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Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes and if you would like the Ancients ad free. Get early access and bonus episodes. Sign up to History Hit with the History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary All About Petra and the Nabateans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
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Today'S episode is brought to you by Soundcore from Anker. Now living in London, I struggle with nighttime noise and my sleep quality was poor due to uncomfortable earbuds. However, discovering Soundcore earbuds changed everything. They are made from incredibly soft, ergonomic materials, feeling weightless and gentle even after hours. They offer unparalleled pressure free comfort, perfect for side sleepers like me, and they block out unwanted noise for a peaceful night's sleep. Transform your sleep experience. Now head to soundcore.com that's s o u n d c o r e.com use the code sleep at checkout for $30 off. That's s l E E P in all caps. Sleep well, my friends. It's the ancients on history hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today we're exploring the story of arguably the most captivating script from antiquity, the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. When you visit Egypt today or see Egyptian archaeology and museums, hieroglyphs are usually never far away. These pictorial symbols adorned the walls of temples, tombs, and towering obelisks. They were written down on papyrus and were used to record everything from transactions to poetry to official peace treaties. So how did hieroglyphs actually work? What did each symbol mean and how many were there? Did the Egyptians believe these symbols had magical properties? And for how long was this script used for? Well, to answer all of this and much more, I was delighted to interview the Egyptologist Hugo Cook. Hugo teaches a course on hieroglyphs at the British Museum. He is an expert in ancient Egyptian texts and his passion for the subject, well, it's undeniable. It was great to interview Hugo, all about hieroglyphs and how these symbols have become one of the greatest gateways into ancient Egypt. Hugo, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today.
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B
Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.
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A
You are welcome. And you contacted me about this and your expertise in the subject of hieroglyphs. And when you mentioned the word hieroglyphs, I was just like, okay, yep, definitely. Because we've never done an episode on it before, but hieroglyphs, I mean, like the pyramids, like Tutankhamun, it feels like another of those central things that has become the definitive symbol of ancient Egypt for all of us today?
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B
Yeah, absolutely. There's so much allure about it, and I think it's an almost universal experience going into a museum and seeing these amazing things, these little pieces of art and wondering about them and having some sense of wonder about them. But yet, despite them being so iconic as an idea and as a literal symbol of ancient Egypt, there's very little that's widely known about them, about how they were and why they're important and why they should matter to all of us today.
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A
I mean, do you think it is partly that mystery of these symbols and I guess their great age that helps explain why, you know, when people go to a big museum today and they go to the Egypt's gallery, they're always looking at these hieroglyphs and these symbols of birds and Other symbols and so on. Do you think it is that mystery that contributes largely to why they have captured the public imagination so greatly today?
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B
Yeah, I certainly think that must be part of it. The unknown of it is appealing in and of itself. Where people go in and wonder, what might this say? Although that said, people often somewhat erroneously think they know what it says. Because people often ask me, Hugo, why did the Egyptians talk so much about birds? As you pointed out, there's a lot of bird symbols and people notice that and assume that means the Egyptians. A bird sign means a bird. Quite a fair assumption really, but not actually the case. The Egyptians did now and then have a thing or two to say about birds, sure, but it wasn't the day to day crux of their life. But yes, I think, I think certainly there's a bit of mystery and majesty around it, and those are ideas which have long been wrapped up around the idea of ancient Egypt. You know, often you'll see a book or a documentary with the word mysteries, the mysteries of ancient Egypt, the mysteries of the pharaohs, something like this. But the fact of the matter is we actually have so much information about ancient Egypt. It's one of our best documented civilizations ever, thanks to these things, thanks to this huge wealth of writing and things like the Rosetta, which allowed us to read them.
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A
Well, ask another big question, but to kick it all off, just how much of a window do hieroglyphs give us now? Once again, also they've been deciphered. Do they give us into daily life, into ancient Egyptian society?
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B
This is a great question and it's absolutely massive, the window. It's less of a window and more of a smashed out wall in the side of a building. For a bit of an idea. There are more texts surviving from ancient Egypt than there are from all of medieval Europe put together. There are more texts surviving from ancient Egypt than there are from ancient Greece and ancient Italy put together. As many people will know, a lot of our original classical texts come from Egypt. Not only is this to do with the writing systems that they had, it's also, this is a country with a monopoly on papyrus. Pretty much. You know, there's the, the famous story about how when Pergamon tried to compete with the library of Alexandria in terms of building an iconic Hellenistic library, the Ptolemies shut down exports of papyrus to Pergamon to say, okay, try and build a library without that. And it supposedly led to them putting effort into creating parchment instead.
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A
Pergamum, just to clarify, that's that was a great city that emerged after Alexander the Great in Western Turkey today. But by that time, Alexandria in Egypt was that intellectual center, and hoglies was still being used on the papyrus.
