Writing: hieroglyphic or hieratic

Hieroglyphic writing consists of three types of sign: ideograms, phonograms, and determinatives.
We can classify each category of sign according to two axes: do they mean something?
Is a pronunciation (phoneme) included?

Example:

This word is composed of three signs meaning the castle.
The ideogram is ( ); it represents a building seen in outline with a tower. It thus has a meaning but at the same time demands a particular reading: Hw.t (which is pronounced hoot). It is thus not a pictogram that we can read how we want according to meaning: building, house, castle, etc. Its pronunciation is very precise.
The phonogram is the final t ( ), which is the final of the feminine. It signifies nothing else. We could thus bypass it but writing needs some redundancy to function better. This t is thus there to support the first sign.The determinative is the last sign ( ). It represents the outline of a house, a place with an entrance. It functions as a semantic classifier. Determinatives are always placed at the ends of words and indicate which notional category the word is linked to. All the words which are lined up, however closely or otherwise, in the general category of buildings or parts of buildings can receive this determinative. It is not read. It merely says that the word we are looking at belongs to the semantic category of buildings. Effectively, a castle is very much a building.

The three components are nevertheless not found in every word. There are words which are reduced to an ideogram or which are only composed of phonograms. On the other hand, a determinative never exists by itself. All the tool words - pronouns, determinants, etc. - are for example only written with phonograms.

During the Old Kingdom, the oldest period, around 1,100 signs were used. In the Middle Kingdom, the ‘classical’ period of literature and language, there were still less, around 800 to 850. During the Late Period (in other words the Greco-Roman era), in certain types of text, above all in inscriptions on the walls of temples, learned scribes invented new signs, using a method that in some small way brings to mind cabalistic or esoteric speculations. In this way the number of signs was multiplied by five or six. Depending on the temples, between 3,500 and 6,000 signs have been listed. But they consisted of a play on writing that only functioned in the world of learning.

Two types of writing were employed in parallel:

Hieroglyphic writing, whose functioning we described earlier, and which we find on the temple walls and in tombs. This is the writing everybody ‘knows’. It is a monumental form of writing which is engraved into stone, even if painted examples exist, notably within tombs. However, etymologically, ‘hieroglyph’ means: the engraving of sacred characters.

Next to that, and since the beginning, is hieratic writing, which is cursive and written with ink and brush. It is that which is found on papyrus. It is a simplified writing. We no longer have the possibility of knowing at once what a sign represents, as is the case for the hieroglyphs. It is in effect necessary to write rapidly. It gave birth, in the Late Period, to what is known as demotic writing, which is a still further simplification of hieratic writing.

Finally, one last element: the reading direction. To determine which is the right one ‘you have to go and meet the characters’. The direction can thus be reversed, within a line or within a column. There exist thus four possible reading directions. But the direction is always indicated by the orientation of the signs. For example the sign here dessin gives the direction: you always have to go and meet the characters.

The language: spoken or ritualised

The ancient Egyptian language has been attested to for around 3,000 years. Over this period it had obviously changed. We can distinguish two great phases:

Egyptian I which is divided into Old Egyptian and Middle Egyptian. The first corresponds to the Old Kingdom (2700-2190 BCE), in other words the period when the great pyramids were built; the second corresponds to the Middle Kingdom (2060-1785 BCE).

Egyptian II which is divided into Late Egyptian (which corresponds to the New Kingdom and the Third Intermediate Period, in other words from the 18th to the 25th dynasty, or around 1550 to 750 before the common era), demotic (Late Period and Greco-Roman times) and Coptic (3rd century AD).

But in effect two languages exist for each period: the spoken language and the ‘ritualised’ language. At the beginning the two coincided: Old Egyptian is the same whether spoken or ritualised. The two languages diverged from the Middle Egyptian period onwards: the ritualised language is now known as classical Egyptian. The difference between middle Egyptian and classical Egyptian is not great, it’s more a question of register, in much the same way that our spoken language is not the same as our written language. As for classical Egyptian, it gave birth to traditional Egyptian. This time, it’s no longer just a question of differences in register: traditional Egyptian is a different language than the spoken language, used everyday. It is reserved for the most ritualised texts, and thus to religious literature. It has a similar status to that of Latin in the post Roman empire period, a frozen or fixed language, reserved for some uses, for example in the church, or in certain institutions, such as the university. It is a language which is no longer understood by most people.

The Ramsès programme focuses on Late Egyptian, as recorded in texts in hieroglyphic or hieratic scripts, but only on ‘everyday’ language and not on ritualised language, the language of tradition.