Hieroglyphs (18 page)

Amun.’ Here is a man who reached the pinnacle of his career as the Overseer of the Priests of All the Gods and First Priest of Amun, and lived to a very old age (even if the offices ran consecutively).

The clue to how he started in this profession is given in a second statue also dedicated at Karnak. Here he declares himself to be a man of Thebes and son of a Second Priest of Amun in Luxor:

‘I came out of the Chamber of Writings/Scrolls as an ‘‘excellent commoner’’ in the Temple of the Lady of Heaven. I learnt to be a priest in the House of Amun as a son guided by his father.’ This text then shows the young Bakhenkhons with an advantage at birth and going to the scribal school before following his chosen profession in the priesthood from the most lowly post upwards. The text is rather formulaic but it gives Bakhenkhons some extra titles: ‘Chief of Secrets in Heaven, Earth and the Underworld; Great Seer of the Sun in Thebes; Great Sem-Priest; Supervisor of the Crafts of Ptah’.
10

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The scribe Amunhotep, son of Hapu, was even more successful. He had been a scribe and chief of priests in his home town of Athribis during the reign of Thutmose III, but in his early fifties was called to Thebes to be chief architect to Amunhotep III and to organize his massive mortuary complex and palace on the west bank. He has been described as the ‘Minister for Culture’ but he called himself

‘the real first scribe of the king’. Around ten statues of Amunhotep were dedicated by him in different temples at Thebes. They show him with layers of flesh on his abdomen, indicating prosperity and advanced years, and a distinctive individual face. He is usually seated in scribal pose, slightly crouched over, reading the text on his lap. If one is inclined to help him with a particularly difficult piece of text or hieratic handwriting, it is possible to stand behind him and read with him. The texts contain his name and titles and extol his virtues, which seem to be considerable. In addition, he offers to act as intermediary for ordinary people. If people came and poured a libation for the old scribe he offered to transmit the prayers to the
phs

god Amun himself. In fact, this might actually explain his real
ogly

importance in life. In order to get to King Amunhotep, petitioners,
Hier

advisers, and his generals had first to go through the scribe Amunhotep. He would know everyone, everything about everyone, including all the king’s business. Amunhotep was the ideal scribe, a man who was apparently quiet and unassuming, who did not shout and brag, but was self-controlled and quiet. He commanded respect by the wisdom of his advice. At least in scribal terms, this is how he achieved this ideal pinnacle. In real life, in the cut-throat politicking of the Amunhotep court, he presumably had luck as well as other non-scribal powers and skills. So great was his reputation that he was venerated in western Thebes as wise man and local saint. A small temple was built and partly dedicated to him at Deir el Medina in the Ptolemaic period as his cult was continued for almost a thousand years.

The temple at Deir el-Medina is dedicated to a second ‘saint’, and also a scribe, the legendary Imhotep. He was architect to King Netjerykhet (Djoser) and responsible for the building of the Step 84

Pyramid, the first monumental stone structure. Little is known of him from his lifetime apart from his titles, which seem to have been

‘Seal-Bearer of the King of Lower Egypt, Great Seer of the Great-Mansion, Chief of Sculptors and Masons’. For his connection with the remarkable and innovative building, he was later regarded as a scribal saint who could intercede between men and gods. Bronze statuettes of him were dedicated in temples at Saqqara and in a few other places temple shrines were also dedicated to him. He is shown seated on a block chair, wearing a cap over his shaven head and with his papyrus book unrolled on his lap. Though his memory was ancient even for the Egyptians of the New Kingdom and beyond, his profession and his success as a wise man are perhaps the real attributes which were being celebrated. It seems that such people could communicate with the gods because of their wisdom, their abilit
y to read hieroglyphs, and their beatified status.11

Scribes an

Kings too were taught to write, and in the Middle Kingdom
d e

‘Prophecy of Neferti’ King Snoferu asks for a palette and papyrus
veryda

roll to record in his own hand the words about what will happen in
y writin

the future, spoken by the lector-priest Neferti. In the divine realm, the ibis-headed god Thoth was the divine scribe who recorded the
g

events of the life of the king on the leaves of the divine persea tree and accounted for the years of the king’s reign by notching a palm-leaf rib as each year passed. In his baboon form he is shown wrapped around the head of human scribes, imparting intelligence, doubtless somewhat uncomfortably. The importance of scribes even extended to the afterlife, where Thoth was on hand to record the outcome of the weighing of the deceased’s heart after death.