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B
Absolutely. In terms of Pokemon. Yet in terms of hieroglyphs, one of the things we'll see is that it's not just hieroglyphs that form the presence on all these sources. You know, a lot of the things written in the library of Alexandria, for example, would have mostly been in Greek, but even the native Egyptian language sources aren't all in. In. In what we'd call hieroglyphs. I should give a little bit of a. A terminological distinction for people to start with. Hieroglyphs aren't the language of ancient Egypt. They're just the script. So just the symbols you use to put your language, which we call Egyptian, into writing, to shove it down on stone or papyrus so that people thousands of miles away and hundreds of years later can see what you're trying to say. And the Egyptians realized that if you want to write a quick shopping list or note down what you've set to the laundrette, real examples of sort of texts, we find quite commonly you don't exactly want to draw an anatomically correct duck for every single bit of it. So they developed a couple of shorthands, simpler systems of writing, the one we see in use in the earlier periods. So we're talking in during the Bronze Age, really, so times of sort of Tutankhamun, Ramses, the great things like that we call hieratic. And it looks. A lot of the signs look the same as hieroglyphs, just a sort of a squiggly version. Think of like how a court stenographer historically has used some sort of system to be able to write faster. Well, they had this. But the birds, things get so simplified down that the birds, they kind of create new symbols for some of the birds, because if you simplify a hundred different birds down enough, they'll all look the same. So they sort of make new signs for that. This use of a shorthand, which we find lots with letters from, you know, two friends arguing over a joke that's made them fall out, or sisters complaining that one of them stole another one's dress and she needs it for a party to impress a boy. You know, these sorts of very human things, we'll see this shorthand use a lot in that, and this evolves and a further, even shorter hand called demotic arises in the first millennium B.C. and this one, well, you asked if you want to Know about sort of windows. This one is huge. We have a massive amount of information in this later script and language. Demotic. This is the. The one Cleopatra would have learned. And a lot of this stuff just hasn't yet been translated. You know, people might think we've done it all, that it's all out there, it's all sorted, but it's not. Not only because some bits aren't found yet. You know, every year some papyrus shows up on the art market that's been locked in someone's attic for the last century and a half, but also even a lot of museums are just slowly working through this massive content of material. And with the demotic stuff, because it's later, you know, there's a higher chance of it surviving. More literacy seems a little bit higher in the later bit. A rough estimate is that literacy in ancient Egypt jumps from a whopping 1% around the time of the pyramids to a dizzying 7% by the time of Cleopatra, which 2,000 years later. Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, two and a half even so long civilization. It may sound like a very low number, the literacy when we think of today, but this is actually quite high comparatively for the world at that time. And yeah, as a little bit of an insight into this Demotic, one of the reasons so little of that has been deciphered. Yes. Or translated, is that it's very, very difficult to read. Imagine taking a very difficult ancient language and seeing it in doctor's handwriting, which your doctor has tried as hard as he can to make cruel and impossible. When I was doing my post grad at Cambridge, I learned two Egyptian languages I hadn't yet learnt there. Coptic, which is the later.
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A
Yes, the priestly one, isn't it?
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B
Yeah, exactly. So this arises with the Roman Empire, so it's quite associated with Christianity and indeed in Egypt it still uses that liturgical language in the way the Catholics use Latin today in Egypt's Christian circles. And so I learned Coptic and the preceding phase to Demotic, same time, started them at the same period, had the same tutor, same number of classes, you'd think I'd have been at equal standard at both by the end. Right. Well, when the exams came round, for the Coptic exam, you know, we got something like about three pages of translation, three to eight pages of translation with commentary to do in three hours. With the equivalent to Motic, we got eight lines to do in 72 hours. That's the sort of understood difference between, between the difficulty there. And I should mention as well, I've. I've Said some of these, these phases, we get roughly five phases of the Egyptian language because as I mentioned, this is a huge civilization. So we call them old, middle and late Egyptian. These ones happen during the Bronze Age mostly. And then we move on to Demotic, which is both a language and a script. And finally the Egyptians decide actually their script isn't necessarily the most practical for learning, so they dump it mostly and pick up the Greek Alphabet instead. Keep the same language mostly with about a third of their vocabulary added from Greek, but just write their language in Greek letters. And that's what we call Coptic, the final phase of the Egyptian language. And there's a fun little thing I should say about that, actually, before we dig fully into, into hieroglyphs, we'll all assume, oh, ancient Egyptian, dead language. But this may be the long. Well, it certainly is the longest attested language in human history, and we may even want to consider it is still just about alive today because in terms of it being the longest attested, the Egyptian language is one of the first or second languages we can see. It's one of the. It's either the first or second language to invent writing. So it appears super early in our record. And then it keeps being used for this long period. Once Egypt goes Christian and then when it goes Muslim, Coptic is still spoken. You know, you'll often look at timelines and they'll say, ah, 7th 8th century, boom. Arabic becomes Egypt's main language. But it was a much slower thing than that. You know, it was mostly when the Arab conquest of Egypt happened. Originally, the Arab armies kept themselves in their camp and there was a policy of sort of a lack of migration from local Egyptians in and these Arabs out. And so cultures were kept very distinct. Still, most people in Egypt for a long time, although they slowly started as Islamic cities started to become more of a thing. In Egypt, people might learn Arabic to get in with the administration and things like that. But until the 17th century AD you'd still find most people in the countryside would still have spoken Coptic, this language of the pharaohs. And from the 17th century it sort of quickly declined. But today there are a couple of families, these Christian families, who still speak Coptic as their first language, Meaning is their first language. And if something is spoken as a first language, that's our usual definition of, of a living language. Once we only know it as a second language and extinct, once we don't know it at all. However, the matriarchs of the two families interviewed have said that they're going to teach their children Arabic as the primary language going forward to make it easier for them integrating in with society. So we're actually probably witnessing the death of the Egyptian language, the longest attested language in human history in our lifetimes, in real time. Which is why it's always important to talk about this thing.
