken by most Egyptians today or any precursor of it. The language used during the period when hieroglyphs were used was one of the divisions (by time period) of the Egyptian language, in particular Old Egyptian (c. 2600 – 2000 BC), Middle Egyptian (c. 2000 – 1350 BC), and Late Egyptian (c. 1350 – 700 BC).
The Egyptian language was part of the Afroasiatic family, like Arabic, but that doesn’t mean that it’s very close to Arabic. For instance, English is part of the Indo-European family, but that doesn’t mean that it’s very close to Russian, Hindustani, Welsh, Romanian, or Persian, to give a few examples. In fact, Hebrew and Arabic are closer to each other than either of them is to Egyptian, since they are both part of the Semitic subfamily of the Afroasiatic family.
