The formulae recited for such purposes are not purely cabalistic, though inasmuch as mystery is of the very essence of magic, foreign words and outlandish names occur in them by preference. Often the magician relates some mythical case where a god had been afflicted with a disease similar to that of the patient, but had finally recovered: a number of such tales were told of Horus, who was usually healed by some device of his mother Isis, she being accounted as a great enchantress. The mere recitation of such similar cases with their happy issue was supposed to be magically effective; for almost unlimited power was supposed to be inherent in mere words. Often the demon is directly invoked, and commanded to come forth. At other times the gods are threatened with privations or even destruction if they refuse to aid the magician: the Egyptians seem to have found little impiety in such a use of the divine name, though to us it would seem the utmost degree of profanity when, for instance, a magician declares that if his spell prove ineffective, he “will cast fire into Mendes and burn up Osiris.”
The verbal spells were always accompanied by some manual performance, the tying of magical knots or the preparation of an amulet. In these acts particular significance was attached to certain numbers: a sevenfold knot, for example, was more efficacious than others. Often the formula was written on a strip of rag or a scrap of papyrus and tied round the neck of the person for whom it was intended. Beads and all kinds of amulets could be infused with magical power so as to be potent phylacteries to those who wore them.
In conclusion, it must be emphasized that in Egypt magic stands in no contrast or opposition to religion, at least as long as it was legitimately used. The religious rites and ceremonies are full of it. When a pretence was made of opening, with an iron instrument, the mouth of the divine statue, to the accompaniment of recited formulae, this can hardly be termed anything but magic. Similarly, the potency attributed toushebti-figures and the copies of theBook of the Deaddeposited in the tombs is magical in quality. What has been considered under this heading, however, is the use that the same principles of magic were put to by men in their own practical life and for their own advantage.
Authorities.—An excellent list of books and articles on the various topics connected with Egyptian Religion will be found in H. O. Lange’s article on the subject in P. D. Chantepie de la Saussaye,Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte(Tübingen, 1905), vol. i. pp. 172-245. Among general works may be especially recommended A. Erman,Die ägyptische Religion(Berlin, 1905); and chapters 2 and 3 in G. Maspero,Histoire ancienne des peuples de l’Orient, les origines, vol. i. (Paris, 1895).
Authorities.—An excellent list of books and articles on the various topics connected with Egyptian Religion will be found in H. O. Lange’s article on the subject in P. D. Chantepie de la Saussaye,Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte(Tübingen, 1905), vol. i. pp. 172-245. Among general works may be especially recommended A. Erman,Die ägyptische Religion(Berlin, 1905); and chapters 2 and 3 in G. Maspero,Histoire ancienne des peuples de l’Orient, les origines, vol. i. (Paris, 1895).
(A. H. G.)
D.Egyptian Language and Writing.—Decipherment.—Although attempts were made to read Egyptian hieroglyphs so far back as the 17th century, no promise of success appeared until the discovery of the Rosetta stone in 1799 by the French engineers attached to Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt. This tablet was inscribed with three versions, in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek, of a long decree of the Egyptian priests in honour of Ptolemy V., Epiphanes and his wife Cleopatra. The Greek and demotic versions were still almost perfect, but most of the hieroglyphic text had been broken away with the top of the tablet; portions of about half of the lines remained, but no single line was complete. In 1802 J. D. Akerblad, a Swedish orientalist attached to the embassy in Paris, identified the proper names of persons which occurred in the demotic text, being guided to them by the position of their equivalents in the Greek. These names, all of them foreign, were written in an alphabet of a limited number of characters, and were therefore analysed with comparative ease.
The hieroglyphic text upon the Rosetta stone was too fragmentary to furnish of itself the key to the decipherment. But the study of this with the other scanty monuments and imperfect copies of inscriptions that were available enabled the celebrated physicist Thomas Young (1773-1829) to make a beginning. In an article completed in 1819 and printed (over the initials I. J.) in the supplement to the 4th, 5th and 6th editions of theEncyclopaedia Britannica(vol. iv., 1824), he published a brief account of Egyptian research, with five plates containing the “rudiments of an Egyptian vocabulary.” It appears that Young could place the hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek texts of the Rosetta stone very correctly parallel; but he could not accurately break up the Egyptian sentences into words, much less could he attribute to the words their proper sounds. Yet he recognized correctly the names of Apis and Re, with many groups for words such as “assembly,” “good,” “name,” and important signs such as those which distinguish feminine words. In a bad copy of another monument he rightly guessed the royal name of Berenice in its cartouche by the side of that of Ptolemy, which was already known from its occurrence on the Rosetta stone. He considered that these names must be written in phonetic characters in the hieroglyphic as in demotic, but he failed to analyse them correctly. It was clear, however, that with more materials and perseverance such efforts after decipherment must eventually succeed.
Meanwhile J. F. Champollion “le Jeune” (seeChampollion; and Hartleben,Champollion, sein Leben und sein Werk, Berlin, 1906) had devoted his energies whole-heartedly since 1802, when he was only eleven years old, to preparing himself for the solution of the Egyptian problem, by wide linguistic and historical studies, and above all by familiarizing himself with every scrap of Egyptian writing which he could find. By 1818 he made many equations between the demotic and the hieroglyphic characters, and was able to transcribe the demotic names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra into hieroglyphics. At length, in January 1822, a copy of the hieroglyphic inscription on the Bankes obelisk, which had long been fruitlessly in the hands of Young, reached the French savant. On the base of this obelisk was engraved a Greek inscription in honour of Ptolemy Euergetes II. and Cleopatra; of the two cartouches on the obelisk one was of Ptolemy, the other was easily recognized as that of Cleopatra, spelt nearly as in Champollion’s experimental transcript of the demotic name, only more fully. This discovery, and the recognition of the name Alexander, gave fourteen alphabetic signs, including homophones, with ascertained values. Starting from these, by the beginning of September Champollion had analysed a long series of Ptolemaic and Roman cartouches. His next triumph was on the 14th of September, when he read the names of the ancient Pharaohs Rameses and Tethmosis in some drawings just arrived from Egypt, proving that his alphabetic characters were employed, in conjunction with syllabic signs, for spelling native names; this gave him the assurance that his discovery touched the essential nature of the Egyptian writing and not merely, as had been contended, a special cipher for the foreign words which might be quite inapplicable to the rest of the inscriptions. His progress continued unchecked, and before the end of the year the connexion of ancient Egyptian and Coptic was clearly established. Subsequently visits to the museums of Italy and an expedition to Egypt in 1828-1829 furnished Champollion with ample materials. ThePrécis du système hiéroglyphique(1st ed. 1823, 2nd ed. 1828) contained the philological results of his decipherments down to a certain point. But his MS. collections were vast, and his illness after the strenuous labours of the expedition and his early death in 1832 left all in confusion. TheGrammaire égyptienneandDictionnaire égyptien, edited from these MSS. by his brother, precious as they were, must be a very imperfect register of the height of his attainments. In his last years he was able to translate long texts in hieroglyphic and in hieratic of the New Kingdom andof the later periods with some accuracy, and his comprehension of demotic was considerable. Champollion outdistanced all his competitors from the first, and had practically nothing to thank them for except material to work on, and too often that had been intentionally withheld from him. In eleven years he broke ground in all directions; if the ordinary span of life had been allowed him, with twenty or thirty more years of labour he might have brought order into the chaos of different ages and styles of language and writing; but, as it was, the task of co-ordination remained to be done by others. For one year, before his illness incapacitated him, Champollion held a professorship in Paris; but of his pupils and fellow-workers, F. P. Salvolini, insincere and self-seeking, died young, and Ippolito Rosellini (1800-1843) showed little original power. From 1832 to 1837 there was a pause in the march of Egyptology, and it seemed as if the young science might be overwhelmed by the storm of doubts and detraction that was poured upon it by the enemies of Champollion. Then, however, Lepsius in Germany and Samuel Birch in England took up the thread where the master had dropped it, and E. de Rougé, H. Brugsch, François Joseph Chabas and a number of lesser lights quickly followed. Brugsch (q.v.) was the author of a hieroglyphic and demotic dictionary which still holds the field, and from time to time carried forward the study of demotic by a giant’s stride. De Rougé (d. 1872) in France was a brilliant translator of hieroglyphic texts and the author of an important grammatical work. Chabas (1817-1882) especially addressed himself to the reading of the hieratic texts of the New Kingdom. By such labours after forty years the results attained by Champollion in decipherment were entirely superseded. Yet, while the values of the signs were for the most part well ascertained, and the meanings of most works fixed with some degree of accuracy, few grammatical rules had as yet been established, the varieties of the language at different periods had not been defined, and the origins of the hieroglyphs and of their values had not been investigated beyond the most obvious points. At this time a rare translator of Egyptian texts in all branches was arising in G. Maspero (q.v.), while E. Revillout addressed himself with success to the task of interpreting the legal documents of demotic which had been almost entirely neglected for thirty years. But the honour of inaugurating an epoch marked by greater precision belongs to Germany. The study of Coptic had begun in Europe early in the 17th century, and reached a high level in the work of the Dane Georg Zoega (1755-1809) at the end of the 18th century. In 1835, too late for Champollion to use it, Amadeo Peyron (1785-1870) of Turin published a Coptic lexicon of great merit which is still standard, though far from satisfying the needs of scholars of the present day. In 1880 Ludwig Stern (Koptische Grammatik) admirably classified the grammatical forms of Coptic. The much more difficult task of recovering the grammar of Egyptian has occupied thirty years of special study by Adolf Erman and his school at Berlin, and has now reached an advanced stage. The greater part of Egyptian texts after the Middle Kingdom having been written in what was even then practically a dead language, as dead as Latin was to the medieval monks in Italy who wrote and spoke it, Erman selected for special investigation those texts which really represented the growth of the language at different periods, and, as he passed from one epoch to another, compared and consolidated his results.