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A
Very important. It's very interesting that you've highlighted straight away how you know the Egyptian language is it's longevity and the fact that to differentiate hieroglyph, hieroglyphs obviously interlinked but it's a script of the Egyptian language and it goes alongside as you say, I believe the word is these cursive shorthands that you mentioned hieratic, demotic and then Coptic and a huge period of time, thousands of years.
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A
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A
How do hieroglyphs work? What do they mean? Each symbol mean? I'm presuming a bird, as you said earlier, doesn't just mean a bird. Why are those symbols picked and what do they represent?
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B
Yeah, it's a brilliant question. For this, it's best to think about the story of hieroglyphs themselves. The origin, where they came from, why they were needed, and where they go. We get hieroglyphs like all of the original scripts we know. So for context, there are four places in the world where we can confirm writing was invented. Egypt and Iraq with its cuneiform around the same time. About a thousand years later, Chinese. And about a thousand years later, get writing in Mesoamerica. And in all instances, the writing is somewhat pictographic. It's based on art. I mean, we can see this still today in the Chinese script. But hieroglyphs are obviously the clearest example of these because they divorce themselves from art the least. As we know, for millennia, millennia, millennia, humans have been using art to communicate ideas and thoughts. And hieroglyphs are an evolution of that idea to make ideas much clearer and more precise. And so we start by seeing labels on things like pots with symbols drawn on the labels to give an indication of what's inside the vessel. That's the origin of hieroglyphs as we know it. But you can only get so far with that. You can only do a couple of things easily by just drawing a picture. Sure enough, with a duck, you know, if you're in, your vessel contains some duck meat, it's easy enough to draw a duck, and you and I can look at it and say, okay, that's a duck. But then what happens when we start getting to more complex ideas like belief and abstract words like that? Because you can't just draw belief. And let me ask you, Tristan, as you. What would you draw as a simple symbol if you want, maybe two symbols, if you wanted me or the audience to think, okay, that means belief, Belief, belief.
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A
Well, in a Christian world, I probably put two hands together in prayer or something like that. Sure.
