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Difficult Hieroglyphs and Unreadable Demotic? How the Ancient Egyptians Dealt with the Complexities of Their Script

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Difficult Hieroglyphs and Unreadable Demotic? How the Ancient Egyptians Dealt with the Complexities of Their Script DIFFICULT HIEROGLYPHS AND UNREADABLE DEMOTIC? HOW THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS DEALT WITH THE COMPLEXITIES OF THEIR SCRIPT Joachim Friedrich Quack Whenever Ancient Egypt is evoked, people associate it, among other things, with the hieroglyphic writing system. By its visual impression, it has a strong allure mixed, however, with some sort of reluctance. ‘Can you really read this?’ is a typical question posed to an egyptologist – as if this was far from self-evident. The very nature of the hieroglyphic signs fosters a common misconception. The writing is taken to be pic- tographic, and more specifically to be based on the direct pictorial value of the depicted objects. This is hardly an adequate model, even if there is a logical nexus between the depicted object and its value as a sign. Cursive Writing I certainly cannot evade the hieroglyphs, but I would like not to limit myself to the monumental writing system. Instead, I will also bring the cursive writing systems of Egypt to the fore, for several reasons. The first is that people tend to forget about the true proportions of use. Monumental inscriptions in stone were meant to perpetuate their content for future times. They only represent, however, a limited sample of the writing that actually was used in Egypt, and hardly a representative one at that. Their importance for the culture is likely to be overestimated nowadays since, in accordance with the intentions of their makers, they were particularly good at bridging the centuries and millennia. But it was the cursive writing systems normally transmitted on papyrus, which represented the vast majority of the actual writing occurring in Egypt, and those very texts, which were of immediate concern for the Egyptians, be it administrative records specifying revenues and obligations or liturgical manuscripts with rituals to be performed by the priests. Scholars distinguish two different sorts of cursive writing in Egypt, namely hieratic and demotic. Hieratic evolved out of a simplification of hieroglyphic writing, which came about easily when writing with a rush 236 joachim friedrich quack pen and using ink.1 It soon developed into forms of its own, although the connection to hieroglyphs was never really severed. Perhaps this can be seen in one obvious fact: Hieratic is normal for everyday supports, papyrus or leather as well as ostraca, but hardly ever encountered on stone. There was one phase in Egypt, the Third Intermediate Period, about 1070–700 bc, when hieratic was sometimes incised on stone for official inscriptions (Meeks 1979: 661–687), but otherwise, when texts were transferred from papyri to monumental surfaces, they were transposed from hieratic to hieroglyphs. That very fact shows how the Egyptians considered those writing systems to be two faces of the same coin, not as distinct systems (although, as a matter of fact, there are some differences in the orthographic preferences). The Greeks felt similarly, because most of their authors who write about Egyptian script do not distinguish between hieroglyphic and hieratic (Marestaing 1913), and the Egyptians designated both with the same term as mtw-nčṛ “words of the god”.2 The second cursive writing used in Egypt is demotic.3 It evolved by about the seventh century bc out of hieratic, by a serious further simplification of the sign forms. In this case, it was considered more as an entity of its own. It was, from the Ptolemaic period onwards, quite often engraved as a sort of monumental script of its own,4 and received a specific term. It was called ‘popular writing’ or ‘indigenous writing’ in Greek, and sẖ频-š 颓.t ‘letter-writing’ in Egyptian. Still, it is theoretically possible to transpose even demotic into hieroglyphic writing; there never was a complete break. Since there are some cases of texts written in demotic language but hieroglyphic script (Quack 1995, Quack 1998), it is possible that models in demotic writing were actually put into hieroglyphs – but it cannot be excluded that in those cases, the basic written document was in hieratic script (which could, at least during some periods, be used also for compositions in demotic language). In my contribution, I will focus on demotic when considering the cursive writing for several reasons. Firstly, in normal descriptions of Egyptian writing systems, demotic is rather relegated to a sort of foot- 1 For hieratic, the standard paleography is Möller (1909–1912); additional works on selected periods are Goedicke (1988) and Verhoeven (2001). 2 Here and in the following, I am using for Ancient Egyptian the specific translitera- tion system used, e.g., in Schenkel (2005). 3 For demotic writing in general, there is no really thorough treatment. See, e.g., the notes and sign-list in Bresciani & Menchetti (2002). 4 Many of the smaller ones are collected in Vleeming (2001)..
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