Standing before Osiris, the ruler of the afterworld, the heart of the deceased was weighed on scales against the feather of
maat
. If the scales balanced or were light the person was adjudged to be ‘true of voice’ and proceeded to the next life. If the scales sank down, then the heart was gobbled up by a monster and the person ceased to exist. The whole proceeding was recorded in writing, like any judicial process. It was the writing which ensured existence, whether you could read it or not.

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Chapter 6

The decipherment

of Egyptian

The journey towards the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs began almost as soon as they had been forgotten. The latest dated hieroglyphic inscription is from the temple of Philae and the reign of the Emperor Theodosius in ad 394. Visitors to Egypt such as the Greek writers Herodotus (fifth century bc) and Strabo (first century bc to first century ad), and Diodorus of Sicily (
c
.40 bc) had already referred to the hieroglyphic signs as a form of unintelligible picture writing. In the fourth century ad, a Hellenized Egyptian called Horapollo made a survey of Egyptian writing and published a list of nearly two hundred signs, with his interpretation of their meaning, in
Hieroglyphica
. This work itself was lost or forgotten and the impetus to decipher hieroglyphs was lost until 1415, when a manuscript of
Hieroglyphica
was acquired on the island of Andros by Cristoforo Bundelmonti and provided the basis for the Renaissance interpretation of hieroglyphs.

According to Horapollo, each sign had a symbolic meaning: the sky dropping dew meant ‘education’, the forequarters of a lion meant ‘strength’, and an owl represented foreknowledge of an abundant wine vintage. No allowance was made for a phonetic system of signs and some rather fanciful reasons for the meanings were suggested. For example, a vulture sign meant ‘mother’, because only female vultures were thought to exist, able to reproduce without the aid of males. In Egyptian, the vulture sign can mean ‘mother’, but the reason is because the phonetic 86

pronunciation of the sign of the vulture
mwt
is the same as the word for mother. Further, the signs were supposed to have allegorical meaning based on stories and philosophy and it was thought that they held the key to hidden ancient my
steries.1

The first step in regaining the meaning of hieroglyphs was made by the Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher, in his book
Oedipus
Aegyptiacus
(
c
.1650). He was a professor of mathematics in Rome and was interested in science and languages. He studied Coptic manuscripts brought to Europe, compiled a Coptic grammar, and recognized for the first time that Coptic was a direct descendant of Ancient Egyptian. He, too, was side-tracked, however, and translated hieroglyphic texts based on symbolic
Th

inferences.

e deci

p

In 1799 part of a temple stela was discovered by the French scholars
herm
of Napoleon in Rosetta. The Rosetta Stone contains a priestly
ent of E

decree in honour of Ptolemy V which was set up in a major temple, perhaps at Saı¨s, in 196 bc. The surviving fragment of granite is
gyptian

inscribed with the decree to guarantee lands and endowments to the temples of Egypt, but crucially it has the same text in three languages: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian Demotic, and Greek.

The importance of the stone for the possible decipherment of hieroglyphs was recognized straight away and attempts began almost at once to work on the script. Even though the Rosetta Stone was handed over to the British as part of the spoils of the Napoleonic War, the texts had by then been copied and were later sent all over the world. The process of decipherment required several stages as each of the principles behind the script was discovered. With hindsight, it seems as if it were a step-by-step progression, but in fact often one person (such as Kircher) would have a good idea, but would continue to use other incorrect assumptions at the same time. So, the final triumph came from deciding which of the many permutations were correct, as in any kind of code-breaking.

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17. The Canopus Decree of 238 BC. A complete stela with the same text
in three languages. The Rosetta Stone may have looked like this when
first set up. Cairo Museum 22816.

Some progress had already been made. First, Joseph de Guignes (1721–1800), a French orientalist and sinologist, had recognized that groups of signs had determinatives and that cartouches contained royal names. Then Georg Zoega (1755–1809), a Danish scholar, suggested that hieroglyphs could be the letters of an alphabet and also independently suggested that cartouches contained royal names. He had learnt Coptic as he felt that it would assist in his work, but his main interest was in Egyptian obelisks.

Johan David Åkerblad (1763–1819), a Swedish diplomat, made good progress by comparing the Greek and Demotic texts on the Rosetta Stone and identified all the proper names which occur in both texts. He also identified the words for ‘temples’ and ‘Greeks’