HIEROGLYPHICS. Hieroglyphics (usa cred carvingsb) is the term which the Greeks applied to the monumental writing of the an cient Egyptians. It fairly interprets the Egyp tian mdw-ntr, °speech of the god,° though with a different connotation; for to the Egyptian of about 3500 a.c., the date of the earliest surviving hieroglyphs, written speech presumably was so marvelous that it seemed necessarily of divine origin, while the Greek who compounded our term 3,000 years later was distinguishing rather between the form of writing which he saw carved on tomb and temple walls and the forms then in use for pen-and-ink documents. The inscriptions nscriptions of that later age were, as we shall see, an artificial product, a sealed book not only to the Greek but to his Egyptian contemporary; and this thought of mystery survives in our common use of the word °hiero glyphs° for any (to us) unintelligible signs. In the field of science the term has been extended beyond the Egyptian which we shall consider here to other systems of picture-writing such as the Hittite in ancient Asia Minor and the Mayan of Yucatan.
Nature.— Marks of ownership, messages, memoranda of taxes, accounts and notable per sonal achievements — all these call for a means of record. So identification marks are scratched on pottery jars, and royal votive offerings of carved stone commemorate their donor's conquests. For such purposes the Egyp tian drew upon his environment. Men and women in various expressive attitudes, parts of the body, creatures of the animal world, objects of earth and sky, clothing, tools and weapons are among the fundamentals which could be directly illustrated. In Fig. 1 (from a votive slate palette of 3400 a.c. or earlier) the king, represented by his symbol the falcon, holds in one claw a rope passed through the nose of a human head. The latter grows out of the long, narrow sign which to the native of the long, narrow Nile Valley represented From the (cland°-sign sprout six lotus leaves, such as occurred by thousands in the Delta marshes. The composite, thus resolved, indicates that the king has carried off from a hostile land 6,000 human captives. Such symbol
ism is, of course, not true writing; it is merely the expression of an idea, which different readers might phrase differently. But below the gland°-sign appears a harpoon, followed by a rectangle crossed with wavy lines. The name of the foreign land, then, is similar to the Egyptian name of this harpoon, wa (really ttl( ; see below) ; and the framed uwaterp-lines indi cate that it is a lake region. The use of a picture of one object to stand for another con cept of similar sound, as the harpoon here represents this geographic name, means that the picture in question has become so associated with one particular word expressive of its idea, that the sound of that word has finally attached itself to the picture. The latter thus acquires *honetic value. The taking of this step made it possible to write abstract terms as well as the concrete ones which alone could be directly pictured. Word-signs in transferred as well as original meanings resulted, and some pic tures attained a wider phonetic usefulness as elements in the writing of longer words.' The final step soon followed: illustrations of certa'n objects whose names contained only one promi nent consonant came to stand regularly for single letters, forming the world's earliest alpha bet. In contrast with•the phonetic signs (word-, consonant group and alphabetic) as a whole are the signs which are not to be read but serve simply as guides to the sense. Of these so called determinative: the °lake° above may be an example.
When we recall the strangeness of Chaucer to modern ears and how we treat Anglo-Saxon as a distinct tongue, it is but natural to assume that the hieroglyphs whose origin has just been traced really represent a whole series of suc cessive languages. This is, in fact, true. The most important historical periods in Egypt, with their linguistic characteristics, are: A. Old Kingdom (Dynasties about 3000-2500 !cc.). Earlier labels on boxes, jars or grave markers are now followed by nobles' tomb-inscriptions displaying the same brevity of writing. From royal burials come the most important of all early records, the Pyramid Texts (see below).