ANCR-401 Lessons

Introduction
Hello, class. Today, we will take our first close look at some of the symbols used in the hieroglyphic writing system. Some of these are more difficult and intricate than the runes many of you have studied over the past two years, so we will take things slowly and discuss them in small groups.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to enter the symbols into a computer, and particularly into an essay submission. So unless you are able to upload pictures of hand-drawn hieroglyphs, I won’t be able to grade or correct your own efforts at writing them. You will, however, have the opportunity to transcribe the hieroglyphs into our own alphabet in later lessons. For now, though, let us start with our lesson.

Consonants in  Hieroglyphics
The first group of hieroglyphs we will study are all symbols that stand for consonants we know from English (and many other European languages). They are sounds that we are all familiar with and that we use in our everyday language and writing.

The following table shows the symbols along with their description and sound value, as well as a sample word or two to illustrate and clarify the sound value. Please note that some of the sounds can be represented by more than one symbol. Egyptians liked variety in their script because the writing was used as much for decoration as for the information it could record.

You will notice that some of these symbols are quite detailed, while others barely suggest the shape of what the description says they represent. The animals in particular often show a lot of detail, while everyday items are often barely recognisable.

In practice, the symbols could be as detailed as the scribe wanted to make them, and you will frequently find even more detailed versions of the symbols in real inscriptions. The birds may be drawn or carved with details on their feathers and the mouth may have proper lips and resemble the real thing rather than a lens (or flattened oval) as depicted here.

The symbols you see above are the standardised depictions of the hieroglyphs used by scholars and academics to make it possible to distinguish between the individual symbols.

The Categories of Egyptian Hieroglyphs
We will only be studying a fraction of the symbols used by Egyptian scribes in our course this year, and even by the end of next year, you may not have learned every single symbol ever used at the height of the Egyptian kingdom. For those of you interested in delving deeper into this topic, I will list a few resources at the end of this lesson.

However, there is one particular piece of information that I would like to share with you today: due to the pictorial nature of the hieroglyphs, it is common to sort the symbols into categories based on what they depict. Although you will find dictionaries of Egyptian hieroglyphs and word lists generally sorted according to the “alphabetic” order of their transcriptions/sound values, it is also common to find hieroglyphs categorised according to their imagery. This helps students in particular in finding unfamiliar symbols and transcribing them correctly.  Similar sounds can have vastly different symbols (as indeed is common to many scripts), so it is rarely obvious to the outsider that B follows A unless they are already familiar with both A and B, as well as C and probably the rest of the alphabet. The same is true for the hieroglyphs, and since there are a fair few more of them than our Latin letters, such categories are extremely helpful.

The most comprehensive and most widely used list of hieroglyphs and categories is the list established by Sir Alan Gardiner (see ‘Further Reading’ below). Gardiner distinguishes between 29 categories. I won’t list them all here, as this is something we will discuss in more detail next year, but some of the main ones are as follows:

1.     Man and his Occupations
2.     Parts of the Human Body
3.     Mammals
4.     Birds
5.     Amphibious Animals, Reptiles, etc.
6.     Trees and Plants
7.     Sky, Earth, Water
8.     Buildings, Parts of Buildings, etc.
9.     Domestic and Funerary Furniture
10.  Crowns, Dress, Staves, etc.
11.  Agriculture, Crafts and Professions
12.  Rope, Fibre, Baskets, Bags, etc.
13.  Vessels of Stone and Earthenware
14.  Loaves and Cakes
15.  Strokes

However, the creator of this system was unfortunately a Muggle. While this system of categorization has served both Muggle and magical scholars well by providing a standard way to discuss the symbols there are some inherent flaws due to a lack of magical knowledge. As you will see next year, some of the glyphs have been miscategorized because Muggles were not aware of the true item being depicted. All in all, though, the few miscategorizations and misinterpretations do little to take away from their usefulness and are used among the magical community. Resortings have been attempted in the past by those from a strictly magical background, but in the end, the resulting categories from these attempts are either a) so similar to Gardiner’s original list that re-organization and re-memorization of the glyphs is pointless, or b) so far removed from logic as to be impossible to understand or remember1. With that explanation out of the way, you may wish to try to sort the hieroglyphs we studied today into some of these categories in preparation for next year or even simply to sate your curiosity.

Closing
On this note, we come to the end of today’s lesson. Please spend some time studying and familiarising yourself with the hieroglyphs introduced today. Although you won’t be able to use them to write words yet, and more knowledge is necessary before you can use them to read inscriptions, I suggest you still pay close attention to the details because I will be testing you on individual systems in the quiz for today’s lesson. If you want to, you can also try and draw some of the hieroglyphs, but this won’t be required.

Next week, we will look at another group of hieroglyphs, and some of the symbols may look similar but with very different meanings. But for now, I will let you work in peace on your assignment, which is a quiz covering the sixteen hieroglyphs introduced today as well as the information about how these symbols are sorted in dictionaries and categorised in lists. For extra credit, you can also show me your categorisation of today’s symbols according to Gardiner’s categories (or indeed, some of your own devising).

Footnotes:
1. One of the most infamous of these botched attempts was made by Ròs Dusachtach, a Scottish magianthropologist who organized the glyphs according to their similarities to her pet peacock’s appearance and personality. Some of her 93 categories included “17. Bits that look like his tail” and “34. Signs that capture the way his eyes sparkle in the moonlight.”

Further reading
Gardiner. Sir Alan. Egyptian Grammar (Griffith Institute, 1957).
(Alternatively, there is a sort of “pocket guide” available online here)
Manley, Bill. Egyptian Hieroglyphs for Complete Beginners (Thames & Hudson, 2012).
Collier, Mark and Bill Manley. How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Rev. Ed. (British Museum, 1998).

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Vocabulary
Sir Alan Gardiner: A Muggle, English Egyptologist. He is responsible (and famous) for his work Egyptian Grammar that contains a list of all Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs, also known as Gardiner’s Sign List.
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Original lesson written by Professor Mathilda Stevens