TheNeuägyptische Grammatik(1880) dealt with texts written in the vulgar dialect of the New Kingdom (Dyns. XVIII. to XX.). Next followed, in theZeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Alterthumskunde, studies on the Old Kingdom inscription of Una, and the Middle Kingdom contracts of Assiut, as well as on an “Old Coptic” text of the 3rd centurya.d.At this point a papyrus of stories written in the popular language of the Middle Kingdom provided Erman with a stepping-stone from Old Egyptian to the Late Egyptian of theNeuägyptische Grammatik, and gave the connexions that would bind solidly together the whole structure of Egyptian grammar (seeSprache des Papyrus Westcar, 1889). The very archaic pyramid texts enabled him to sketch the grammar of the earliest known form of Egyptian (Zeitschrift d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gesellschaft, 1892), and in 1894 he was able to write a little manual of Egyptian for beginners (Ägyptische Grammatik, 2nd ed., 1902), centring on the language of the standard inscriptions of the Middle and New Kingdoms, but accompanying the main sketch with references to earlier and later forms. Of the work of Erman’s pupils we may mention G. Steindorff’s littleKoptische Grammatik(1894, ed. 1904), improving greatly on Stern’s standard work in regard to phonology and the relationship of Coptic forms to Egyptian, and K. Sethe’sDas Ägyptische Verbum(1899). The latter is an extensive monograph on the verb in Egyptian and Coptic by a brilliant and laborious philologist. Owing to the very imperfect notation of sound in the writing, the highly important subject of the verbal roots and verbal forms was perhaps the obscurest branch of Egyptian grammar when Sethe first attacked it in 1895. The subject has been reviewed by Erman,Die Flexion des ägyptischen Verbumsin theSitzungsberichteof the Berlin Academy, 1900. The Berlin school, having settled the main lines of the grammar, next turned its attention to lexicography. It has devised a scheme, founded on that for the Latin Thesaurus of the Berlin Academy, which almost mechanically sorts the whole number of occurrences of every word in any text examined. Scholars in England, America and Denmark, as well as in Germany, have taken part in this great enterprise, and though the completion of it may be far off, the collections of classified material already made are very valuable for consultation.11At present Egyptologists depend on Heinrich Brugsch’s admirable but somewhat antiquatedWörterbuchand on Levi’s useful but entirely uncriticalVocabolario. Though demotic has not yet received serious attention at Berlin, the influence of that great school has made itself felt amongst demotists, especially in Switzerland, Germany, America and England. The death of Heinrich Brugsch in 1895 was a very severe blow to demotic studies; but it must be admitted that his brilliant gifts lay in other directions than exact grammatical analysis. Apart from their philological interest, as giving the history of a remarkable language during a period of several thousand years, the grammatical studies of the last quarter of the 19th century and afterwards are beginning to bear fruit in regard to the exact interpretation of historical documents on Egyptian monuments and papyri. Not long ago the supposed meaning of these was extracted chiefly by brilliant guessing, and the published translations of even the best scholars could carry no guarantee of more than approximate exactitude, where the sense depended at all on correct recognition of the syntax. Now the translator proceeds in Egyptian with some of the sureness with which he would deal with Latin or Greek. The meaning of many words may be still unknown, and many constructions are still obscure; but at least he can distinguish fairly between a correct text and a corrupt text. Egyptian writing lent itself only too easily to misunderstanding, and the writings of one period were but half intelligible to the learned scribes of another. The mistaken readings of the old inscriptions by the priests at Abydos (Table of Abydos), when attempting to record the names of the kings of the 1st Dynasty on the walls of the temple of Seti I., are now admitted on all sides; and no palaeographer, whether his field be Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian or any other class of MSS., will be surprised to hear that the Egyptian papyri and inscriptions abound in corruptions and mistakes. The translator of to-day can, if he wishes, mark where certainty ends and mere conjecture begins, and it is to be hoped that advantage will be taken more widely of this new power. The Egyptologist who has long lived in the realm of conjecture is too prone to consider any series of guesses good enough to serve as a translation, and forgets to insert the notes of interrogation which would warn workers in other fields from implicit trust.
TheNeuägyptische Grammatik(1880) dealt with texts written in the vulgar dialect of the New Kingdom (Dyns. XVIII. to XX.). Next followed, in theZeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Alterthumskunde, studies on the Old Kingdom inscription of Una, and the Middle Kingdom contracts of Assiut, as well as on an “Old Coptic” text of the 3rd centurya.d.At this point a papyrus of stories written in the popular language of the Middle Kingdom provided Erman with a stepping-stone from Old Egyptian to the Late Egyptian of theNeuägyptische Grammatik, and gave the connexions that would bind solidly together the whole structure of Egyptian grammar (seeSprache des Papyrus Westcar, 1889). The very archaic pyramid texts enabled him to sketch the grammar of the earliest known form of Egyptian (Zeitschrift d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gesellschaft, 1892), and in 1894 he was able to write a little manual of Egyptian for beginners (Ägyptische Grammatik, 2nd ed., 1902), centring on the language of the standard inscriptions of the Middle and New Kingdoms, but accompanying the main sketch with references to earlier and later forms. Of the work of Erman’s pupils we may mention G. Steindorff’s littleKoptische Grammatik(1894, ed. 1904), improving greatly on Stern’s standard work in regard to phonology and the relationship of Coptic forms to Egyptian, and K. Sethe’sDas Ägyptische Verbum(1899). The latter is an extensive monograph on the verb in Egyptian and Coptic by a brilliant and laborious philologist. Owing to the very imperfect notation of sound in the writing, the highly important subject of the verbal roots and verbal forms was perhaps the obscurest branch of Egyptian grammar when Sethe first attacked it in 1895. The subject has been reviewed by Erman,Die Flexion des ägyptischen Verbumsin theSitzungsberichteof the Berlin Academy, 1900. The Berlin school, having settled the main lines of the grammar, next turned its attention to lexicography. It has devised a scheme, founded on that for the Latin Thesaurus of the Berlin Academy, which almost mechanically sorts the whole number of occurrences of every word in any text examined. Scholars in England, America and Denmark, as well as in Germany, have taken part in this great enterprise, and though the completion of it may be far off, the collections of classified material already made are very valuable for consultation.11At present Egyptologists depend on Heinrich Brugsch’s admirable but somewhat antiquatedWörterbuchand on Levi’s useful but entirely uncriticalVocabolario. Though demotic has not yet received serious attention at Berlin, the influence of that great school has made itself felt amongst demotists, especially in Switzerland, Germany, America and England. The death of Heinrich Brugsch in 1895 was a very severe blow to demotic studies; but it must be admitted that his brilliant gifts lay in other directions than exact grammatical analysis. Apart from their philological interest, as giving the history of a remarkable language during a period of several thousand years, the grammatical studies of the last quarter of the 19th century and afterwards are beginning to bear fruit in regard to the exact interpretation of historical documents on Egyptian monuments and papyri. Not long ago the supposed meaning of these was extracted chiefly by brilliant guessing, and the published translations of even the best scholars could carry no guarantee of more than approximate exactitude, where the sense depended at all on correct recognition of the syntax. Now the translator proceeds in Egyptian with some of the sureness with which he would deal with Latin or Greek. The meaning of many words may be still unknown, and many constructions are still obscure; but at least he can distinguish fairly between a correct text and a corrupt text. Egyptian writing lent itself only too easily to misunderstanding, and the writings of one period were but half intelligible to the learned scribes of another. The mistaken readings of the old inscriptions by the priests at Abydos (Table of Abydos), when attempting to record the names of the kings of the 1st Dynasty on the walls of the temple of Seti I., are now admitted on all sides; and no palaeographer, whether his field be Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian or any other class of MSS., will be surprised to hear that the Egyptian papyri and inscriptions abound in corruptions and mistakes. The translator of to-day can, if he wishes, mark where certainty ends and mere conjecture begins, and it is to be hoped that advantage will be taken more widely of this new power. The Egyptologist who has long lived in the realm of conjecture is too prone to consider any series of guesses good enough to serve as a translation, and forgets to insert the notes of interrogation which would warn workers in other fields from implicit trust.
Language and Writing.—The history of the Egyptian language is evidenced by documents extending over a very long range of time. They begin with the primitive inscriptions of the Ist Dynasty (not later than 3300b.c.) and end with the latest Coptic compositions of about the 14th centurya.d.The bulk of the hieroglyphic inscriptions are written in a more or less artificial literary language; but in business documents, letters, popular tales, &c., the scribes often adhered closely to the living form of the tongue, and thus reveal its progressive changes.
The stages of the language are now distinguished as follows:—
Old Egyptian.—This is properly the language of the Old Kingdom. In it we have (a) the recently discovered inscriptions of the Ist Dynasty, too brief and concise to throw much light on the language of that time; and the great collections of spells and ritual texts found inscribed in the Pyramids of the Vth and VIth Dynasties, which must even then have been of high antiquity, though they contain later additions made in the same style. (b) A few historical texts and an abundance of short inscriptions representing the language of the IVth, Vth and VIth Dynasties. The ordinaryliterary languageof the later monuments is modelled on Old Egyptian. It is often much affectedby contemporary speech, but preserves in the main the characteristics of the language of the Old Kingdom.
Middle and Late Egyptian.—These represent the vulgar speech of the Middle and New Kingdoms respectively. The former is found chiefly in tales, letters, &c., written in hieratic on papyri of the XIIIth Dynasty to the end of the Middle Kingdom; also in some inscriptions of the XVIIIth Dynasty. Late Egyptian is seen in hieratic papyri of the XVIIIth to the XXIst Dynasties. The spelling of Late Egyptian is very extraordinary, full of false etymologies, otiose signs, &c., the old orthography being quite unable to adapt itself neatly to the profoundly modified language; nevertheless, this clumsy spelling is expressive, and the very mistakes are instructive as to the pronunciation.
Demotic.—Demotic Egyptian seems to represent approximately the vulgar speech of the Saite period, and is written in the “demotic” character, which may be traced back to the XXVIth Dynasty, if not to a still earlier time. With progressive changes, this form of the language is found in documents reaching down to the fall of Paganism in the 4th centurya.d.12Under the later Ptolemies and the Roman rule documents in Greek are more abundant than in demotic, and the language of the ruling classes must have begun to penetrate the masses deeply.