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B
But that could either mean prayer, it could mean worshipper, it could even mean high five, it could mean karate chop. It could mean lots of different things because pictures are quite hard often to give it one exact meaning to. What the Egyptians might have done if they'd spoken our language is they would have drawn a bee, like the buzzing, honey producing insects, and then a leaf, like the green thing that falls from a tree, and then You've got be leaf. And this is the basis of how hieroglyphs work, something called the rebus principle, where a picture doesn't actually mean what the picture looks like. It's about the sound that that picture has. And by taking a bunch of simple enough to draw and things that, that have simple sounds attached to them, they could suddenly create a huge suite of syllables which they could then stack together like that bee and that leaf, to make a word completely separate. You know, belief has nothing to do with bees or leaves unless you believe in a God of, of, of honey. But it's about the sounds. And this is how the majority of hieroglyphic words are constructed. They're built up of these things. So, for example, if you see an owl in a text, it may have nothing to do with an owl, but it's because earlier on, the word for owl had an M sound in it. And so they used it as the letter M in lots of words that just need, need an M. So this is one of the. It is the main type of the what I should say, three types of hieroglyphs are just these sound signs that work a little bit like how we might think of an Alphabet today, but much bigger because it doesn't just include the simple Alphabet we have, but it also includes whole syllables. So while there's one sign for the letter M, there's another sign for the sound men, if, you know, common sounds in Egyptian, so that they could build up longer words with fewer hieroglyphs. So that's the main thing we've got going on these sound signs. We've also got some fossils from that evolutionary period of hieroglyphs when it's first appearing. And they're just, you know, drawing a duck on a label to show what's in something. We have a few words which can be written just by drawing that word. So, for example, if you want to say the word sun, as in the big burning ball in the sky, you can just draw a sun and that will, that will make it clear to the reader what you're doing. These are. They appear with common words, but there aren't many of them. And then the final type of hieroglyphs. Oh, I love this. This is why this is the best language I've ever studied, hands down. I'm not biased, I'm right. And the third type is what we in Egyptology called determinatives. Now, usually when you're looking at a language and those of you who've, you know, learned other languages, ancient Languages, modern languages, you might have encountered something somewhat tricky where a language often has to choose. Is it going to be a very strict language with very clear rules, which makes it easy to understand, but doesn't always allow much room for poetry and artistic flair. You know, whereas other languages might be a bit more laxed in their rules, which gives a writer a bit more flair. Flair and room for it, but creates the complexities of not having a. A very fixed system. Hieroglyphs and Egyptian. Using hieroglyphs says, why not both? Let's have the best language ever and be able to do whatever we want. So their language is. Is nice and structured and rigid and clear, and we get all those advantages. But one of the places, I think they have this really unique way of adding flow and where you really get to see the thoughts and psychology of a writer behind a text, Even if this writer is just copying something down, we get to see a bit of who they are. Are these signs often appearing at the end of a word called a determinative. Now, these are silent symbols. They are completely unpronounced. And these are where the Egyptians really harkened back to the artistic roots of hieroglyphs. Because what these symbols do is they categorize a word. So, for example, if you draw a little seated man at the end of a word, it means the word before has something to do with men. It might be a man's name, might be a man's job. It could be. It's just something that's a man. And so it can help a reader in a number of ways if it's a word you don't know. You know, with my students recently, we were translating this text, this autobiography of this soldier. Then he talks very proudly about joining the navy and sleeping on a hammock made of net. But this word for net that he's talking about is a. Is a Hapax Legomenon. It's the only time in the language we see this word. And we wouldn't necessarily know what it was, except it's got the determinative at the end for sort of fishing stuff, right? So we can guess that this is probably net, that the hammock, and it's the fishing one.
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A
Is that. Is it like a little. A little fish, or is it something a bit different?
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B
It's actually equipment for it. Equipment. And so it can help you with this. Bear in mind, remember, a lot of this country wasn't fully literate. And you get. Literacy was more of a gradient. You get some people who could Read bits and bobs and useful things. Think of it less today how we see literacy and more how we might see computer literacy, where there are people more skilled people less and people who have certain abilities. And so they can help with that. They can also help distinguish between, you know, homonyms. Like, for example, the word set means both woman and a species of duck. But if you have the seated woman determinative at the end versus a bird's determinative, it's quite clear which one it is. And brilliantly, I think the third and best use of it is it can show nuance. So let's take for example this word jais, which means disagreement, right? If you draw it with a man touching his mouth. And at the end, this is the symbol that shows the word has something to do with oral action, whether that's, you know, breathing, speaking, spitting, kissing, anything like that. And so if there's a man touching his mouth at the end of the word for disagreement, it means a sort of a verbal argument, right, spoken argument. The same word can be written instead with a man holding a stick. This is the word for crime and violence. Now it's a punch up the disagreement. Now it's getting a bit violent and hairy. And thirdly, you also see the word pop up with a different man. This time he's holding a sword and shield. This is the determinative for war. And at this point, the disagreement is now a civil war. This is the word they use for civil war. Now I've got to say, it's the same word. It's still pronounced the same in all three instances. It's just disagreement. They're just adding a bit of nuance that only the reader can see through these little pictures. And they're not all men. There's lots of, lots of different ones. For example, abstract ideas like, you know, belief, which I mentioned, they'll have a little papyrus role at the end because we mentioned earlier how hard it is to draw abstract ideas because they're not physical. Well, the Egyptians realize the only time abstract ideas are physical things is when you write them down. So papyrus role was the, was the physical image of an abstract idea. And there are loads of these things and they are so much fun because it means that they're completely mutable and changeable. A scribe or an author can decide whether to add them, to omit them, to have several of them, to have none of them, to choose certain ones. There's no set rule about what to use. It's about creating an idea. So, you know, someone Might write a story, this one story, you know, about a man who's making some continually bad decisions. And his name goes from having that seated man sign just showing he's a guy to slowly starting his name. Starts having a mummy determinative at the end to give the reader this indication he's walking towards his own grave. Now because often these texts were read out around a maybe, you know, in a village or something like that, someone literate would have read these stories. The audience would have had no indication of that because these are silent signs. But the reader can see this, this little bit of information. And so it feels like this sort of extended idea of dramatic irony where the reader knows something which the, you know, the character really doesn't because it's, it's just not as much part of the spoken languages.
