ANCR-401 Lessons

Introduction
It seems you have all survived your midterms last week and are ready to delve deeper into the world of the hieroglyphs.  Last week we learned that Egyptians had rather little respect for vowels in their writings, a practice that makes the script prone to misunderstandings. But the Egyptians weren’t stupid. Aware of this problem, they devised a solution that was not only effective, but also rather decorative! Today we will look at a class of symbols called “determinatives.” If that term leaves you scratching your head, please do exercise patience. The answers to your questions are forthcoming.

Determinatives in Hieroglyphics
Last week, we spoke about vowels, a class of sounds that every language possesses in order to make words that are easy to pronounce. The ratio of vowel to consonant sounds differs from language to language. Some are heavy on the consonants, while others prefer to use vowels more liberally, but no known language completely does without one or the other.

Scripts are a different matter. Even today, there are still languages that are written without any symbols for the vowel sounds, such as Hebrew.  The same is more or less true for the Egyptian hieroglyphs. This obviously can pose problems.

Some of you may remember from last year that in the Younger Futhark, certain runes can stand for several different vowel sounds. This meant that the transcription of a word could have several different outcomes. One such word was “L [a/o] K [i/e]” in one of the exercises. While many of you identified this inscription as the name of the Norse god “Loki,” others chose to transcribe this as the more familiar English word “lake.” Both of these transcriptions were correct, because there was no specific context to the inscription given in this exercise.

Context is what we call the information surrounding any specific word or text (and sometimes also more generally surrounding an event or object). It is derived from the Latin prefix “con-“ which means “with, around,” and so it means something that is “with” a text, something that surrounds the text, and thus gives it a place in space and time. Context can help us understand the meaning of something, such as whether that inscription we are working on refers to a lake or the god Loki.

Context is particularly useful when we are working with a script that leaves out certain elements, such as vowels, and in the case of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, we have a whole category of symbols specifically for the purpose of giving context. These symbols are called determinatives, because they “determine” the meaning of the symbols they accompany.

The tables below show the main determinatives you will find in hieroglyphic inscriptions. You will notice that some of these categories are fairly broad, while others have very specific meanings and narrow down the meaning of the symbols to be determined quite a bit.

Taking our example from above, we could quite easily distinguish between the words “lake” and “Loki” simply by using the appropriate determinative. To show that we mean the name of the god Loki, we would add the symbol for god to the inscription. However, if our runes were meant to signify a lake, then we would add the three lines of water ripples that denote a body of water. Simple and elegant, don’t you think?

Here is a handout with all the determinatives, as well as a few additional signs we will discuss next week. Keep it close at hand, as you’re going to need it for your assignments later today, though you will only need the section titled “determinatives,” as you hopefully will have guessed.

What Are You Looking At? - The Direction of Hieroglyphics
Now, I just mentioned that you can simply “add” the determinative hieroglyph to the inscription. You might be wondering whether there are any rules as to where to add them, such as at the beginning or end of a word.

Well, the simple answer is that there is no particular rule for this. In fact, hieroglyphs in general had few rules as to the direction of writing. They could be written from left to right, as we are used to, or top to bottom, or indeed right to left, with no difference to the meaning. Hieroglyphs can also be written so that they are grouped for optimum use of space, meaning that they could be written generally from left to right, but with some symbols written on top of each other to save space and create a more pleasing overall design.

However, this does not mean that you will be flying blind when you are trying to work out what an inscription means. There are clues in the hieroglyphs that will tell you where to start reading. You have obviously noticed by now that many of the hieroglyphs show animals or human figures as well as parts of their bodies. The faces of most of these figures are shown in profile, and this was put to good use by the scribes to help the reader decipher the inscriptions.

All hieroglyphs can be shown facing right or left, unless they’re symmetrical, in which case there is no real difference. While the direction does not affect their meaning, it can affect the meaning of the inscription. Ancient Egyptian scribes used the asymmetrical nature of many symbols to indicate where a text begins, and thus pointing us to where we should begin to read.

              

The rule is that all figures (animal or human) will face the direction from where you need to start to read. So in our script, which is generally written left to right, all hieroglyphs are usually shown to face to the left side, because we need to start reading from the left. Inscriptions that need to be read from the right would have all their figures (or indeed arms such as in some of the determinative in the list above) facing or pointing to the right.

The only writing direction that is not used in hieroglyphic inscription is bottom to top, so if you have hieroglyphs stacked on top of each other, you can always read them from the top to the bottom. The same goes for inscriptions with a mixed order of symbols, where some are next to each other while others are stacked on top of each other. Start from whichever side the faces are looking, and if you encounter hieroglyphs on top of each other, read those from top to bottom, then continue on in the original direction.

Egyptian Places and Faces
As we did in your first year of Ancient Runes, I would like to take a moment to give you a reference list of common places and names in ancient Egypt to go along with these determinatives. These pieces of information can provide great insight, whether it is to a curse-breaker attempting to diffuse a nasty enchantment or a magihistorian attempting to document an inscription’s origins. Unlike in Year Two of Ancient Runes, I will be including a much larger range of the names of gods and goddesses, even to the point of giving them their own category. Magic in this culture was highly focused on deities to lend power and prestige to their spells. With that in mind, it is also important to note that these names of gods and goddesses are often flexible, with multiple spellings and alternative names. This is due to the unique characteristics of religion in ancient Egypt, but as Professor Morgan will be discussing this in Mythology this year, I will not be going into too much detail here. It is enough to know about the existence of similar names for now. This is also slightly true of the pharaonic names that will be listed, although to a lesser degree.

Additionally, as far as variants go, it is crucial for you to note that these words are all transcriptions from their original forms, and therefore all of these names can vary. This is mostly due to ancient hieroglyphics’ original omission of vowels needing to be filled in for westerners like ourselves.

Finally, on the topic of place names, it is prudent to note that these are ancient designations that often have modern counterparts. It is much like how Noregr became Norway, though because of language differences, the new and old names may not seem so related to each other. The modern name, when applicable, will be provided in parentheses. To add another unfortunate level of complexity, you will not often know any of these towns by their ancient or modern names but instead by what is more often termed a “popular” name, or a version of the name that was changed by explorers and travelers and often westernized. This will also be listed, though italicized and in quotation marks to visually distinguish it. Therefore a sample inscription might look like this: Ancient name (Modern name) “Popular name.”

Closing
With that, you have added one more tool to your transcribing arsenal, and one which you need practice using. Your assignments today consist of one transcription exercise that involves these determinatives and a short quiz on the material covered in this lesson.

Vocabulary
Context: Information surrounding a word, text, or even a situation.
Determinative: a symbol that indicates a specific category of word (such as location, occupation, or building) to aid in transcription and translation.

Original lesson written by Professor Mathilda Stevens
Additional portion by Professor Venita Wessex