Coptic.—This, in the main, represents the popular language of early Christian Egypt from the 3rd to perhaps the 10th centurya.d., when the growth of Coptic as a literary language must have ceased. The Greek alphabet, reinforced by a few signs borrowed from demotic, rendered the spoken tongue so accurately that four distinct, though closely allied, dialects are readily distinguishable in Coptic MSS.; ample remains are found of renderings of the Scriptures into all these dialects. The distinctions between the dialects consist largely in pronunciation, but extend also to the vocabulary, word-formation and syntax. Such interchanges are found aslforr, ϭ (k,ch) for ϫ (dj), finalifor finale,afore,aforo. Early in the 2nd centurya.d., pagan Egyptians, or perhaps foreigners settled in Egypt, essayed, as yet unskilfully, to write the native language in Greek letters. ThisOld Coptic, as it is termed, was still almost entirely free from Greek loan-words, and its strong archaisms are doubtless accounted for by the literary language, even in its most “vulgar” forms, having moved more slowly than the speech of the people. Christian Coptic, though probably at first contemporary with some documents of Old Coptic, contrasts strongly with the latter. The monks whose task it was to perfect the adaptation of the alphabet to the dialects of Egypt and translate the Scriptures out of the Greek, flung away all pagan traditions. It is clear that the basis which they chose for the new literature was the simplest language of daily life in the monasteries, charged as it was with expressions taken from Greek, pre-eminently the language of patristic Christianity. There is evidence that the amount of stress on syllables, and the consequent length of vowels, varied greatly in spoken Coptic, and that the variation gave much trouble to the scribes; the early Christian writers must have taken as a model for each dialect the deliberate speech of grave elders or preachers, and so secured a uniform system of accentuation. The remains of Old Coptic, though very instructive in their marked peculiarities, are as yet too few for definite classification. The main divisions of Christian Coptic as recognized and named at present are: Sahidic (formerly called Theban), spoken in the upper Thebais; Akhmimic, in the neighbourhood of Akhmim, but driven out by Sahidic about the 5th century; Fayumic, in the Fayum (formerly named wrongly “Bashmuric,” from a province of the Delta); Bohairic, the dialect of the “coast district” (formerly named “Memphite”), spoken in the north-western Delta. Coptic, much alloyed with Arabic, was spoken in Upper Egypt as late as the 15th century, but it has long been a dead language.13Sahidic and Bohairic are the most important dialects, each of these having left abundant remains; the former spread over the whole of Upper Egypt, and the latter since the 14th century has been the language of the sacred books of Christianity throughout the country, owing to the hierarchical importance of Alexandria and the influence of the ancient monasteries established in the north-western desert.
The above stages of the Egyptian language are not defined with absolute clearness. Progress is seen from dynasty to dynasty or from century to century. New Egyptian shades off almost imperceptibly into demotic, and it may be hoped that gaps which now exist in the development will be filled by further discovery.
Coptic is the only stage of the language in which the spelling gives a clear idea of the pronunciation. It is therefore the mainstay of the scholar in investigating or restoring the word-forms of the ancient language. Greek transcriptions of Egyptian names and words are valuable as evidence for the vocalization of Egyptian. Such are found from the 6th centuryb.c.in the inscription of Abu Simbel, from the 5th in Herodotus, &c., and abound in Ptolemaic and later documents from the beginning of the 3rd centuryb.c.onwards. At first sight they may seem inaccurate, but on closer examination the Graecizing is seen to follow definite rules, especially in the Ptolemaic period. A few cuneiform transcriptions, reaching as far back as the XVIIIth Dynasty, give valuable hints as to how Egyptian was pronounced in the 15th centuryb.c.Coptic itself is of course quite inadequate to enable us to restore Old Egyptian. In it the Old Egyptian verbal forms are mostly replaced by periphrases; though the strong roots are often preserved entire, the weaker consonants and the צ have largely or entirely disappeared, so that the language appears as one of biliteral rather than triliteral roots. Coptic is strongly impregnated with Greek words adopted late; moreover, a certain number of Semitic loan-words flowed into Egyptian at all ages, and especially from the 16th centuryb.c.onwards, displacing earlier words. It is only by the most careful scrutiny, or the exercise of the most piercing insight, that the imperfectly spelled Egyptian has been made to yield up one grammatical secret after another in the light brought to bear upon it from Coptic. Demotic grammar ought soon to be thoroughly comprehensible in its forms, and the study of Late Egyptian should not stand far behind that of demotic. On the other hand, Middle Egyptian, and still more Old Egyptian, which is separated from Middle Egyptian by a wide gap, will perhaps always be to us little more than consonantal skeletons, the flesh and blood of their vocalization being for the most part irretrievably lost.14
In common with the Semitic languages, the Berber languages of North Africa, and the Cushite languages of North-East Africa, Egyptian of all periods possesses grammatical gender, expressing masculine and feminine. Singularly few language groups have this peculiarity; and our own great Indo-European group, which possesses it, is distinguished from those above mentioned by having the neuter gender in addition. The characteristic triliteral roots of all the Semitic languages seemed to separate them widely from others; but certain traits have caused the Egyptian, Berber and Cushite groups to be classed together as three subfamilies of a Hamitic group, remotely related to the Semitic. The biliteral character of Coptic, and the biliteralism which was believed to exist in Egyptian, led philologists to suspect that Egyptian might be a surviving witness to that far-off stage of the Semitic languages when triliteral roots had not yet been formed from presumed original biliterals; Sethe’s investigations, however, prove that the Coptic biliterals are themselves derived from Old Egyptian triliterals, and that the triliteral roots enormously preponderated in Egyptian of the earliest known form; that view is, therefore, no longer tenable. Many remarkableresemblances have been observed in the grammatical structure of the Berber and Cushite groups with Semitic (cf. H. Zimmern,Vergleichende Grammatik d. semitischen Sprachen, Berlin, 1898, especially pronouns and verbs); but the relationship must be very distant, and there are no ancient documents that can take back the history of any one of those languages more than a few centuries. Their connexion with Semitic and Egyptian, therefore, remains at present an obscure though probable hypothesis. On the other hand, Egyptian is certainly related to Semitic. Even before the triliterality of Old Egyptian was recognized, Erman showed that the so-called pseudo-participle had been really in meaning and in form a precise analogue of the Semitic perfect, though its original employment was almost obsolete in the time of the earliest known texts. Triliteralism is considered the most essential and most peculiar feature of Semitic. But there are, besides, many other resemblances in structure between the Semitic languages and Egyptian, so that, although the two vocabularies present few points of clear contact, there is reason to believe that Egyptian was originally a characteristic member of the Semitic family of languages. See Erman, “Das Verhältnis d. ägyptischen zu d. semitischen Sprachen” (Zeitschrift d. deutschen morgenl. Gesellschaft, 1892); Zimmern,Vergl. Gram., 1898; Erman, “Flexion d. ägyptischen Verbums” (Sitzungsberichte d. Berl. Akad., 1900). The Egyptians proper are not, and so far as we can tell never were, Semitic in physical feature. As a possible explanation of the facts, Erman supposes that a horde of conquering Semites, like the Arabs of a later day, imposed their language on the country, but disappeared, being weakened by the climate or absorbed by the native population. The latter acquired the Semitic language imperfectly from their conquerors; they expressed the verbal conjugations by periphrases, mispronounced the consonants, and so changed greatly the appearance of the vocabulary, which also would certainly contain a large proportion of native non-Semitic roots. Strong consonants gave place to weak consonants (ashas done to, in the modern Arabic of Egypt), and then the weak consonants disappearing altogether produced biliterals from the triliterals. Much of this must have taken place, according to the theory, in the prehistoric period; but the loss of weak consonants, of ע and of one of two repeated consonants, and the development of periphrastic conjugations continued to the end. The typical Coptic root thus became biliteral rather than triliteral, and the verb, by means of periphrases, developed tenses of remarkable precision. Such verbal resemblances as exist between Coptic and Semitic are largely due to late exchanges with Semitic neighbours.
The following sketch of the Egyptian language, mainly in its earliest form, which dates from some three or four thousand yearsb.c., is founded upon Erman’s works. It will serve to contrast with Coptic grammar on the one hand and Semitic grammar on the other.The Egyptian Alphabet=l; so conventionally transcribed since it unites two values, being sometimes y but often א (especially at the beginning of words), and from the earliest times used in a manner corresponding to the Arabichamza, to indicate a prosthetic vowel. Often lost.andare frequently employed fory.= ’(א); easily lost or changes toy.= ’(ע); lost in Coptic. This rare sound, well known in Semitic, occurs also in Berber and Cushite languages.=w; often changes toy.=b.=p.=f.=m.=n.=r; often lost, or changes toy.randlare distinguished in later demotic and in Coptic.=hdistinction lost in Coptic.=ḥ” ”=h; in Coptic ϣ (sh) or Ϧ (kh) correspond to it.=ḫ; generally written with(š) in the Old Kingdom, butcorresponds tokhin Coptic.=sdistinction lost at the end of the Old Kingdom.=ś” ” ”=š(sh).=q; Coptic κ.=kCoptic κ; or ϭ, ϫ, according to dialect.=gCoptic κ; or ϭ.=ṯ; often lost at the end of words.=t(θ); often changes tot, otherwise Coptic ϯ; or ϫ, ϭ.=d; in Coptic reduced tot.=ḏ(z); often changes tod, Coptic ϯ; otherwise in Coptic ϫ.ROOTSEgyptian roots consist of consonants and semi-consonants only, the inflexion being effected by internal vowel-change and the addition of consonants or vowels at the beginning or end. The Egyptian system of writing, as opposed to the Coptic, showed only the consonantal skeletons of words: it could not record internal vowel-changes; and semi-consonants, even when radicals, were often omitted in writing.PERSONAL PRONOUNSSing.1. c.iw(?) laterwi.2. m.kw.f.ṯn.3.m. *fy, surviving only in a special verbal form.f.śy.Pl.1. c.n.2. c.ṯn.3. m.śn, early lost, except as suffix.f. *śtsurviving as 3. c.Du.2. c.ṯny.3. c.śny.From these are derived the suffixes, which are shortened forms attached to nouns to express the possessor, and to verbs to express the subject. In the latter case the verb was probably in the participle, so thatśḏmii-śn, “they hear,” is literally “hearing are they.” The singular suffixes are: (1) c.-i; (2) m.-k, f.-ṯ; (3) m.-f, f.-ś;—the dual and plural have no special forms.Another series of absolute pronouns is: (2) m.ṯwt,ṯw; f.ṯmt,ṯm; (3) m.śwt,św; f.