- [30:05]
A
So it's a story being read out. And also as you say, the fact that not many people would have been able to read the script so that one person who could would be reading it out. And it's amazing image to think of an Egyptian village, maybe they're all farmers during the day by the river Nile. And then they sit and they hear this story, story that's being read out to them on papyrus. And the man or woman who is reading it out, the scribe or whoever is reading out those signs and is able to tell the story, which is absolutely extraordinary with the particular script of hieroglyphs and the Egyptian language. I mean how many thousands of years are we talking about that we know that hieroglyphs are used as a particular script for the Egyptian language?
- [30:42]
B
Oh, that's a great question. Hieroglyphs appear about 3100 BC. Our sort of first proto hieroglyphs start appearing as a thing and our first real grammatical sentences in them appear a couple hundred years later, our last ever attested hieroglyphs used. And it's quite wonderful you can actually go see them. Anyone who is listening and planning a trip to Egypt anytime soon, I'd recommend you go to the beautiful Philli temple in the south of Egypt. And there somewhat surreptitiously on a wall, it used to be hidden behind a big sort of super trooper light thing. There's a little graffito from a local worshiper who writes in both hieroglyphs and demotic a dedication next to an image of a God. The God has been scratched out by by Christians in shortly afterwards. And I always think it's quite beautiful. The this little dedication ends with something like May my words last forever and ever. And These are the final attestation of hieroglyphs we have. So we're talking as a thing in the sense that we see hieroglyphs, typically they last for three and a half thousand years.
- [31:57]
A
Three and a half thousand years, which is just remarkable.
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B
They do earlier than that during this Iron Age period, when, when demotic becomes more of a thing, they do start getting relegated to becoming more of a priestly thing, and they start becoming not just something you can choose to use in official contexts. So I should say earlier on, when you've got just the options of hieroglyphs versus that slightly shorter hand, hieratic, you'll use hieroglyphs for something which you want to look spectacular. Right? These are effectively works of art. It's worth pointing out, in fact, that the Egyptians didn't have a different word between drawing and writing. You know, they could use this word for both. And hieroglyphs were always meant to be artistic, were meant to be visually beautiful. And there are some wonderful ways that they. They accomplish this and tie this in with art and show that conceptually was a very similar thing to them. And so it might be in a private letter, you would use hieratic. But on monuments, decrees, religious texts, things like that, you'd use hieroglyphs. Later on, they start using demotic, Greek, and eventually Latin for all those things. And hieroglyphs are really just used in temple circles. They become something so old that they get associated with this ancient religion and these ancient practices, and. And they're thought to have been gifts from the gods. You know, the common term for hieroglyphs in ancient Egypt, sesha netrut, literally means writing of the gods, to differentiate it from these other writing systems they have. These are the ones that the ibis headed Thoth, God of knowledge and wisdom, handed to the Egyptians as his. As his good luck present to get on going with civilization.
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A
Also, are there mythological stories associated with hieroglyphs? Is that a gift from the gods?
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B
So it's something. I mean, mythology is often an interesting one when we think about ancient Egypt. Because you asked earlier about this window we have, how much do we know? It's not just the number of the text that might astonish people about ancient Egypt, but it's also the breadth. I remember once I was with a very, very brilliant classicist, and I was talking about Egyptian literature, and she asked me, oh, the Egyptians had literature. Because we mostly imagine, you know, when people go into these museums and see these birds and zigzags decorating the stones around them, I think the common assumption, if they're not assuming it talks about birds, people quite naturally think, oh, these are, you know, the things we hear the Egyptians talk about sort of grand praise for the king and things like that. But we get a huge wonderful variety of texts, everything from really brilliant works of philosophy. You know, one of my favorite texts is about a man whose, whose soul leaves his body because the man is contemplating taking his own life and his soul steps out. And they have a conversation about the merits of life versus death. And the man is saying, he's trying to argue all the sort of horrors of life and the, the soul is saying all the horrors of death. One would say, you know, look at, you know, what, going down to the water and seeing the glint of the sun on the water and the fisherman doing it. Isn't that, doesn't that just make you want to seize life? The man says, yeah, but the fish stink. But it gets, it gets a little deeper than that. And it's very interesting text because it has a very dark negative view on death. Death and the afterlife, which we don't usually associate with ancient Egypt. Who, when these people largely wrote about death mostly out of hope and in, in context when they're trying to achieve this outcome. They write about death as some sort of wonderful thing where, or at least the afterlife will be pleasant. But we know they feared the idea of it. You'll, you'll often get people say, ah, the Egyptians loved, they didn't fear death. They, they spent their whole life.
