Egyptian hieroglyphs: the «words of the god» carved in stone

The ancient Egyptians called their monumental script medu netjer, «the words of the god». The Greeks rendered it as hieroglyphika grammata, «sacred carved letters», because they saw it mainly on the walls of temples and tombs. The earliest secure evidence dates to shortly before 3000 BC, and small labels found at Abydos, in the tomb known as U-j, may be older still. For more than three thousand years this system accompanied the religious and political life of the Nile valley.

A three-level system

Contrary to what was believed for centuries, hieroglyphs are not mere allegorical symbols. The system combines three kinds of signs. Logograms stand for a whole word, such as the drawing of the sun for «sun». Phonograms represent consonantal sounds, from one to three per sign: the owl stands for m, the mouth for r. Determinatives, finally, are not read aloud but clarify meaning, showing for instance that a word concerns a man, a deity or an action connected with walking.

Vowels were not written, which is why the exact pronunciation of ancient Egyptian is partly reconstructed. Texts could run from right to left, from left to right or in columns: the practical rule is that human and animal figures face the beginning of the line. In the classical period the signs in use numbered a few hundred, while in the temples of the Ptolemaic age the priests multiplied them to several thousand.

Thoth and the power of images

According to Egyptian tradition, writing was a gift of Thoth, the ibis-headed god, lord of wisdom and scribe of the gods. Plato's Phaedrus takes up the myth: the Egyptian god Theuth presents writing to King Thamus, who fears its effects on memory. For the Egyptians, however, the written sign was not a simple reminder: it had a force of its own, capable of making real what it depicted.

A custom documented in tombs of the late Old Kingdom and the following periods shows this clearly. Signs depicting dangerous animals, such as snakes and scorpions, were sometimes cut in half or deprived of part of their body, so that they could not harm the deceased. In the same way, erasing a pharaoh's name from the monuments, as happened to Hatshepsut and Akhenaten, meant striking at their memory and their existence in the afterlife.

Hieratic, Demotic and the long decline

Alongside monumental hieroglyphs, scribes used cursive forms for papyri. Hieratic, born almost at the same time as hieroglyphs, long served for religious and administrative texts. From the seventh century BC Demotic spread, quicker still, suited to contracts and daily life. Hieroglyphs instead remained the script of stone, temples and sarcophagi, bound to cult and kingship.

With the Christianisation of Egypt and the closure of the temples, knowledge of the signs faded away. The last dated hieroglyphic inscription is found in the temple of Isis at Philae and dates to 24 August 394 AD. After that date no one could read them for more than fourteen centuries, and hieroglyphs became the very symbol of a lost wisdom.

That silence fed, for centuries, the idea that temple walls guarded metaphysical secrets accessible only to initiates. Nineteenth-century decipherment showed that they contain hymns, names, offerings, funerary formulas and decrees, yet it did not erase the fascination of a script that its own authors regarded as divine speech, able to give life to what it named.