śtt,śt. Of theseṯwt,ṯmt, &c., are emphatic forms.Many of the above absolute pronouns were almost obsolete even in the Old Kingdom. In ordinary texts some survive, especially as objects of verbs, namely,wi,tw,tn,sw,st. The suffixes of all numbers and persons except the dual were in full use throughout, to Coptic;sn, however, giving way to a new suffix,-w, which developed first in the New Kingdom.Another absolute pronoun of the first person isink,like Heb. יכנא. It is associated with a series for the second and third persons:nt-k,nt-ṯ,nt-f,nt-śn, &c.; but from their history, use and form, it seems probable that the last are of later formation, and are not to be connected with the Semitic pronouns (chiefly of the 2nd person) resembling them.DEMONSTRATIVE PRONOUNSThere are several series based on m.p; f.t; pl.n; butnas a plural seems later than the other two. From them are developed a weak demonstrative to which possessive suffixes can be attached, producing the definite and possessive articles (p’,t’,n’, “the,”p’y-f, “his,”p’y-s“her,” &c.) of Middle Egyptian and the later language.NOUNSTwo genders, m. (endingw, or nothing), f. (endingt). Three numbers: singular, dual (m.wi, f.ti, gradually became obsolete), plural (m.w; f.wt). No case-endings are recognizable, but construct forms—to judge by Coptic—were in use. Masculine and feminine nouns of instrument or material are formed from verbal roots by prefixingm;e.g.m·sdm·t, “stibium,” fromsdm, “paint the eye.” Substantives and adjectives are formed from substantives and prepositions by the addition ofyin the masculine;e.g.n·t, “city,”nt·y, “belonging to a city,” “citizen”;ḥr, “upon,”ḥr·y(f.ḥr·t; pl.ḥr·w), “upper.” This is not unlike the Semiticnisbeendingiy,ay(e.g.Ar.beled, “city,”beledi, “belonging to a city”). Adjectives follow the nouns they qualify.NUMERALS1,w’; 2,śn; 3,ḫmt; 4,fdw; 5,dw’; 6,sis(orsw’?); 7,sfḫ; 8,ḫmn; 9,psḏ; 10,mt. 2, 6, 7, 8 and 9 (?) resemble Semitic numerals. 20 and 30 (m’b) had special names; 40-90 were named as if plurals of the units 4-9, as in Semitic. 100,šnt; 1000,ḫ’; 10,000,zb’; 100,000,ḥfnw.VERBSThe forms observable in hieroglyphic writing lead to the following classification:—Strong Verbs.BiliteralOften showing traces of an original III. inf.; in early times very rare.TriliteralVery numerous.QuadriliteralQuinqueliteralGenerally formed by reduplication. In Late Egyptian they were no longer inflected, and were conjugated with the help ofiry, “do.”Weak Verbs.II. geminataeProperly triliterals, but, with the 2nd or 3rd radical alike, these coalesced in many forms where no vowel intervened, and gave the word the appearance of a biliteral.III. gem.Rare.III. inf.Numerous. III.w, and III.iwere unified early. Some very common verbs, “do,” “give,” “come,” “bring” are irregular.IV. inf.Partly derived from adjectival formations iny, from nouns and infinitives:—e.g.ś·ip, inf.śipt; adj.śipty; verb (4 lit.),śipty.Many verbs with weak consonants—Iy, Iw, II. inf. (m[w]t), and those with א—are particularly difficult to trace accurately, owing to defective writing.It seems that all the above classes may be divided into two main groups, according to the form of the infinitive:—with masculine infinitive the strong triliteral type, and with feminine infinitive the type of the III. inf. The former group includes all except III. inf., IV. inf., and the causative of the biliterals, which belong to the second group.It is probable that the verb had a special form denoting condition, as in Arabic. There was a causative form prefixingś, and traces of forms resemblingPi‘elandNiphalare observed. Some roots are reduplicated wholly or in part with a frequentative meaning, and there are traces of gemination of radicals.Pseudo-Participle.—In very early texts this is the past indicative, but more commonly it is used in sentences such as,gm-n-f wi ‘ḥ‘·kwi, “he found me I stood,”i.e.“he found me standing.” The indicative use was soon given up and the pseudo-participle was employed only as predicate, especially indicating a state;e.g.ntr·t šm·ti, “the goddess goes”;iw-k wḏ’·ti, “thou art prosperous.” The endings were almost entirely lost in New Egyptian. For early times they stand thus:—Sing.3. masc.fem2. masc.fem.1. c.i, latew.ti.titikwi.Dualwii.tiiwPl.w.ti.tiwny.wyn.The pseudo-participle seems, by its inflexion, to have been the perfect of the original Semitic conjugation. The simplest form being that of the 3rd person, it is best arranged like the corresponding tense in Semitic grammars, beginning with that person. There is no trace of the Semitic imperfect in Egyptian. The ordinary conjugation is formed quite differently. The verbal stem is here followed by the subject-suffix or substantive—śḏm-f, “he hears”;śḏmw śtn, “the king hears.” It is varied by the addition of particles, &c.,n,in,ḫr,tw, thus:—śḏm-f, “he hears”;śḏm-w-f, “he is heard” (pl. śḏm-ii-śn, “they are heard”);śḏm-tw-f, “he is heard”;śḏm-n-f, “he heard”;śḏm-n-tw-f, “he was heard”; also,śḏm-in-f,śḏm-ḫr-f,śḏm-k’-f. Each form has special uses, generally difficult to define,śdm-fseems rather to be imperfect,śḏm-n-fperfect, and generally to express the past. Later,śḏm-fis ordinarily expressed by periphrases; but by the loss ofn,śḏm-n-fbecame itselfsdm-f, which is the ordinary past in demotic. Coptic preservesśḏm-fforms of many verbs in its causative (e.g.“cause him to live,” from Egyptiandi·t·nḫ-f), and, in its periphrastic conjugation, the same forms ofwn, “be,” andiry, “do.” Withśḏm-f(śeḏmo-f) was a more emphatic form (eśḏomef), at any rate in the weak verbs.The above, with the relative forms mentioned below, are supposed by Erman to be derived from the participle, which is placed first for emphasis: thus,śḏm·w śtn, “hearing is the king”;śḏm-f, forśḏm-fy, “hearing he is.” This Egyptian paraphrase of Semitic is just like the Irish paraphrase of English, “It is hearing he is.”Theimperativeshows no ending in the singular; in the plural it hasy, and laterw; cf. Semitic imperative.Theinfinitiveis of special importance on account of its being preserved very fully in Coptic. It is generally of masculine form, but feminine iniii. inf. (as in Semitic), and in causatives of biliterals.There are relative forms ofśḏm-fandśḏm-n-f, respectivelyśḏm·w-f(masc.),śḏm·t-n-f(fem.), &c. They are used when the relative is the object of the relative sentence, or has any other position than the subject. Thusśḏm·t-fmay mean “she whom he hears,” “she who[se praises] he hears,” “she [to] whom he hears [someone speaking],” &c. There are close analogies between the function of the relative particles in Egyptian and Semitic; and the Berber languages possess a relative form of the verb.Participles.—These are active and passive, perfect and imperfect, in the old language, but all are replaced by periphrases in Coptic.Verbal Adjectives.—There is a peculiar formation,śḏm·ty-fy, “he who shall hear,” probably meaning originally “he is a hearer,”śḏm·tybeing an adjective inyformed from a feminine (t) form of the infinitive, which is occasionally found even in triliteral verbs; the endings are: sing., masc.ty-fy, fem.ty-śy; pl., masc.ty-śn, fem.ty-śt. It is found only in Old Egyptian.Particles.—There seems to be no special formation for adverbs, and little use is made of adverbial expressions. Prepositions, simple and compound, are numerous. Some of the commonest simple prepositions aren“for,”r“to,”m“in, from,”ḥr“upon.” A few enclitic conjunctions exist, but they are indefinite in meaning—śwta vague “but,”grta vague “moreover,” &c.Coptic presents a remarkable contrast to Egyptian in the precision of its periphrastic conjugation. There are two present tenses, an imperfect, two perfects, a pluperfect, a present and a past frequentative, and three futures besides future perfect; there are also conjunctive and optative forms. The negatives of some of these are expressed by special prefixes. The gradual growth of these new forms can be traced through all the stages of Egyptian. Throughout the history of the language we note an increasing tendency to periphrasis; but there was no great advance towardsprecisionbefore demotic. In demotic there are distinguishable a present tense, imperfect, perfect, frequentative, future, future perfect, conjunctive and optative; also present, past and future negatives, &c. The passive was extinct before demotic; demotic and Coptic express it, clumsily it must be confessed, by an impersonal “they,”e.g.“they bore him” stands for “he was born.”It is worth noting how, in other departments besides the verb, the Egyptian language was far better adapted to practical ends during and after the period of the Deltaic dynasties (XXII.-XXX.) than ever it was before. It was both simplified and enriched. The inflexions rapidly disappeared and little was left of the distinctions between masculine and feminine, singular, dual and plural—except in the pronouns. The dual number had been given up entirely at an earlier date. The pronouns, both personal and demonstrative, retained their forms very fully. As prefixes, suffixes and articles, they, together with some auxiliary verbs, provided the principal mechanism of the renovated language. An abundant supply of useful adverbs was gradually accumulated, as well as conjunctions, so far as the functions of the latter were not already performed by the verbal prefixes. These great improvements in the language correspond to great changes in the economic condition of the country; they were the result of active trade and constant intercourse of all classes of Egyptians with foreigners from Europe and Asia. Probably the best stage of Egyptian speech was that which immediately preceded Coptic. Though Coptic is here and there more exactly expressive than the best demotic, it was spoilt by too much Greek, duplicating and too often expelling native expressions that were already adequate for its very simple requirements. Above all, it is clumsily pleonastic.The WritingThe ancient Egyptian system of writing, so far as we know, originated, developed and finally expired strictly within the limits of the Nile Valley. The germ of its existence may have come from without, but, as we know it, it is essentially Egyptian and intended for the expression of the Egyptian language. About the 1st centuryb.c., however, the semi-barbarous rulers of the Ethiopian kingdoms of Meroe and Napata contrived the “Meroitic” alphabet, founded on Egyptian writing, and comprising both a hieroglyphic and a cursive form (seeEthiopia). As yet both of these kinds of Nubian writing are undeciphered. Egyptian hieroglyphic was carried by conquest into Syria, certainly under the XVIIIth Dynasty, and again under the XXVIth for the engraving of Egyptian inscriptions; but in the earlier period the cuneiform syllabary, and in the later the “Phoenician” alphabet, had obtained a firm hold there, and we may be sure that no attempt was made to substitute the Egyptian system for the latter. Cuneiform tablets in Syria, however, seem almost confined to the period of the XVIIIth Dynasty. Although it cannot be proved it seems quite possible that the traders of Phoenicia and the Aegean adopted the papyrus and Egyptian hieratic writing together, before the end of the New Kingdom, and developed their “Phoenician” alphabet from the latter about 1000b.c.In very early times a number of systems of writing alreadyreigned in different countries forming a compact and not very large area—perhaps from South Arabia to Asia Minor, and from Persia to Crete and Egypt. Whether they all sprang from one common stock of picture-writing we shall perhaps never know, nor can we as yet trace the influence which one great system may have had on another, owing to the poverty of documents from most of the countries concerned.It is certain that in Egypt from the IVth Dynasty onwards the mode of writing was essentially the same as that which was extinguished by the fall of paganism in the 4th centurya.d.Its elements in the hieroglyphic form are pictorial, but each hieroglyph had one or more well-defined functions, fixed by convention in such a manner that the Egyptian language was expressed in writing word by word. Although a picture sign may at times have embarrassed the skilled native reader by offering a choice of fixed values or functions, it was never intended to convey merely an idea, so as to leave to him the task of putting the idea into his own words. How far this holds good for the period before the IVth Dynasty it is difficult to say. The known inscriptions of the earlier times are so brief and so limited in range that the system on which they were written cannot yet be fully investigated. As far back as the Ist Dynasty, phonograms (see below) were in full use. But the spelling then was very concise: it is possible that some of the slighter words, such as prepositions, were omitted in the writing, and were intended to be supplied from the context. As a whole, we gain the impression that a really distinct and more primitive stage of hieroglyphic writing by a substantially vaguer notation of words lay not far behind the time of the Ist Dynasty.The employment of the signs are of three kinds: any given sign represents either (1) a whole word or root; or (2) a sound as part of a word; or (3) pictorially defines the meaning of a word the sound of which has already been given by a sign or group of signs preceding. The number of phonograms is very restricted, but some signs have all these powers. For instance,is the conventional picture of a draughtboard (shown in plan) with the draughtsmen (shown in elevation) on its edge:—this sign (1) signifies the rootmn, “set,” “firm”; or (2) in the group, represents the same sound as part of the rootmnḫ, “good”; or (3) added to the groupsnt(thus:), shows that the meaning intended is “draught-board,” or “draughts,” and not any of the other meanings ofsnt. Thus signs, according to their employment, are said to be (1) “word-signs,” (2) “phonograms,” or (3) “determinatives.”Word-signs.