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A
They're obsessed with it, that idea, isn't it? Yeah, they loved it.
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B
We know they hated it because in outside tombs, where again, slightly contrary to modern expectations of how a grave works, tombs would often be somewhat semi public. You'd want people to come in and make offerings and remember your name and things like that. And so a lot of them had what we might think of as adverts and billboards outside trying to encourage you, a passerby in the necropolis to come into that particular one and give some nice Egyptian beer. And one of the most, and you know, today in, in marketing campaigns, they'll try and speak to everyone but act as if they're speaking to you as an individual. Well, they do a similar thing in ancient Egypt where they will address you with, rather than just saying people, you know, they'll, they'll try and think of something that might describe you but that could describe anyone. And one of the most common ones we get on these, these adverts, I say in adverted commas is to those who love life and despise death. So, you know, we know at the end of the day, they saw it as an innate human value, or at least an innate Egyptian value to despise death. And so all this seeming love for death was actually preparation for something they weren't too fond about the idea of. So we get this huge breadth of that every. And, you know, while I mentioned philosophy on this, on this tangent, the impact of this on wider things is huge. I mean, famously, a lot of Greek philosophers went and, and studied in, in Egypt. And it's been suggested that this sort of dialogue approach and things like the ones I mentioned might have some influence on, on Plato and beyond. You know, works of philosophy, you get epic words of fiction and literature, you know, wonderful tales, poetic and prosaic. But in terms of mythology, so earlier on, we don't actually find many mythologies in the sense we might think of them. You know, a story about the gods. A lot of what we can tell early on about mythology we have to infer because the Egyptians already knew it. And they refer to it in things like spells and religious texts. And they might refer to an episode, but they don't always write it down, especially earlier. And there's certainly an element of, of secrecy around, around religion in ancient Egypt. And for example, earlier on, you'll get certain, you know, to, to bring in the hieroglyphs quickly. You'll get certain religious texts and, and spells written in what we call retrograde hieroglyphs, which are where they are written in mirror writing, to sort of encode them and make them harder to read, to give it this air of exclusivity. And I should say that mirror writing is trickier because generally hieroglyphs could be written left to right or right to left. And you can see where to start, which orientation they're going in based on the orientation of the signs. So, for example, you know, if you want to, you know, people listening, if you want to go and witness this in a museum or in Egypt, just look where the faces of the animals and things are looking. That's the start of the line. But in some of this retrograde writing, they do it the other way. The animals would face away from the start of the line. So you'd think the text might be, might be reading right to left, but it was actually reading left to right. And I can say sometimes it does throw at you if you're a new student trying to try to work this out. But it might have been easily readable for a lot of literate people, but it still gave this air of coding. And later on during the Greco Roman period when, as I mentioned, hieroglyphs really become something closely associated with the priestly class and not used in many other circles. Hieroglyphs actually get much more complicated in a way. They jump up from about 800 signs in total to about to several thousand signs. And there's a lot of codes that rely sort of on puns to give it this air of secrecy and mystery which goes in with this Egyptian attitude that sort of anything really worth knowing isn't going to be known by everyone. AT T Mobile we'll give you four.
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Americans lose when politicians choose. Learn more@guardyourcard.com so you get this kind of evolution and in the complexity of hieroglyphs as time goes on and like these adding and adding more, more symbols to it. There are so many examples of hieroglyphs surviving and you might immediately think of hieroglyphs carved onto temples in stone and those examples as you've already highlighted those on papyrus. It feels a difficult question, but are there like the best surviving examples of hieroglyphs from a particular site or a particular place that we should talk about?
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Well, it's a good question. There's a lot of talk that before the Greco Roman period hieroglyphs, you know, what a lot of Egyptologists called better quality because there seems to have, you know, more practice, more use for them. They had wider. Yeah, they had, they had wider use. And maybe they're just being done by native Egyptian craftsmen who know the stuff we, we offer. You do often see some Greco Roman period ones which are just dodgy, you know, squiggly as, you know, I'm someone who looks a lot at that period and says that. Oh, often, you know, we, we dismiss these things. Sometimes the things we see as worse in Greco Roman Egyptian art is actually a deliberate, you know, change. But sometimes these hieroglyphs do just look a little bit squinty. But I would say in lots of places, all over Egypt, you've got amazing quality stuff. Earlier on, you know, in the very early periods of, of ancient Egypt, in the sort of pyramid age, things were very centralized. You'd have the king and his court all in one area and all the sort of great artisans would be there too. And all our finest production is from there. But after Egypt's first civil war, the, the crown never quite reclaims as much power or central authority as it once had.
