Think Like an Egyptian (3 page)

Buried within the hieroglyphic system is an alphabet. This has been put to good use by tourist jewelry shops in modern Egypt which offer to “write your name in hieroglyphs” (and then cast it beautifully in a silver or gold pendant). This may be fun, but no ancient Egyptian would have used hieroglyphs in this way. When writing foreign names, Egyptians broke them down into syllables and used a set of hieroglyphs modified for this particular purpose. They did not spell names alphabetically as we do. It is tempting to assume that an alphabet is an easier system to learn and to use than hieroglyphs, but this is not necessarily true. A Western alphabet, although consisting of far fewer signs, is an arbitrary set of symbols not anchored in a representation of the world around us. The great advantage, however, of an alphabetic script is that it can be used to write any language and is not grounded in one specific culture, whereas Egyptian hieroglyphs are so intimately bound up with the ancient Egyptian language that they cannot as a full system be used to write any other language.

Hieroglyphic writing is in itself an introduction to how Egyptians thought. It is not the product of a brief period when people sat down and drew up a large table, in which signs and their phonetic values and pictorial meanings were arranged logically, with attempts to avoid duplication and to fill gaps. Instead, the system looks like an accumulation of habits based around a few principles, enriched by idiosyncratic personal selection and subject to the processes of extinction and divergent growth that complex systems display over long periods of time. It is full of inconsistencies and usages that surprise us. But, despite this, it worked beautifully. When scribes sought to improve it, they simply added new variants.

The evidence for the earliest stages of hieroglyphic writing is incomplete. At least as far back as 4000 BC people making pottery scratched individual symbols onto the surface of jars, probably to mark ownership. There is a general reluctance to see this as writing, any more than watching traffic lights change or interpreting facial expressions can be said to constitute reading, even though information is being transmitted. In 1988, many small bone and ivory tags inscribed with groups of signs, usually one or two simple pictures followed by a numeral, were discovered in a tomb at Abydos dating to around 3150 BC, a century and a half before the 1st Dynasty. These are the earliest examples of writing so far found in Egypt; the signs, even though few in number, seem to follow rules and can be linked to hieroglyphic signs of later periods. From the beginning of the 1st Dynasty short texts appear, using quite an extensive set of signs, which no one doubts are examples of proper hieroglyphic writing. The texts are brief and record the names of kings, important events, and elements of the administrative system. They have proved insufficient, however, for charting the detailed development of the writing system, hieroglyph by hieroglyph. We have to wait another five or six centuries, until the latter part of the Old Kingdom, to encounter narrative texts (carved in stone) of any significant length and examples of texts written on papyrus—by this time the system had reached a mature stage. All the translations of texts used in this book date to no earlier than this period.

Many of the written sources—stories, useful advice on how to live contained within manuals of instruction written by famous sages, love poems, private letters—communicate with us fairly directly. Other sources are philosophical speculations about the nature of existence, written by priests. They created in intricate detail an “Otherworld” in which the forces that governed existence—especially the sun-god—struggled to keep the universe in equilibrium. The “Book of the Dead,” a collection of utterances or spells, was one popular religious text that equipped the spirit of its dead owner with knowledge to navigate safely through this complicated and dangerous realm.

The sources that depict the Otherworld took much knowledge for granted and did not lay out a system of religious thought. The Egyptians, familiar with the details, found no need for simple explanation of this complex world. They felt enriched by alternative explanations laid side by side, accepting an ambiguity and incompleteness of knowledge. Although they argued legal cases in courts of law, they did not apply an adversarial style—which aims for a single correct verdict—to speculative knowledge. So the gods simultaneously displayed human fallibilities subject to weaknesses of body and conduct, while representing philosophical ideals, such as justice, truth, evil, and power, and the fundamental elements of the universe. Reading Egyptian religious texts can be a bewildering experience as we try to enter a distinct cultural mind-set.

The single ideographic hieroglyphic signs provide us with one way of exploring the unique Egyptian world. They do not paint a complete picture, however, for not all significant areas of experience were covered by their own distinctive hieroglyph, and many important words and concepts used a dominant sign that was based on phonetic similarity rather than direct representation, as explained earlier with the verb “to love.” Nonetheless, a choice of 100 hieroglyphs presents an initial sketch of the ancient Egyptian world from specifically Egyptian concepts and knowledge. If we want to think like an Egyptian, we need to think hieroglyphs.

Here, I have created an album of snapshots of what it was like to be an ancient Egyptian. Part of that experience is re-created in the order in which I have presented the hieroglyphs. Modern conventions encourage us to index a broad field of knowledge in alphabetic order, even though this is conceptually arbitrary. The Egyptians did not attach the same degree of importance to the initial letters of words. One long text, written around 1000 BC by the ancient scholar Amenemope, sets out a scheme of knowledge in the form of a word list. He provides no explanations for the individual words, but they are arranged according to a progression of association. Sometimes association runs smoothly, but sometimes large jumps occur. His list begins with words for sky, water, and earth, moves through categories of people, towns of Egypt, and types of buildings and agricultural land, and finishes up with a list of an ox’s body parts. I have not emulated his order, not least because I have included categories of experience (such as “to come into existence”) whereas Amenemope confined himself to concrete nouns. But I have tried to follow a flow of associations, beginning with the visible world around the Egyptians, just as Amenemope did.