—The word-sign value of a sign is, in the first place, the name of the object it represents, or of some material, or quality, or action, or idea suggested by it. Thusisḥr, “face”;, a vase of ointment, ismrḥ.t, “ointment”;iswdb, “turn.” Much investigation is still required to establish the origins of the values of the signs; in some cases the connexion between the pictures and theprimaryvalues seems to be curiously remote. Probably all the signs in the hieroglyphic signary can be employed in their primary sense. Thesecondaryvalue expresses the consonantal root of the name or other primary value, and any, or almost any, derivative from that root: as when, a mat with a cake upon it, is not onlyḥtp, an “offering-mat,” but alsoḥtpin the sense of “conciliation,” “peace,” “rest,” “setting” (of the sun), with many derivatives. In the third place, some signs may betransferredto express another root having the same consonants as the first: thus, the ear, by a play upon words can express not onlyśḏm, “hear,” but alsośdm, “paint the eyes.”Phonograms.—Only a limited number of signs are found with this use, but they are of the greatest importance. By searching throughout the whole mass of normal inscriptions, earlier than the periods of Greek and Roman rule when great liberties were taken with the writing, probably no more than one hundred different phonograms can be found. The number of those commonly employed in good writing is between seventy and eighty. The most important phonograms are theuniliteraloralphabeticsigns, twenty-four in number in the Old Kingdom and without any homophones: later these were increased by homophones to thirty. Ofbiliteralphonograms—each expressing a combination of two consonants—there were about fifty commonly used: some fifteen or twenty were rarely used. As Egyptian roots seldom exceeded three letters, there was no need fortriliteralphonograms to spell them. There is, however, one triliteral phonogram, the eagle,,tyw, ortiu(?), used for the plural ending of adjectives inyformed from words ending int(whether radical or the feminine ending).The phonetic values of the signs are derived from their word-sign values and consist usually of the bare root, though there are rare examples of the retention of a flexional ending; they often ignore also the weaker consonants of the root, and on the same principle reduce a repeated consonant to a single one, as when the hoe,ḥnn, has the phonetic valueḥn. The history of some of the alphabetic signs is still very obscure, but a sufficient number of them have been explained to make it nearly certain that the values of all were obtained on the same principles.15Some of the ancient words from which the phonetic values were derived probably fell very early into disuse, and may never be discoverable in the texts that have come down to us. The following are among those most easily explained:—, reed flower,valueyand א; from,y’, “reed.”(It seems as if the two valuesyand א were obtained by choosing first one and then the other of the two semi-consonants composing the name. They are much confused, and a conventional symbollhas to be adopted for rendering.), forearm,value ’(ע); from, ’(ע), “hand.”, mouth,valuer; from,r, “mouth.”, belly and teats,valueḫ; from,ḫ.t, “belly.”(The feminine ending is here, as usual, neglected.), tank,valueš; from,š, “tank.”, slope of earth or brickwork,valueq; from,q’’, “slope,” “height.”(The doubled weak consonant is here neglected.), hand,valued; from,d.t, “hand.”, cobra,valuez; from,z.t, “cobra.”For some alphabetic signs more than one likely origin might be found, while for others, again, no clear evidence of origin is yet forthcoming.It has already been explained that the writing expresses only consonants. In the Graeco-Roman period various imperfect attempts were made to render the vowels in foreign names and words by the semi-vowels as also by, the consonant ע whichoriginally represented having been reduced in speech by that time to the power of א, only. Thus,Πτολεμαιοςis speltPtwrmys, Antoninus,’Nt’nynwsorIntnyns, &c. &c. Much earlier, throughout the New Kingdom, a special “syllabic” orthography, in which the alphabetic signs for the consonants are generally replaced by groups or single signs having the value of a consonant followed by a semi-vowel, was used for foreign names and words,e.g.תבכרמ,“chariot,” was written, in Coptic.לדגמ,“tower,” was written,,.רונכ,“harp,” was written.תמח,“Hamath,” was written.According to W. Max Müller (Asien und Europa, 1893, chap, v.), this represents an endeavour to express the vocalization; but, if so, it was carried out with very little system. In practice, the semi-vowels are generally negligible. This method of writing can be traced back into the Middle Kingdom, if not beyond, and it greatly affected the spelling of native words in New Egyptian and demotic.Determinatives.—Most signs can on occasion be used as determinatives, but those that are very commonly employed as phonograms or as secondary word-signs are seldom employed as determinatives; and when they are so used they are often somewhat differentiated. Certain generic determinatives are very common,e.g.:—; of motion.; of acts involving force.; of divinity.; of a person or a man’s name.; of buildings.; of inhabited places.; of foreign countries.; club; of foreigners.; of all actions of the mouth—eating and speaking, likewise silence and hunger.; ripple-lines; of liquid.; hide; of animals, also leather, &c.; of plants and fibres.; of flesh.; a sealed papyrus-roll; of books, teaching, law, and of abstract ideas generally.In the earliest inscriptions the use of determinatives is restricted to the, &c., after proper names, but it developed immensely later, so that few words beyond the particles were written without them in the normal style after the Old Kingdom.Some few signs ideographic of a group of ideas are made to express particular words belonging to that group by the aid of phonograms which point out the special meaning. In such cases the ideogram is not merely a determinative nor yet quite a word-sign. Thus“Semite,”“Libyan,” &c., butcannot stand by itself for the name of any particular foreign people. So also in monogramisšm“go,”is “conduct.”Orthography.—The most primitive form of spelling in the hieroglyphic system would be by one sign for each word, and the monuments of the Ist Dynasty show a decided tendency to this mode. Examples of it in later times are preserved in the royal cartouches, for here the monumental style demanded special consciseness. Thus, for instance, the name of Tethmosis III.—MN-ḪPR-R’—is spelled(as R’ is the name of the sun-god, with customary deference to the deity it is written first though pronounced last). A number of common words—prepositions, &c.—with only one consonant are spelled by single alphabetic signs in ordinary writing. Word-signs used singly for the names of objects are generally marked with | in classical writing, as,ib, “heart,”,ḥr, “face,” &c.But the use of bare word-signs is not common. Flexional consonants are almost always marked by phonograms, except in very early times; as when the feminine word=z.t, “cobra,” is spelled. Also, if a sign had more than one value, a phonogram would be added to indicate which of its values was intended: thusinisśw, “he,” but init isśtn, “king.” Further, owing to the vast number of signs employed, to prevent confusion of one with another in rapid writing they were generally provided with “phonetic complements,” a group being less easily misread than a single letter.E.g.,wz, “command,” is regularly written,wz(w); but,ḥz, “white,” is written,ḥz(z). This practice had the advantage also of distinguishing determinatives from phonograms. Thus the root or syllableḥnis regularly writtento avoid confusion with the determinative. Redundance in writing is the rule; for instance,bis often spelled(b)b’(’). Biliteral phonograms are very rare as phonetic complements, nor are two biliteral phonograms employed together in writing the radicals of a word.Spelling of words purely in phonetic or even alphabetic characters is not uncommon, the determinative being generally added. Thus in the pyramidal texts we findḫpr, “become,” writtenin one copy of a text, in another. Such variant spellings are very important for fixing the readings of word-signs. It is noteworthy that though words were so freely spelled in alphabetic characters, especially in the time of the Old Kingdom, no advance was ever made towards excluding the cumbersome word-signs and biliteral phonograms, which, by a judicious use of determinatives, might well have been rendered quite superfluous.Abbreviations.—We find, strictly’nḫ z’śstanding for the ceremonialviva! ’nḫ wz, śnb. “Life, Prosperity and Health,” and in course of timewas used in accounts instead ofdmz, “total.”Monogramsare frequent and are found from the earliest times. Thus,mentioned above are monograms, the association ofandhaving no pictorial meaning. Another common monogram is,i.e.andforḤ·t-Ḥrw“Hathor.” A word-sign may be compounded with its phonetic complement, asḥz“white,” or with its determinative, asḥz“silver.”The table on the opposite page shows the uses of a few of the commoner signs.The decorative value of hieroglyphic was fully appreciated in Egypt. The aim of the artist-scribe was to arrange his variously shaped characters into square groups, and this could be done in great measure by taking advantage of the different ways in which many words could be spelt. Thusḥscould be written,ḥsy,ḥs-f,ḥs-n-f. But some words in the classical writing were intractable from this point of view. It is obvious that the alphabetic signs played a very important part in the formation of the groups, and many words could only be written in alphabetic signs. A great advance was therefore made when several homophones were introduced into the alphabet in the Middle and New Kingdoms, partly as the result of the wearing away of old phonetic distinctions, giving the choice betweenandandandandand. In later times the number of homophones in use increased greatly throughout the different classes, the tendency being much helped by the habit of fanciful writing; but few of these homophones found their way into the cursive script. Occasionally a scribe of the old times indulged his fancy in “sportive” or “mysterious” writing, either inventing new signs or employing old ones in unusual meanings. Short sportive inscriptions are found in tombs of the XIIth Dynasty; some groups are so written cursively in early medical papyri, and certain religious inscriptions in the royal tombs of the XIXth and XXth Dynasties are in secret writing. Fanciful writing abounds on the temples of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods.PalaeographyHRGic.