EGYPTIAN GRAMMAR AND WRITING AS A FORM OF PSYCHOTECHNOLOGY
Christopher James Diak
Professor Pieter Broucke Department of Historty of Art and Architecture
Professor Shalom Goldman Department of Religion
Middlebury College Middlebury, Vermont
HARC/RELI 241: Ancient Egypt: Art and Religion December 6, 2018
1
EGYPTIAN GRAMMAR AND WRITING
AS A FORM OF PSYCHOTECHNOLOGY
In 1799, the discovery of the Rosetta Stone catalyzed a transformation in European conceptions of Ancient Egypt.1 For centuries the Hebrew Bible was the only widely available source for Europeans to reflect on the culture and religion of the ancient civilization. After more than a millennium, through the efforts of scores of scholars including Johan David Akerblad, Thomas Young, and Jean-François
Champollion, Egyptian could be read with understanding.2 The black basalt of the Rosetta Stone was inscribed with “a decree by the priesthoods of Egypt in honor of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes (196 BC)” in three registers: one written in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the second in the cursive Demotic script, and the third in Greek. 3 The Greek script on the Rosetta Stone provided a cipher for the early translators who made understandably slow progress as it was unclear whether the Egyptian writing systems were alphabetic or nonalphabetic. In spite of Young’s discovery that Egyptian was written with “alphabetic and nonalphabetic signs alongside each other” Champollion is credited with having made the breakthroughs in his Précis du système hiéroglyphique ( 1824)4 which finally enabled understanding of the language and “in 1831 the first chair in Egyptian history and archaeology was created for him at the Collège de France.”5
Beginning with a short exposition of the the “affinities and characteristics” of Egyptian we will survey the development of the language from Old Egyptian to Coptic, before moving on to a discussion of the writing systems: hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic and coptic. We will also touch on pictograms, the principle of the rebus, and Walter Ong’s (1986) hypothesis that writing is a technology that restructures thought.
In his introduction to Egyptian Grammar, Sir Gardiner details six interrelated observations about Egyptian thought and language. From Gardiner’s perspective, “the most striking feature of Egyptian” is its emphasis on external objects and events, what Gardiner calls its “realism.”6 This idea is supported by
1 David, 241, 2003 2 Ibid.: 242 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid.: 243 5 Ibid.: 242 6 Gardiner, 4, 1957 2 his claims that Egyptian has 1) a “marked preference for static over dynamic expression,” 2) a “rich” vocabulary, 3) a “strict word-order probably due in part to the absence of case-endings in the nouns,” 4)
“a certain formality” which may derive from the character of the source materials available and 5) a
“concision” in expression, as “involved constructions and lengthy periods are rare.”7 The portrait these observations paint is of an austere mode of thought lost to the sands of time. Does an analysis of the morphology of the language support this characterization?
The Egyptian language was a member of the Hamito-Semitic (Afroasiatic) language family and had notable “affinities with Hamitic languages such as Beja, Berber, and Oromo”8 as well as East African languages such as “Galla and Somali.”9 Gardiner and Allen identify consonantal root structures, the stems of words which are composed of consonants, “as a rule three in number, which are theoretically at least unchangeable,”10 and a series of phonological parallelisms between Egyptian roots and suffixes and the
Hamitic and Semitic languages as evidence for placing Egyptian on this branch of the language tree. It should be noted however that “these pecularities identify Egyptian as a distinct branch within the
Hamito-Semitic language family, with no close relatives of its own.”11 Some notable non-Semitic features include lexical cognates (e.g. Egyptian fdw “four” as a cognate for Bejan “fadhig”)12 and a curious formal semantic feature of the language: reduplication.
Whereas, Gardiner writes, “grammatical inflexion and minor variations of meaning are contrived mainly by ringing the changes on the internal vowels” and through the use of affixes, “more important differences of meaning are created by reduplication, whole or partial” of a lexical root.13 He uses the example of “śn” which means “brother” and “śnśn” which means to “be brotherly towards” to demonstrate this feature.14 How this particular semantic feature affects the conception of relation and the “static” “concise” and “realist” elements of Egyptian language and thought seems an open and interesting
7 Ibid. 8 Allen, 1, 2013 9 Gardiner, 2, 1957 10 Ibid. 11 Allen, 1, 2013 12 Ibid. 13 Gardiner, 2, 1957 14 Ibid. 3 question -- not in the sense of a form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,15 but rather, as a linguistic codification of cultural and religious ideas about the nature of reality, such as we find in the common
English expression among children, “How was I made?” which reflects a linguistic codification, in the estimation of Alan Watts, of Biblical creation mythology.16 Other syntactical features which help to place Egyptian in the taxonomy of Hamito-Semitic languages are the formation of the verb, where “no traces of the old Semitic imperfect has survived” and for the construction of nouns “the case-endings of early
Semitic had already vanished” by the earliest Old Egyptian sentences which have been reconstructed.17 In
Old Egyptian, “the entire vocalic system,” Gardiner contends, converged with the morphology of Hebrew and modern Arabic in prehistory and “the free and open vocalization of earlier times… has given place under the influence of a strong tonic accent to a system in which all the secondary syllables are shortened down and subordinated to the one accented vowel in the penultimate syllable.”18 Thus what may have
e e 19 been pronounced in prehistory as “natārata ‘goddess’ has in historic Egyptian become n târ t.” The Egyptian inscribed in the Rosetta Stone in 196 BC was not the Egyptian of Ramses the Great, much less Khafre or Narmer. The Egyptian language--like all languages--developed by accretion and in relation to changing social, cultural, and religious vocabularies. By scholarly convention the development of rhw Egyptian language is segmented into five discrete stages: Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, Late