- [43:27]
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When is this civil war, by the way, Hugo?
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This is about 2000 BC right?
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Gossip.
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And so after that, after the end of the sort of pyramid era, things are dispersed and you get much better local centers of production with talented artists and scribes across the country. And so from that period, yeah, we see brilliant, beautiful things all over the place. And they certainly, as I say, they did consider it a work of art. You know, sometimes they might do it quite quickly on a piece of papyrus, but on a, on a temple wall, they, they would, you know, put rich color and detail and excellent carving. You know, Egypt was one of the first places to really get monumental stonework going. And they really perfected this art of doing it. And the link between hieroglyphs and art was, was pretty brilliant because they were very aware of this. So, you know, sometimes you'll be reading a biography in a tomb, let's say, and autobiographies, as you might imagine, often contain the word I, you know, me. And this is usually done in Egyptian with. It has a picture, the word for I usually has that same picture as a, as a seated man that I mentioned earlier, or if you're a woman, a seated woman. However, in these autobiographies, it's often missing, which seems strange because it feels like writing an autobiography without the word I. It'd be like saying, name is Hugo, am an Egyptologist, that sort of thing. The instances where they do that, it's because next to the text is a huge statue of that person. And so they're using the statue as a hieroglyph. The Statue is a 3D one which they're inserted, insert that into the correct spots in the text and they play around with this a lot and have these wonderful visual puns. Ramses the Great was quite big on these, you know. Ramses the Great. Why is he the great? He wasn't the greatest conqueror, he wasn't the greatest legislator. He was great at propaganda.
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PR man, wasn't he?
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Yeah, he's a PR genius. And you can actually go to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and see this very wonderful statue which looks like one thing. It looks clear. It looks like we've got a falcon standing behind young child Ramses. This is a fairly standard looking image. Horus, the, the God who's the guardian of kingship often associated with Vulcans, is regularly shown standing behind a king, protecting them as this, as this God of kingship. But there's an interesting thing here. The little boy who's shown by touching his finger to his mouth, which is the ancient Egyptian sort of equivalent of sucking your thumb, is also carrying this, this little sedge plant. And when we look at that sedge plant, it frames the whole thing differently because if we imagine that the falcon isn't Horus, as is usually supposed in these contexts, but is meant to be read as Ra, the other famous falcon God and the sun God, we've got Ra and then the child of Ramses. Child, Ancient Egyptian. The word for child is mess. And then the sedge plant was pronoun. The word for sedge was Sue. So together this bird, this child and this plant spell out Ramesizu. So they say the name of the king through this using what looks like one thing you're, you know, you look at and think, ah, Taurus with the king, but then you think, ah, it's actually spelling out his name and, and he does this with a couple of statues, these kind of 3D hieroglyphs which don't just have to be, you know, written in the traditional way on a wall, but they can really play with it like this.
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Hugo. It's absolutely extraordinary. And I'll bring up very quickly that Karnak temple complex and the amazing hieroglyphs that you can see on the walls, carved into the walls, some of them very much. I talk about Ramesses II as well, don't they? So absolutely extraordinary. And it does feel that that New Kingdom Egypt there is a real kind of zenith in hieroglyph Art. What I also remember from going to Garnica was actually, you see some of those pillars, I mean, they're completely colored. Well, they are colored and they were colored and they're restoring them now. So it's also, I guess, to think about hieroglyphs with an association with color, but also slightly different. But we'll kind of merge these questions together with magic too. This idea of these animals being etched into stone or on papyrus and I guess that belief, I mean, can these animals come to life? Especially if they're colorful animals too, so reflecting the actual colors of an animal you'll see in your day to day life?
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Yeah, absolutely. And I can think of a couple great examples there that bring in both those points with color. One thing we see is, yeah, rich, beautiful color use on hoglyphs, and a lot can be said there. A common thing you see on papyrus particularly is the use of the color red. Egyptian scribes, their toolkit of their trade was a sort of a wooden palette with a black inkwell and a red inkwell, the two very cheap colors to produce in Egypt. And black is what you'd use naturally for the majority of writing. But sometimes you'll see on papyrus, they switch to red. And this is because hieroglyphs don't really have punctuation. Like there's no full stops, no commas, no paragraphs, no spaces even between words. What they did have was this use of color instead. So when they want to denote what we would think of as a new paragraph or a new chapter, or in something like the Book of the Dead, a new spell, they'll switch to red to show a new section is starting. And just for a short bit. But funny enough, you know, the ideas of religion, you know, Herodotus called the Egyptians the most religious people on earth. These ideas of religion pervade every aspect of their culture, including their writing traditions. And so even though red is a cheap color to produce and they can use it here nicely, it's also considered a chaotic, evil color in ancient Egypt.