—The main division is into monumental or epigraphic hieroglyphs and written hieroglyphs. The former may be rendered by the sculptor or the painter in stone, on wood, &c., with great delicacy of detail, or may be simply sunk or painted in outline. When finely rendered they are of great value to the student investigating the origins of their values. No other system of writing bears upon its face so clearly the history of its development as the Egyptian; yet even in this a vast amount of work is still required to detect and disentangle the details. Monumental hieroglyphic did not cease till the 3rd centurya.d.(Temple of Esna). The written hieroglyphs, formed by the scribe with the reed pen on papyrus, leather, wooden tablets, &c., have their outlines more or less abbreviated, producing eventually the cursive scripts hieratic and demotic. The written hieroglyphs were employed at all periods, especially for religious texts.Hieratic.—A kind of cursive hieroglyphic or hieratic writing is found even in the Ist Dynasty. In the Middle Kingdom it is wellcharacterized, and in its most cursive form seems hardly to retain any definable trace of the original hieroglyphic pictures. The style varies much at different periods.Sign.Description.Name.Word-signValue.PhoneticValue.DeterminativeValue.childhrd (khrod)youthfaceḥr (ḥor)ḥr[ḥr]eyeir.t (yori.t)irirsee, &c.mouthr (ro)rrforearm’ (’ei)’’[action of hand or arm]arm with sticknḫt “be strong”nḫtviolent actionman with sticknḫt “be strong”nḫtviolent actionlungs and windpipesm;sm;heartibheartheart and windpipe?nfrsparrow?šrevil, worthlessness, smallnesswidgeons;.ts;s;bolti-fishin.tinintusk(1) ibḥ “tooth”(2) ḥw “taste”bḥḥwbḥbite, &c.cut branchḫtḫt[ḫt]wood, treethreshing-floorsp.tspsun(1) r’ “sun”(2) hrw “day”(1) sun(2) division of timechamber, houseprprflat landt’t’t’boundless horizon, eternitylibation vaseḥs.tḥsḥscord on stickwzwzwzbasketnb.tnblooped basket?kksickle?m’m’composite hoe[mr?]mrmrtillagefire-drillz’.t(?)z’z’attendant’s equipmentšmś “follow”šmśknifedśdścut, prick, cutting instrumentDemotic.—Widely varying degrees of cursiveness are at all periods observable in hieratic; but, about the XXVIth Dynasty, which inaugurated a great commercial era, there was something like a definite parting between the uncial hieratic and the most cursive form afterwards known as demotic. The employment of hieratic was thenceforth almost confined to the copying of religious and other traditional texts on papyrus, while demotic was used not only for all business but also for writing literary and even religious texts in the popular language. By the time of the XXVth Dynasty the cursive of the conservative Thebais had become very obscure. A better form from Lower Egypt drove this out completely in the time of Amasis II. and is the true demotic. Before the Macedonian conquest the cursive ligatures of the old demotic gave birth to new symbols which were carefully and distinctly formed, and a little later an epigraphic variety was engraved on stone, as in the case of the Rosetta stone itself. One of the most characteristic distinctions of later demotic is the minuteness of the writing.HRGic is normally written from right to left, the signs facing to the commencement of the line; hieratic and demotic follow the same direction. But monumental hieroglyphic may also be written from left to right, and is constantly so arranged for purposes of symmetry,e.g.the inscriptions on the two jambs of a door are frequently turned in opposite directions; the same is frequently done with the short inscriptions scattered over a scene amongst the figures, in order to distinguish one label from another.In modern founts of type, the hieroglyphic signs are made to run from left to right, in order to facilitate the setting where European text is mixed with the Egyptian. The table on next page shows them in their more correct position, in order to display more clearly their relation to the hieratic and demotic equivalents.Clement of Alexandria states that in the Egyptian schools the pupils were first taught the “epistolographic” style of writing (i.e.demotic), secondly the “hieratic” employed by the sacred scribes, and finally the “hieroglyphic” (Strom.v. 657). It is doubtful whether they classified the signs of the huge hieroglyphic syllabary with any strictness. The only native work on the writing that has come to light as yet is a fragmentary papyrus of Roman date which has a table in parallel columns of hieroglyphic signs, with their hieratic equivalents and words written in hieratic describing them or giving their values or meanings. The list appears to have comprised about 460 signs, including most of those that occur commonly in hieratic. They are to some extent classified. The beeheads the list as a royal sign, and is followed by figures of nobles and other human figures in various attitudes, more or less grouped among themselves, animals, reptiles and fishes, scorpion, animals again, twenty-four alphabetic characters, parts of the human body carefully arranged fromto, thirty-two in number, parts of animals, celestial signs, terrestrial signs, vases. The arrangement down to this point is far from strict, and beyond it is almost impossible to describe concisely, though there is still a rough grouping of characters according to resemblance of form, nature or meaning. It is a curious fact that not a single bird is visible on the fragments, and the trees and plants, which might easily have been collected in a compact and well-defined section, are widely scattered. Why the alphabetic characters are introduced where they are is a puzzle; the order of these is:—Three others,and, had already occurred amongst the fish and reptiles. There seems to be no logical aim in this arrangement of the alphabetic characters and the series is incomplete. Very probably the Egyptians never constructed a really systematic list of hieroglyphs. In modern lists the signs are classified according to the nature of the objects they depict, as human figures, plants, vessels, instruments, &c. Horapollon’sHieroglyphicamay be cited as a native work, but its author, if really an Egyptian, had no knowledge of good writing. His production consists of two elaborate complementary lists: the one describing sign-pictures and giving their meanings, the other cataloguing ideas in order to show how they could be expressed in hieroglyphic. Each seems to us to be made up of curious but perverted reminiscences eked out by invention; but they might some day prove to represent more truly the usages of mystics and magicians in designing amulets, &c., at a time approaching the middle ages.
The following sketch of the Egyptian language, mainly in its earliest form, which dates from some three or four thousand yearsb.c., is founded upon Erman’s works. It will serve to contrast with Coptic grammar on the one hand and Semitic grammar on the other.
The Egyptian Alphabet
ROOTS
Egyptian roots consist of consonants and semi-consonants only, the inflexion being effected by internal vowel-change and the addition of consonants or vowels at the beginning or end. The Egyptian system of writing, as opposed to the Coptic, showed only the consonantal skeletons of words: it could not record internal vowel-changes; and semi-consonants, even when radicals, were often omitted in writing.
PERSONAL PRONOUNS
1. c.iw(?) laterwi.
2. m.kw.
f.ṯn.
3.m. *fy, surviving only in a special verbal form.
f.śy.
1. c.n.
2. c.ṯn.
3. m.śn, early lost, except as suffix.
f. *śtsurviving as 3. c.
2. c.ṯny.
3. c.śny.
From these are derived the suffixes, which are shortened forms attached to nouns to express the possessor, and to verbs to express the subject. In the latter case the verb was probably in the participle, so thatśḏmii-śn, “they hear,” is literally “hearing are they.” The singular suffixes are: (1) c.-i; (2) m.-k, f.-ṯ; (3) m.-f, f.-ś;—the dual and plural have no special forms.
Another series of absolute pronouns is: (2) m.ṯwt,ṯw; f.ṯmt,ṯm; (3) m.śwt,św; f.śtt,śt. Of theseṯwt,ṯmt, &c., are emphatic forms.
Many of the above absolute pronouns were almost obsolete even in the Old Kingdom. In ordinary texts some survive, especially as objects of verbs, namely,wi,tw,tn,sw,st. The suffixes of all numbers and persons except the dual were in full use throughout, to Coptic;sn, however, giving way to a new suffix,-w, which developed first in the New Kingdom.
Another absolute pronoun of the first person isink,like Heb. יכנא. It is associated with a series for the second and third persons:nt-k,nt-ṯ,nt-f,nt-śn, &c.; but from their history, use and form, it seems probable that the last are of later formation, and are not to be connected with the Semitic pronouns (chiefly of the 2nd person) resembling them.
DEMONSTRATIVE PRONOUNS
There are several series based on m.p; f.t; pl.n; butnas a plural seems later than the other two. From them are developed a weak demonstrative to which possessive suffixes can be attached, producing the definite and possessive articles (p’,t’,n’, “the,”p’y-f, “his,”p’y-s“her,” &c.) of Middle Egyptian and the later language.
NOUNS
Two genders, m. (endingw, or nothing), f. (endingt). Three numbers: singular, dual (m.wi, f.ti, gradually became obsolete), plural (m.w; f.wt). No case-endings are recognizable, but construct forms—to judge by Coptic—were in use. Masculine and feminine nouns of instrument or material are formed from verbal roots by prefixingm;e.g.m·sdm·t, “stibium,” fromsdm, “paint the eye.” Substantives and adjectives are formed from substantives and prepositions by the addition ofyin the masculine;e.g.n·t, “city,”nt·y, “belonging to a city,” “citizen”;ḥr, “upon,”ḥr·y(f.ḥr·t; pl.ḥr·w), “upper.” This is not unlike the Semiticnisbeendingiy,ay(e.g.Ar.beled, “city,”beledi, “belonging to a city”). Adjectives follow the nouns they qualify.
NUMERALS
1,w’; 2,śn; 3,ḫmt; 4,fdw; 5,dw’; 6,sis(orsw’?); 7,sfḫ; 8,ḫmn; 9,psḏ; 10,mt. 2, 6, 7, 8 and 9 (?) resemble Semitic numerals. 20 and 30 (m’b) had special names; 40-90 were named as if plurals of the units 4-9, as in Semitic. 100,šnt; 1000,ḫ’; 10,000,zb’; 100,000,ḥfnw.
VERBS
The forms observable in hieroglyphic writing lead to the following classification:—
Many verbs with weak consonants—Iy, Iw, II. inf. (m[w]t), and those with א—are particularly difficult to trace accurately, owing to defective writing.
It seems that all the above classes may be divided into two main groups, according to the form of the infinitive:—with masculine infinitive the strong triliteral type, and with feminine infinitive the type of the III. inf. The former group includes all except III. inf., IV. inf., and the causative of the biliterals, which belong to the second group.
It is probable that the verb had a special form denoting condition, as in Arabic. There was a causative form prefixingś, and traces of forms resemblingPi‘elandNiphalare observed. Some roots are reduplicated wholly or in part with a frequentative meaning, and there are traces of gemination of radicals.
Pseudo-Participle.—In very early texts this is the past indicative, but more commonly it is used in sentences such as,gm-n-f wi ‘ḥ‘·kwi, “he found me I stood,”i.e.“he found me standing.” The indicative use was soon given up and the pseudo-participle was employed only as predicate, especially indicating a state;e.g.ntr·t šm·ti, “the goddess goes”;iw-k wḏ’·ti, “thou art prosperous.” The endings were almost entirely lost in New Egyptian. For early times they stand thus:—
3. masc.
fem
2. masc.
fem.
1. c.
i, latew.
ti.
ti
ti
kwi.
Dualwii.
tiiw
w.
ti.
tiwny.
wyn.
