nar mr or nar mHr, is spelt with the logograms of the sheat-fish, nar, and the chisel, mr.The Egyptians themselves called hieroglyphic writing æI°î zXA n.j mdw.w nTr ‘writing of god's words’. The Greek hieroglyphiká grámmata, lit. ‘holy engraved signs’, is apparently an attempted calque on this expression. – Hieroglyphic writing was mainly used as a monumental script in stone inscriptions and public documents, but is also found on papyrus.
The page may be divided either in lines or in columns.
A character of the set is called a hieroglyph. There are almost 7000 hieroglyphs spread over the history. The authoritative list of those in use in Classical Egyptian, the Gardiner list, features 760 glyphs, including allographs. The inventory was not systematized by the Egyptians. The Gardiner list is ordered by sign shape first into semantic categories indicated by upper case letters, and inside each category by numbers. For instance, the first (pronounced) character of the specimen, ¾ sw, which represents the su-reed, is a member #23 of category M ‘Trees and other plants’, thus character M23.
There is no punctuation and no word spacing.
Although most characters are pictorial, they are no pictograms. Some of them, if used logographically (see below), do represent the object they depict. Most, however, are just beautifully formed letters, comparable to the chapter initials of medieval manuscripts.
A glyph may have any or all of the following functions:
In Classical Egyptian, there are (on the wikipedia.en pages) 26 uniliteral, 102 biliteral and 48 triliteral characters. From -2600 on, the uniliteral set is complete, i.e. Egyptian could have been written exclusively with these letters.
There are no signs to represent vowels. However, the characters representing semivowels and glottal/pharyngeal fricatives may in certain contexts have been used to represent the corresponding vowels. At any rate, they are often pronounced that way by Egyptologists.
Diachronically, determinatives have evolved from logograms, and phonograms have evolved from ideograms. Therefore many glyphs have more than one function. Moreover, many biliterals and most triliterals coincide with just one lexeme (which renders the distinction between a logogram and a triliteral problematic in several cases). The logographic reading is often forced by the ‘determinative stroke’, a small vertical stroke put beneath or beside the character in question and marking it as a logogram. Example: specimen text, col. 4, middle line.
To enhance redundancy and achieve unequivocality, words are often accompanied by either or both of the following devices:
Both devices accompany both logograms and pluriliteral phonograms.
The writing system is not standardized. It is not essentially determined by consistency in the mapping of linguistic units to graphic units, but by honorific and calligraphic considerations:
Cursive hieroglyphics form a simpler counterpart to hieroglyphic writing. They were used from the 11th through the 20th dynasty, mainly in religous texts written on papyrus, e.g. in Books of the Dead. Later, they were replaced by hieratic writing.
Egyptological transliteration was codified in the 19th cent., i.e. before the advent of IPA and phonological theory. Each uniliteral symbol is matched by a letter, and the same letters render bi- and triliteral characters. Determinatives and phonetic complements are not transcribed. Some morpheme boundaries are indicated:
Recent publications1 claim to have dated hieroglyphic texts to before
Writing came up at about the same time in Egypt, Sumer and Elam. Since these countries were in stable contact, it is very likely that its invention in one country inspired its introduction in the other countries. There is also some similarity in the semiotic makeup of the scripts, since they all contain logograms and determinatives. The form of the characters in hieroglyphic and in cuneiform writing is, however, entirely different. Any concrete influence and its direction therefore remain to be ascertained.
Hieroglyphic writing develops in the first dynasty in line with a similar fine arts style. Most characters are pictorial and represent objects of the Egypt environment and culture. Their classical form is standardized during the Middle Kingdom. Contrasting with cuneiform characters, hieroglyphs retain their pictographic shape throughout history.
Even the first attested stage is not purely logographic (let alone pictographic), but already logophonographic. By acrophony (the “rebus” principle), phonograms were derived from logograms. For instance, the logogram ¨ represents ra ‘mouth’; used as a phonogram, it represents the consonant /r/. Many such reinterpretations had already taken place at the beginning of written documentation. For instance, the name of the early pharao Narmer, nar mr or nar mHr, is spelt with the logograms of the sheat-fish, nar, and the chisel, mr.
The phonograms are not syllabograms, because they do not specify the vowels. Instead, the principle of acrophony is effective throughout the language history, so that the proportions among logograms, triliteral, biliteral and uniliteral phonograms shift gradually in favor of the latter.
During Hellenism, the glyph inventory was multiplied, but the system remained unchanged. The latest hieroglyphic texts known are from Philae (former Nile island) and dated to AD 394. From then on, nobody can read hieroglyphic texts any more.
For a certain time, the Egyptian hieroglyphs were also used in Nubia. For international correspondence, cuneiform writing was used.
A rather complete hieroglyphic TTF is found on http://amk.com/hiero.htm
1 a 1998 report on findings in the predynastic tomb of U-j at Abydos, dated to
Wikipedia.de s.v. Ägyptische Hieroglyphen