Ancient Egyptian civilization ran its course in roughly 3,000 years, from around 3000 BC until a time within the life of the Roman Empire. The familiar images of ancient Egypt—pyramids, Tutankhamun, animal mummies, and temples such as Edfu that have survived almost complete—belong to different periods within this span and are not necessarily typical outside these periods. I have largely ignored time distinctions, though, and have drawn examples from the full breadth of Egyptian civilization, to develop a picture of ancient Egypt that is different from that of any other society.

My main concession to the long time-span covered is to tie some examples to the scheme of Egyptian dynasties. Ancient Egypt was ruled by hereditary kings (Pharaohs) from a succession of royal families, or dynasties. The dynasties were set in order and numbered from 1 to 30, not long after the last dynasty had departed, by an Egyptian priest named Manetho. He lived under one of the Greek-speaking kings who succeeded Alexander the Great (who had conquered Egypt in 332 BC). Two thousand years later, Manetho’s scheme remains useful in a rough-and-ready way. Modern historians group the dynasties into broader periods: the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, the New Kingdom, and the Late Period, separated by three Intermediate Periods of divided rule and sporadic internal warfare.

 

I invite you to share my fascination with a society that existed before anything remotely modern intruded. Ancient Egypt shows how far a civilization can go not only without complex technology, but also without many of the ideas and systems of belief that we are inclined to accept as the bedrock of modern civilization. We understand the beginnings of the universe in a way that was unimaginable to the Egyptians, but the question “Why?” remains unanswered and turns many to religion just as it did the Egyptians. Personally, I feel good about modern dentistry, ambiguous about government interference in everyday life, horrified by the magnification of the scale of hatred and killing that has happened in the my lifetime and that of my parents. The ancient Egyptians wondered why the world was such a chaotic, unharmonious place. I wonder the same and am just as bewildered as they were. Ancient Egypt provides us with a measure of how far, and how little, the world has progressed in the last few thousand years.

 

 

 

 

The heart of Egypt was and still is the floodplain of the river Nile, a narrow ribbon of green stretched across a continent-wide desert. No more than 20 kilometers across in the valley proper, it reaches its greatest breadth of 200 kilometers as it fans out into a delta to join the Mediterranean coast in the north. Although the floodplain possesses subtle gradients left by slow meandering swings of the river from side to side, the valley floor gives an overall impression of a flat land, of dark and rather heavy soil. For the word “earth” or “land,”
t3
(
ta
), the Egyptians chose a flat, narrow sign. Beneath it, three small circles were often added, the sign for granules; land was the grainy soil beneath their feet, a physical reality, not a political entity (see no. 3, “Grain of sand”).

The borders of modern Egypt run to the Red Sea to the east; to the west and south they make a right angle and cut into the desert. The ancient Egyptian world was far smaller—no more than the muddy floor of the valley north of Aswan. The huge tracts of desert did not belong. A common name that the ancient Egyptians used for their homeland, in reference to its soil color, was Kmt (
Kemet
), “the black land.” In stepping from the valley to the desert, from the “black” to the “red,” the ancient Egyptians were already leaving their country. In their mythology, the ram-headed creator-god Khnum fashioned human beings from clay on a potter’s wheel; Egyptians associated themselves with the mud of their soil, not the sand of the desert.

Even allowing for wide margins of error in our calculations, at the time the pyramids were built, the inhabitants of the whole of Egypt would have fitted into one of the larger suburbs of modern Cairo. Compared to today, the people and their dwellings would have been far less obtrusive. The basis of their lives was tilling the rich soil, and the whole population, from the peasant in his tiny house to the king in his sprawling painted palace, lived in buildings whose walls, floors, and ceilings were made from mud. We know from their writings that the ancient Egyptians intended to be remembered through buildings of stone that would endure “for millions of years”; but these were tombs and temples, not places for the living.

The valley and the delta were treated as separate “lands” in their own right. The Egyptians constructed a myth that, at a time in the distant past, each “land” had been a discrete kingdom, with its own symbols, including a distinctive crown. Each had its own name, and the modern convention is to translate these as Upper and Lower Egypt, for the south and the north, respectively. The kingdom of Egypt was always “the two lands”
or more simply
t3wy
(
tawy
), and each king was “lord of the two lands”
nb t3wy
(
neb tawy
). The coronation of a new king was a ceremony symbolically reunifying the two lands. A design of two plants knotted together, found on the walls of temples and palaces, represented the binding of the two kingdoms. Over the kings reigned the supreme god, Amun-Ra, “lord of the thrones of the two lands.”