The pseudo-participle seems, by its inflexion, to have been the perfect of the original Semitic conjugation. The simplest form being that of the 3rd person, it is best arranged like the corresponding tense in Semitic grammars, beginning with that person. There is no trace of the Semitic imperfect in Egyptian. The ordinary conjugation is formed quite differently. The verbal stem is here followed by the subject-suffix or substantive—śḏm-f, “he hears”;śḏmw śtn, “the king hears.” It is varied by the addition of particles, &c.,n,in,ḫr,tw, thus:—
śḏm-f, “he hears”;śḏm-w-f, “he is heard” (pl. śḏm-ii-śn, “they are heard”);śḏm-tw-f, “he is heard”;śḏm-n-f, “he heard”;śḏm-n-tw-f, “he was heard”; also,śḏm-in-f,śḏm-ḫr-f,śḏm-k’-f. Each form has special uses, generally difficult to define,śdm-fseems rather to be imperfect,śḏm-n-fperfect, and generally to express the past. Later,śḏm-fis ordinarily expressed by periphrases; but by the loss ofn,śḏm-n-fbecame itselfsdm-f, which is the ordinary past in demotic. Coptic preservesśḏm-fforms of many verbs in its causative (e.g.“cause him to live,” from Egyptiandi·t·nḫ-f), and, in its periphrastic conjugation, the same forms ofwn, “be,” andiry, “do.” Withśḏm-f(śeḏmo-f) was a more emphatic form (eśḏomef), at any rate in the weak verbs.
The above, with the relative forms mentioned below, are supposed by Erman to be derived from the participle, which is placed first for emphasis: thus,śḏm·w śtn, “hearing is the king”;śḏm-f, forśḏm-fy, “hearing he is.” This Egyptian paraphrase of Semitic is just like the Irish paraphrase of English, “It is hearing he is.”
Theimperativeshows no ending in the singular; in the plural it hasy, and laterw; cf. Semitic imperative.
Theinfinitiveis of special importance on account of its being preserved very fully in Coptic. It is generally of masculine form, but feminine iniii. inf. (as in Semitic), and in causatives of biliterals.
There are relative forms ofśḏm-fandśḏm-n-f, respectivelyśḏm·w-f(masc.),śḏm·t-n-f(fem.), &c. They are used when the relative is the object of the relative sentence, or has any other position than the subject. Thusśḏm·t-fmay mean “she whom he hears,” “she who[se praises] he hears,” “she [to] whom he hears [someone speaking],” &c. There are close analogies between the function of the relative particles in Egyptian and Semitic; and the Berber languages possess a relative form of the verb.
Participles.—These are active and passive, perfect and imperfect, in the old language, but all are replaced by periphrases in Coptic.
Verbal Adjectives.—There is a peculiar formation,śḏm·ty-fy, “he who shall hear,” probably meaning originally “he is a hearer,”śḏm·tybeing an adjective inyformed from a feminine (t) form of the infinitive, which is occasionally found even in triliteral verbs; the endings are: sing., masc.ty-fy, fem.ty-śy; pl., masc.ty-śn, fem.ty-śt. It is found only in Old Egyptian.
Particles.—There seems to be no special formation for adverbs, and little use is made of adverbial expressions. Prepositions, simple and compound, are numerous. Some of the commonest simple prepositions aren“for,”r“to,”m“in, from,”ḥr“upon.” A few enclitic conjunctions exist, but they are indefinite in meaning—śwta vague “but,”grta vague “moreover,” &c.
Coptic presents a remarkable contrast to Egyptian in the precision of its periphrastic conjugation. There are two present tenses, an imperfect, two perfects, a pluperfect, a present and a past frequentative, and three futures besides future perfect; there are also conjunctive and optative forms. The negatives of some of these are expressed by special prefixes. The gradual growth of these new forms can be traced through all the stages of Egyptian. Throughout the history of the language we note an increasing tendency to periphrasis; but there was no great advance towardsprecisionbefore demotic. In demotic there are distinguishable a present tense, imperfect, perfect, frequentative, future, future perfect, conjunctive and optative; also present, past and future negatives, &c. The passive was extinct before demotic; demotic and Coptic express it, clumsily it must be confessed, by an impersonal “they,”e.g.“they bore him” stands for “he was born.”
It is worth noting how, in other departments besides the verb, the Egyptian language was far better adapted to practical ends during and after the period of the Deltaic dynasties (XXII.-XXX.) than ever it was before. It was both simplified and enriched. The inflexions rapidly disappeared and little was left of the distinctions between masculine and feminine, singular, dual and plural—except in the pronouns. The dual number had been given up entirely at an earlier date. The pronouns, both personal and demonstrative, retained their forms very fully. As prefixes, suffixes and articles, they, together with some auxiliary verbs, provided the principal mechanism of the renovated language. An abundant supply of useful adverbs was gradually accumulated, as well as conjunctions, so far as the functions of the latter were not already performed by the verbal prefixes. These great improvements in the language correspond to great changes in the economic condition of the country; they were the result of active trade and constant intercourse of all classes of Egyptians with foreigners from Europe and Asia. Probably the best stage of Egyptian speech was that which immediately preceded Coptic. Though Coptic is here and there more exactly expressive than the best demotic, it was spoilt by too much Greek, duplicating and too often expelling native expressions that were already adequate for its very simple requirements. Above all, it is clumsily pleonastic.
The Writing
The ancient Egyptian system of writing, so far as we know, originated, developed and finally expired strictly within the limits of the Nile Valley. The germ of its existence may have come from without, but, as we know it, it is essentially Egyptian and intended for the expression of the Egyptian language. About the 1st centuryb.c., however, the semi-barbarous rulers of the Ethiopian kingdoms of Meroe and Napata contrived the “Meroitic” alphabet, founded on Egyptian writing, and comprising both a hieroglyphic and a cursive form (seeEthiopia). As yet both of these kinds of Nubian writing are undeciphered. Egyptian hieroglyphic was carried by conquest into Syria, certainly under the XVIIIth Dynasty, and again under the XXVIth for the engraving of Egyptian inscriptions; but in the earlier period the cuneiform syllabary, and in the later the “Phoenician” alphabet, had obtained a firm hold there, and we may be sure that no attempt was made to substitute the Egyptian system for the latter. Cuneiform tablets in Syria, however, seem almost confined to the period of the XVIIIth Dynasty. Although it cannot be proved it seems quite possible that the traders of Phoenicia and the Aegean adopted the papyrus and Egyptian hieratic writing together, before the end of the New Kingdom, and developed their “Phoenician” alphabet from the latter about 1000b.c.In very early times a number of systems of writing alreadyreigned in different countries forming a compact and not very large area—perhaps from South Arabia to Asia Minor, and from Persia to Crete and Egypt. Whether they all sprang from one common stock of picture-writing we shall perhaps never know, nor can we as yet trace the influence which one great system may have had on another, owing to the poverty of documents from most of the countries concerned.
It is certain that in Egypt from the IVth Dynasty onwards the mode of writing was essentially the same as that which was extinguished by the fall of paganism in the 4th centurya.d.Its elements in the hieroglyphic form are pictorial, but each hieroglyph had one or more well-defined functions, fixed by convention in such a manner that the Egyptian language was expressed in writing word by word. Although a picture sign may at times have embarrassed the skilled native reader by offering a choice of fixed values or functions, it was never intended to convey merely an idea, so as to leave to him the task of putting the idea into his own words. How far this holds good for the period before the IVth Dynasty it is difficult to say. The known inscriptions of the earlier times are so brief and so limited in range that the system on which they were written cannot yet be fully investigated. As far back as the Ist Dynasty, phonograms (see below) were in full use. But the spelling then was very concise: it is possible that some of the slighter words, such as prepositions, were omitted in the writing, and were intended to be supplied from the context. As a whole, we gain the impression that a really distinct and more primitive stage of hieroglyphic writing by a substantially vaguer notation of words lay not far behind the time of the Ist Dynasty.
The employment of the signs are of three kinds: any given sign represents either (1) a whole word or root; or (2) a sound as part of a word; or (3) pictorially defines the meaning of a word the sound of which has already been given by a sign or group of signs preceding. The number of phonograms is very restricted, but some signs have all these powers. For instance,is the conventional picture of a draughtboard (shown in plan) with the draughtsmen (shown in elevation) on its edge:—this sign (1) signifies the rootmn, “set,” “firm”; or (2) in the group, represents the same sound as part of the rootmnḫ, “good”; or (3) added to the groupsnt(thus:), shows that the meaning intended is “draught-board,” or “draughts,” and not any of the other meanings ofsnt. Thus signs, according to their employment, are said to be (1) “word-signs,” (2) “phonograms,” or (3) “determinatives.”
Word-signs.—The word-sign value of a sign is, in the first place, the name of the object it represents, or of some material, or quality, or action, or idea suggested by it. Thusisḥr, “face”;, a vase of ointment, ismrḥ.t, “ointment”;iswdb, “turn.” Much investigation is still required to establish the origins of the values of the signs; in some cases the connexion between the pictures and theprimaryvalues seems to be curiously remote. Probably all the signs in the hieroglyphic signary can be employed in their primary sense. Thesecondaryvalue expresses the consonantal root of the name or other primary value, and any, or almost any, derivative from that root: as when, a mat with a cake upon it, is not onlyḥtp, an “offering-mat,” but alsoḥtpin the sense of “conciliation,” “peace,” “rest,” “setting” (of the sun), with many derivatives. In the third place, some signs may betransferredto express another root having the same consonants as the first: thus, the ear, by a play upon words can express not onlyśḏm, “hear,” but alsośdm, “paint the eyes.”
Phonograms.—Only a limited number of signs are found with this use, but they are of the greatest importance. By searching throughout the whole mass of normal inscriptions, earlier than the periods of Greek and Roman rule when great liberties were taken with the writing, probably no more than one hundred different phonograms can be found. The number of those commonly employed in good writing is between seventy and eighty. The most important phonograms are theuniliteraloralphabeticsigns, twenty-four in number in the Old Kingdom and without any homophones: later these were increased by homophones to thirty. Ofbiliteralphonograms—each expressing a combination of two consonants—there were about fifty commonly used: some fifteen or twenty were rarely used. As Egyptian roots seldom exceeded three letters, there was no need fortriliteralphonograms to spell them. There is, however, one triliteral phonogram, the eagle,,tyw, ortiu(?), used for the plural ending of adjectives inyformed from words ending int(whether radical or the feminine ending).
