Orality and written traces

The theological speculations of overzealous priests led to an impasse in this imaginative and perhaps illogical thinking. For the hieroglyphic system really was a transcription of the Egyptian language; it was a precise and rigorous means of communication. “In order for writing to be clear,” explains the Egyptologist, “and in order for it to be in daily use, whether for administrative purposes or for personal communication, everybody has to understand the same thing the same way. Egyptian writings that did not have a theological function were obviously not so full of allusions. The hieroglyphs themselves could communicate a precise message that had no relationship to the sacred. The more common systems of writing, like hieratic and demotic, used iconic codes, but more and more they depended on uniliteral signs (one sign, one letter) that were in the end fairly close to the letters of an alphabet. In everyday writing, we see very early on, stable words that have a clear meaning, a reduced number of signs and a standardized orthography”.

The realization that hieroglyphs constituted a writing system connected to Egyptian language and culture did not occur until the 18th century. At that time, the explanation in terms of symbolism was abandoned. Other systems of writing were discovered, and Egypt began to be revealed. Some in the 17^th century guessed that Coptic was the final state of the ancient Egyptian language. They were correct. An embryonic Egyptology began to take its first steps forward. The hypothesis that certain hieroglyphic signs might have a phonetic value was put forward timidly. And then, in the course of the expedition to Egypt led by Napoleon, the Rosetta Stone was discovered (thanks to some excavation work). The stone was the first trilingual inscription of an Egyptian text, written in demotic, in hieroglyphs, and in Greek. Very quickly, linguists figured out the meaning of the hieroglyphic signs for the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra through a process of comparison and deduction. But the researchers were soon blocked again. For what they had discovered in these names belonged to a phonetic writing that transcribed oral speech. Were the hieroglyphs an alphabet, then? This idea could not be maintained, because the system contained too many signs.

This was the situation when Champollion found the solution. In a letter written in 1822, he writes: “It is a complex language, a writing that is completely figurative, symbolic and phonetic, in one text, one phrase, I would almost say in one single word". The hieroglyphic system was a composite system of writing, and Champollion had just figured that out. First, he remarked that some signs had phonetic functions, while others had ideographic functions. He finished by concluding that several signs could form a single word, and that depending on its position, a single sign could be used in terms of its ideographic function (as a logogram) or in terms of its phonetic function (as a phonogram). It could even have a purely semantic function (as a classifier), if it was found at the end of a word.

A system bound up with its culture

Had they wanted to, the Egyptians could have used only one alphabet. From the very beginning (as this is known) of the hieroglyphic system (near the end of the fourth millennium before our era), they used a relatively restricted list of signs with phonetic value, and this list contained all the phonemes in their language. The signs, identifiable icons such as a house or an arm, became completely de-semanticized, and when they were combined, they could become words.

Today our alphabets appear to us to be a simple and rapid means of communication. The Egyptians retained a composite system for over 3000 years, including the hieroglyphic and hieratic systems as well as demotic. This is challenging for people from Western cultures to imagine, because those cultures developed under a completely different paradigm; but the Egyptologist is able to understand it. “This kind of complex system, which allows people to play with signs that represent something you recognize, is a dimension supplementary to strictly phonetic information. It is a richness that allows us to add another level to the transmission of a message". For example, today, writings in China and in Japan are comparable in a number of respects. At age 16, adolescents are still learning to write, because their system is so complicated. However, they would not want to trade it for a system that is simpler and that is strictly phonetic. When they learn to write, it is in fact their culture and their civilization that they are learning.