Egyptian, Demotic and Coptic.20 21 Old Egyptian has two distinct subphases: early and late. The early Old
Egyptian, as found in the Pyramid Texts, dates from 3180 BCE and has a distinct orthographic expression which may be due to the fact of the “surviving documents of this stage are mainly official or otherwise formal.”22 Late Old Egyptian is distinguished from Early Old Egyptian by virtue of the “‘pseudo-verbal’ constructions subject-ḥr-stp a nd subject-r-stp.”23 Middle Egyptian largely conserved the form of Old Egyptian and was “possibly the vernacular of Dynasties IX - XI” although a distinction is made between
15 Hussein, 642, 2012 16 Watts, 4:00-5:30, 1960: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nULGU9bHuJ8 17 Ibid.: 3 18 Gardiner, 3, 1957 19 Ibid. 20 Gardiner, 5, 1957 21 Allen, 2, 2013 22 Gardiner, 5, 1957 23 Allen, 3, 2013 4 the religious language which was closer to Old Egyptian and the vernacular which was “later contaminated with new popular elements.”24 Late Egyptian emerged roughly contemporaneously with the
New Kingdom in the eighteenth dynasty and flourished until the twenty-fourth dynasty, surviving examples of which include “business documents and letters” as well as “stories and other literary compositions” and “official monuments from Dynasty XIX onwards.”25 Dynasty XXV witnessed the birth of the Demotic script and the term “Demotic” is “loosely applied to the language used in the books and documents” written in that script.26 Demotic was used from around 715 BCE to 470 CE.27 Coptic, the final stage of Egyptian language, was named after the Copts who used it as a liturgical language from the third century CE until it “became extinct as a spoken tongue in the sixteenth century.”28 Neverthless, it was still read in churches, “though not understood” even at the time of Gardiner’s writing in 1957. The demotic script, along with hieratic and hieroglyphic, were the “three kinds of script which in course of time were evolved in Ancient Egypt.”29 Demotic and hieratic were cursive forms of the earlier hieroglyphs “to provide increased speed in writing, particularly for business and literary texts.”30 Before the advent of these scripts, hieroglyphs were a form of pictorial writing used “for ‘sacred’ (Greek hīeros)” writings “on stelae of stone” and consisted of ideograms or sense-signs which “signify either the actual object depicted… or else some closely connected notion” and phonograms or sound-signs which “represent the individual sounds which make up the words in a language” and enable a listener to “spell” a word.31
Phonograms were a form of psychotechnology that couldn’t have been invented without the discovery of the rebus principle, the idea pictograms could be used “not to denote those things themelves or any cognate notions, but to indicate certain other entirely different things not easily susceptible of
24 Gardiner, 5, 1957 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 9 30 David, 238, 2003 31 Ibid. 5 pictorial representation, the names of which chanced to have a similar sound.”32 Regularities in phonology, after the discovery of the rebus principle, led to regularities in written representation.
To answer the question we began with, whether Egyptian language and thought had the properties
Gardiner attributed to it, studies of the hieroglyphic system which emerged from the convergence of phonological features and visual representations could be analyzed along the line of thought Walter Ong,
SJ, posits in Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought. With the emergence of writing, Ong argues, “the critical and unique breakthrough into new kinds of noetic operations and new worlds of knowledge was achieved within human consciousness.”33 Given their constructed natures he posits that
“all writing systems do not have the same psychic or even neurophysiological structures or effects.”34
David notes “the ancient Egyptians never developed a truly alphabetic system in which each symbol, sign, or letter represented a simple sound in the language.”35 Holding this fact in tension with
Ong’s argument that “no other writing system restructures the human lifeworld so drastically as alphabetic writing. Or so democratically, for the alphabet is relatively easy to learn,”36 we may be led to conclude that the austerity of Egyptian writing, art, and religion could be evidence of a form of consciousness inaccessible through modern “alphabetized” consciousness. “The fact that we do not commonly feel the influence of [alphabetic] writing on our thoughts shows that we have interiorized the technology of writing so deeply that without tremendous effort we cannot separate it from ourselves or even recognize its presence and influence.”37 It may therefore be impossible to know whether Egyptian language and patterns of thought shaped the writing system, but further studies which pursue the relation between pictographic writing systems and the structure and dynamics of thought may shed light on the inner life of a people whose souls are forevermore in darkness.
32 Gardiner, 6-7, 1957 33 Ong, 34, 1986 34 Ibid. 35 David, 237, 2003 36 Ong, 25, 1986 37 Ibid. 24 6
Honor Code
I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this assignment.
Christopher James Diak
References
Allen J.P. The Ancient Egyptian Language: An Historical Study. Cambridge University Press. New York. 2013.
David, R. A Handbook to Life in Ancient Egypt. Revised Ed. Facts on File, Inc. New York, New York. 2003. Gardiner, A. Egyptian Grammar: Being an Introduction to the Study of Hieroglyphs. 3rd Edition, Revised. Griffiths Institute, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. 1957.
Hussein, B.A. “The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Today.” Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3,
pp. 642-646, March 2012.
Ong, W. “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought” in The Written Word: Literacy in Translation. Wolfson College Lectures 1985. Ed. Greg Baumann. Clarendon Press, Oxford. 1986 Watts, A.W. The Nature of Consciousness. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nULGU9bHuJ8 Transcription: https://erowid.org/culture/characters/watts_alan/watts_alan_article1.shtml Pub.: 1960.