The phonetic values of the signs are derived from their word-sign values and consist usually of the bare root, though there are rare examples of the retention of a flexional ending; they often ignore also the weaker consonants of the root, and on the same principle reduce a repeated consonant to a single one, as when the hoe,ḥnn, has the phonetic valueḥn. The history of some of the alphabetic signs is still very obscure, but a sufficient number of them have been explained to make it nearly certain that the values of all were obtained on the same principles.15Some of the ancient words from which the phonetic values were derived probably fell very early into disuse, and may never be discoverable in the texts that have come down to us. The following are among those most easily explained:—
(It seems as if the two valuesyand א were obtained by choosing first one and then the other of the two semi-consonants composing the name. They are much confused, and a conventional symbollhas to be adopted for rendering.)
For some alphabetic signs more than one likely origin might be found, while for others, again, no clear evidence of origin is yet forthcoming.
It has already been explained that the writing expresses only consonants. In the Graeco-Roman period various imperfect attempts were made to render the vowels in foreign names and words by the semi-vowels as also by, the consonant ע whichoriginally represented having been reduced in speech by that time to the power of א, only. Thus,Πτολεμαιοςis speltPtwrmys, Antoninus,’Nt’nynwsorIntnyns, &c. &c. Much earlier, throughout the New Kingdom, a special “syllabic” orthography, in which the alphabetic signs for the consonants are generally replaced by groups or single signs having the value of a consonant followed by a semi-vowel, was used for foreign names and words,e.g.
According to W. Max Müller (Asien und Europa, 1893, chap, v.), this represents an endeavour to express the vocalization; but, if so, it was carried out with very little system. In practice, the semi-vowels are generally negligible. This method of writing can be traced back into the Middle Kingdom, if not beyond, and it greatly affected the spelling of native words in New Egyptian and demotic.
Determinatives.—Most signs can on occasion be used as determinatives, but those that are very commonly employed as phonograms or as secondary word-signs are seldom employed as determinatives; and when they are so used they are often somewhat differentiated. Certain generic determinatives are very common,e.g.:—
In the earliest inscriptions the use of determinatives is restricted to the, &c., after proper names, but it developed immensely later, so that few words beyond the particles were written without them in the normal style after the Old Kingdom.
Some few signs ideographic of a group of ideas are made to express particular words belonging to that group by the aid of phonograms which point out the special meaning. In such cases the ideogram is not merely a determinative nor yet quite a word-sign. Thus“Semite,”“Libyan,” &c., butcannot stand by itself for the name of any particular foreign people. So also in monogramisšm“go,”is “conduct.”
Orthography.—The most primitive form of spelling in the hieroglyphic system would be by one sign for each word, and the monuments of the Ist Dynasty show a decided tendency to this mode. Examples of it in later times are preserved in the royal cartouches, for here the monumental style demanded special consciseness. Thus, for instance, the name of Tethmosis III.—MN-ḪPR-R’—is spelled(as R’ is the name of the sun-god, with customary deference to the deity it is written first though pronounced last). A number of common words—prepositions, &c.—with only one consonant are spelled by single alphabetic signs in ordinary writing. Word-signs used singly for the names of objects are generally marked with | in classical writing, as,ib, “heart,”,ḥr, “face,” &c.
But the use of bare word-signs is not common. Flexional consonants are almost always marked by phonograms, except in very early times; as when the feminine word=z.t, “cobra,” is spelled. Also, if a sign had more than one value, a phonogram would be added to indicate which of its values was intended: thusinisśw, “he,” but init isśtn, “king.” Further, owing to the vast number of signs employed, to prevent confusion of one with another in rapid writing they were generally provided with “phonetic complements,” a group being less easily misread than a single letter.E.g.,wz, “command,” is regularly written,wz(w); but,ḥz, “white,” is written,ḥz(z). This practice had the advantage also of distinguishing determinatives from phonograms. Thus the root or syllableḥnis regularly writtento avoid confusion with the determinative. Redundance in writing is the rule; for instance,bis often spelled(b)b’(’). Biliteral phonograms are very rare as phonetic complements, nor are two biliteral phonograms employed together in writing the radicals of a word.
Spelling of words purely in phonetic or even alphabetic characters is not uncommon, the determinative being generally added. Thus in the pyramidal texts we findḫpr, “become,” writtenin one copy of a text, in another. Such variant spellings are very important for fixing the readings of word-signs. It is noteworthy that though words were so freely spelled in alphabetic characters, especially in the time of the Old Kingdom, no advance was ever made towards excluding the cumbersome word-signs and biliteral phonograms, which, by a judicious use of determinatives, might well have been rendered quite superfluous.
Abbreviations.—We find, strictly’nḫ z’śstanding for the ceremonialviva! ’nḫ wz, śnb. “Life, Prosperity and Health,” and in course of timewas used in accounts instead ofdmz, “total.”
Monogramsare frequent and are found from the earliest times. Thus,mentioned above are monograms, the association ofandhaving no pictorial meaning. Another common monogram is,i.e.andforḤ·t-Ḥrw“Hathor.” A word-sign may be compounded with its phonetic complement, asḥz“white,” or with its determinative, asḥz“silver.”
The table on the opposite page shows the uses of a few of the commoner signs.
The decorative value of hieroglyphic was fully appreciated in Egypt. The aim of the artist-scribe was to arrange his variously shaped characters into square groups, and this could be done in great measure by taking advantage of the different ways in which many words could be spelt. Thusḥscould be written,ḥsy,ḥs-f,ḥs-n-f. But some words in the classical writing were intractable from this point of view. It is obvious that the alphabetic signs played a very important part in the formation of the groups, and many words could only be written in alphabetic signs. A great advance was therefore made when several homophones were introduced into the alphabet in the Middle and New Kingdoms, partly as the result of the wearing away of old phonetic distinctions, giving the choice betweenandandandandand. In later times the number of homophones in use increased greatly throughout the different classes, the tendency being much helped by the habit of fanciful writing; but few of these homophones found their way into the cursive script. Occasionally a scribe of the old times indulged his fancy in “sportive” or “mysterious” writing, either inventing new signs or employing old ones in unusual meanings. Short sportive inscriptions are found in tombs of the XIIth Dynasty; some groups are so written cursively in early medical papyri, and certain religious inscriptions in the royal tombs of the XIXth and XXth Dynasties are in secret writing. Fanciful writing abounds on the temples of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods.
Palaeography
HRGic.—The main division is into monumental or epigraphic hieroglyphs and written hieroglyphs. The former may be rendered by the sculptor or the painter in stone, on wood, &c., with great delicacy of detail, or may be simply sunk or painted in outline. When finely rendered they are of great value to the student investigating the origins of their values. No other system of writing bears upon its face so clearly the history of its development as the Egyptian; yet even in this a vast amount of work is still required to detect and disentangle the details. Monumental hieroglyphic did not cease till the 3rd centurya.d.(Temple of Esna). The written hieroglyphs, formed by the scribe with the reed pen on papyrus, leather, wooden tablets, &c., have their outlines more or less abbreviated, producing eventually the cursive scripts hieratic and demotic. The written hieroglyphs were employed at all periods, especially for religious texts.
Hieratic.—A kind of cursive hieroglyphic or hieratic writing is found even in the Ist Dynasty. In the Middle Kingdom it is wellcharacterized, and in its most cursive form seems hardly to retain any definable trace of the original hieroglyphic pictures. The style varies much at different periods.
Demotic.—Widely varying degrees of cursiveness are at all periods observable in hieratic; but, about the XXVIth Dynasty, which inaugurated a great commercial era, there was something like a definite parting between the uncial hieratic and the most cursive form afterwards known as demotic. The employment of hieratic was thenceforth almost confined to the copying of religious and other traditional texts on papyrus, while demotic was used not only for all business but also for writing literary and even religious texts in the popular language. By the time of the XXVth Dynasty the cursive of the conservative Thebais had become very obscure. A better form from Lower Egypt drove this out completely in the time of Amasis II. and is the true demotic. Before the Macedonian conquest the cursive ligatures of the old demotic gave birth to new symbols which were carefully and distinctly formed, and a little later an epigraphic variety was engraved on stone, as in the case of the Rosetta stone itself. One of the most characteristic distinctions of later demotic is the minuteness of the writing.
HRGic is normally written from right to left, the signs facing to the commencement of the line; hieratic and demotic follow the same direction. But monumental hieroglyphic may also be written from left to right, and is constantly so arranged for purposes of symmetry,e.g.the inscriptions on the two jambs of a door are frequently turned in opposite directions; the same is frequently done with the short inscriptions scattered over a scene amongst the figures, in order to distinguish one label from another.
In modern founts of type, the hieroglyphic signs are made to run from left to right, in order to facilitate the setting where European text is mixed with the Egyptian. The table on next page shows them in their more correct position, in order to display more clearly their relation to the hieratic and demotic equivalents.
Clement of Alexandria states that in the Egyptian schools the pupils were first taught the “epistolographic” style of writing (i.e.demotic), secondly the “hieratic” employed by the sacred scribes, and finally the “hieroglyphic” (Strom.v. 657). It is doubtful whether they classified the signs of the huge hieroglyphic syllabary with any strictness. The only native work on the writing that has come to light as yet is a fragmentary papyrus of Roman date which has a table in parallel columns of hieroglyphic signs, with their hieratic equivalents and words written in hieratic describing them or giving their values or meanings. The list appears to have comprised about 460 signs, including most of those that occur commonly in hieratic. They are to some extent classified. The beeheads the list as a royal sign, and is followed by figures of nobles and other human figures in various attitudes, more or less grouped among themselves, animals, reptiles and fishes, scorpion, animals again, twenty-four alphabetic characters, parts of the human body carefully arranged fromto, thirty-two in number, parts of animals, celestial signs, terrestrial signs, vases. The arrangement down to this point is far from strict, and beyond it is almost impossible to describe concisely, though there is still a rough grouping of characters according to resemblance of form, nature or meaning. It is a curious fact that not a single bird is visible on the fragments, and the trees and plants, which might easily have been collected in a compact and well-defined section, are widely scattered. Why the alphabetic characters are introduced where they are is a puzzle; the order of these is:—
Three others,and, had already occurred amongst the fish and reptiles. There seems to be no logical aim in this arrangement of the alphabetic characters and the series is incomplete. Very probably the Egyptians never constructed a really systematic list of hieroglyphs. In modern lists the signs are classified according to the nature of the objects they depict, as human figures, plants, vessels, instruments, &c. Horapollon’sHieroglyphicamay be cited as a native work, but its author, if really an Egyptian, had no knowledge of good writing. His production consists of two elaborate complementary lists: the one describing sign-pictures and giving their meanings, the other cataloguing ideas in order to show how they could be expressed in hieroglyphic. Each seems to us to be made up of curious but perverted reminiscences eked out by invention; but they might some day prove to represent more truly the usages of mystics and magicians in designing amulets, &c., at a time approaching the middle ages.