Use.—By the I. Dynasty (about 3400 a.c.) the Egyptian had learned to paint or incise his hieroglyphs on stone and pottery, wood and ivory, and moreover to carve them in relief (see Fig. 1). But the most representative of all Egyptian methods of writing —in common use already by the Old Kingdom — was made pos sible by the papyrus plant, whose tall stalks flourished in all the swamps and pools. The long strips into which sections of the stalk could be cut lengthwise were glued together side by side and crossed at right ankles by another similar layer. When pressed, dried and scraped, a flexible sheet of vegetable fibre, the direct ancestor of our modern paper, was pro duced. On such papyrus sheets or rolls (for the sheets were usually glued together into strips of the desired length) the Egyptian scribe wrote rapidly with pen and ink as do Nye, his cultural descendants. But a modern split pen point would have been ill suited to the soft, unglazed surface of his papyrus; so the Egyp tian softened the end of his reed pen, probably by chewing it, until it formed a sort of tuft with which he practically painted his characters. His black ink was of soot suspended in a solu tion of gum and water; his palette always car ried red ink also, similarly made with iron oxide, and regularly used for headings and catch-words. This custom, passing into Euro pean manuscripts, survives to-day in printed rubrics. The papyrus was ordinarily held in the unsupported left hand, except when the roll was extremely long and heavy, in which case the scribe might squat and spread it across his knees; the pen met it at a right or slightly acute angle. As the writing-surface was un rolled from the left so as to come under the pen held in the right hand, the lines and col umns naturally progressed from right to left, reversing our own method. This same Egyp tian technique spread into Asia soon after 1100 a.c., almost contemporary with the appearance of the Phoenician alphabet, from which the Greek, Latin and our modern Western alpha bets are descended. Now the Phoenician differs from other Hither Asiatic writing, but agrees with the Egyptian, in technique, in direction of writing, in its lack of vowels and fundamen tally in the very principle of alphabetic instead of syllabic signs. So it is quite probable that the letters with which this article is printed are the remote offspring of the hieroglyphs with which it deals.
That the hieroglyphs proper, especially as used on tomb or temple wall, were intended as much to decorate as to inform is evident from the calligraphic grouping of signs as far as pos sible into squares and from the balancing of inscriptions as well as of scenes. For this pur pose the normal order of writing, hi which the signs face toward the right, the beginning of the line, is often reversed in one-half of a design. Each of the two units usually then faces toward the centre, reading from there outward. The decorative motive is emphasized in addition by pictorial details common ih both cutting and painting of individual signs, and by the calmness with which scribe as well as stone-cutter can overlook errors in the text which may entirely obscure its sense for modern readers and must often have done so for the ancient. Papyrus documents, on the other hand, needed only to be useful. Thanks to the unusual dryness of the Egyptian climate, vast quantities of these elsewhere perishable records have survived. They include letters, reports of court proceedings, volumes of charms for the benefit of the dead and other volumes of romance to entertain the living. In drawing on papyrus the brush-pen naturally gave to the hieroglyphs a bolder, more cursive form. The resulting hieratic system of writing paral lels the hieroglyphic for almost 3,000 years, being related to the latter much as modern handwriting is to print. The hieratic of the Old Kingdom was in vertical lines only, like the Chinese. During the Middle Kingdom horizontal lines appear and soon completely displace the vertical. Both styles are found together in Fig. 2, a bit of our earliest historical novel, the tale of Sintthe (see below). Of the hieratic forms, though they change from age to age, two general types are distinguish able: the uniform Took-hand" with its signs mostly standing out individually as here illus trated, and the hurried business hand of the clerk or court reporter who often links signs to gether by the continuous sweep of his pen. By
inevitable reaction many single signs or ligatured groups which had diverged widely from their originals were ultimately adopted as new characters into the hieroglyphic, while modified and disguised forms of others totally displaced their unequivocal originals. The process in Egypt was akin to that in early Babylonia, where, however, the rendering of signs by impressed wedges (cuneiform writing) in successive modifications not only effectively obscured the whole body of original pictures but entirely did away with the parent system. By 500 'lc. a new and more compressed busi ness hand, the demotic, which had so lost all resemblance to the original hieroglyphs that whole associated groups of characters were fused into single signs, had developed in Egypt. The hieratic thereupon gained a sanctity which had previously accrued to the no longer under stood hieroglyphs. The Greek names hieratic and demotic («common, popular))) applied to the two cursive systems refer, of course, like the term hieroglyphic itself (see above), to this late situation. As the papyrus plant was useful in so many ways that it could ill be spared to make scratch paper, memoranda and even actual letters and other documents were often scribbled on potsherds or flakes of limestone, which were abundantly available to everyone. These rough substitutes, inscribed in hieratic, demotic or Coptic, are called ostraka.
Decipherment—The basis of our knowl edge of ancient Egyptian dates back less than 100 years. Whatever the Greeks may once have known about the subject was lost, with one unfortunate exception: the highly fanciful treatise of a certain Horapollo survived to spread a mistaken notion that the hieroglyphs were mystic symbols which pure science must avoid. Yet before 1800 the Dane Zoega had recognized that frames ("cartouches') met with around certain groups of signs indicated kings' names, and had correctly distinguished some monuments as late by their style alone. Then in 1799 Napoleon's expedition to Egypt dis covered at Rosetta an inscription dated in 196 B.C., deifying King Ptolemy (V) Epiphanes for numerous benefits conferred upon the priest hood and ordering that this their resolution be displayed beside Ptolemy's statue in all the im portant temples in the sacred, the demotic, and the Greek characters." The "Rosetta Stone,* now in the British Museum, was evidently one of the stelae here called for; and its Greek text was expected to lead at once to decipher ment of its hieroglyphic and demotic versions. The one cartouche preserved in the fragmentary hieroglyphic portion must surely contain the name °Ptolemy," which the Swede Akerblad had in 1802 identified in the demotic. The English scientist Thomas Young proceeded to assign phonetic values to the characters in this name; but study of the text as a whole failed because belief in the symbolic nature of the signs (except as used in such foreign proper names) persisted. Meantime a gifted young Frenchman, Jean Francois Champolhon, born in 1790, had been devoting himself to Egyptian studies since the age of 12. He finally reached the correct conclusion that the hiero glyphs on the Rosetta Stone could not be word symbols, since they were about three times as numerous as the words of the Greek transla tion. A few months later, in 1822, he recog nized in some newly received copies of inscrip tions the Empire royal names Thutmose and Ramses and realized that the signs which he had previously discovered to be phonetic in all Ptolemaic and Roman names were also phonetic in the old language. Rapid progress on the basis of his previous researches could now fol low. Before his early death in 1832 Champol lion had made a journey through Egypt, and his published notes on the antiquities reveal how fully he had come to understand their language. But his grasp was intuitive rather than grammatical, and much scientific skep ticism persisted until his decipherment was fully confirmed by another bilingual inscription, the Decree of Canopus, found in 1866.