- [49:19]
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Sorry to screech. It's made from ochre. Is it? And the black is carbon. So ochre and carbon.
- [49:24]
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And because it was considered an evil color, you shouldn't write a God's name in it. So you'll see a text, sort of this paragraph starter, what we call the rubric, where there's a bit of red and then it switches back to black for a God's name, and then it switches back to red again because you didn't want to anger the gods. They Might have had interesting ideas about sacrilege. You know, we get one love spell where a guy threatens Osiris and he threatens to sort of burn down Osiris temples and palaces if he doesn't make the woman he loves fall in love with him. But they were certainly cautious in these senses. So we get that. And that idea of religion pervading hieroglyphs happens in some really wonderful magical tomb texts. And it's interesting you mentioned them coming to light because I've got an example of exactly that. You'll see sometimes this very strange phenomenon where you go in and you look at the text and something's missing because it's all the animals are literally missing pieces. You might find birds drawn without their feet, insects drawn without their wings, even snakes drawn. Not just missing things, but with knives drawn stabbed in their backs, or lions drawn with their heads clearly having been chopped off. Really violent looking hieroglyphs that aren't the norm and people don't, what on earth is that? But it's this process we call mutilation. Because they saw this very thin boundary between hieroglyphs, art and reality. They worried that the magic of the spell, the magic that's the force of creation in their religion, might accidentally seep into the hieroglyphs and bring the hieroglyphs to life. And the last thing you want is a bunch of owls flying around your tomb eating all your tomb offroad rings. So they would mutilate the animals, either cutting off bits of them or showing them murdered so that either the magic, you know, doesn't recognize it as a full owl and doesn't bring it to life, or if it does, it immediately dies again because it's chock full of knives in its back.
- [51:18]
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I guess one would be crocodiles as well, wouldn't it? That would be the big one. They're just like, we don't want a crocodile emerging.
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Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's the last thing you want. As I mentioned, you know, you can't advertise these tombs to people saying to all those who love life and hate death and come in and there's a bunch of magical crocodiles charging around the place. And they did like their stories about. There were a few stories about magical objects turning into crocodiles in these mythic and religious texts. Magic and religion had their own impacts on it.
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Hugo, what ultimately happens to hieroglyphs, do we just think the tradition of using this type of script for the Egyptian language? As time goes on, it becomes a bit more obsolete, less People know about it and ultimately it becomes a lost script.
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It's a really important question. And it's a couple of things, as you say. One, the complexity of it means that that's what causes it to be sequestered away as a religious thing. As the Greek writing system takes over as something easy to do. It's got vowels which make it easy to know how to pronounce, which hieroglyphs, like other aphrosiatic languages like Arabic and Hebrew, don't show the vowels. But the problem is it's sort of getting pushed into this role as a religious thing because then it means when Egyptian religion falls, hieroglyphs fall with it. So when the Roman Empire goes Christian, hieroglyphs go with it, go with the religion. We actually get this sermon recorded from a, from a Coptic Christian monk, Father Chanute. And Chanute writes this, you know, this sermon, Dao, which he gave in church in the first millennium AD about the evils of hieroglyphs. And he talks about that red color that I mentioned and sort of the animals and how it seems satanic and barbaric and that his disciples need to destroy them where they find them. They didn't entirely. You know, we see, for example, you mentioned Karnak earlier. There's. There's one place there which is the longest running place of worship still in use today because it was an ancient Egyptian temple with Ramses as hieroglyphs in. And then it becomes a Greco Roman temple and then a church and then a mosque. And it's still used today as a mosque. And you know, there are pillars with hieroglyphs in the mosque. You know, hieroglyphs are everywhere in ancient Egypt. They weren't able to destroy them all. You did get some bits of iconoclasm earlier on. There's this. I meant, funny enough, I actually mentioned this sign when I was talking about you might have a sign for the letter M, but a sign for the sound men. That sign for men we often find missing in places because throw things back a couple of thousand years to the time of Tus and Carmen is his father. Akhenaten famously banned the gods in an effort to curb the power of the priesthood. And chiefly he banned the major God Almond. And he sent out craftsmen to go and destroy hieroglyphs with Amon's name. But these craftsmen were clearly illiterate and they didn't know Armen's name. They just learned to recognize the biggest hieroglyph in his name, which is that men sound and so they go and carve that out wherever they see it. Even in words which have nothing to do with almonds. The words like fortification and word like enduring also have the same sign. So you'll be reading a text about some mundane fortifications, and someone's come along with a chisel and knocked it out because they thought it was a religious thing. When it wasn't. It would be like, you know, someone trying to destroy my name, Hugo, and destroying everything that had an H in it, you know, a capital H. Just out of caution, because they weren't sure how to spell my name. So that's how they fizzle out. But your wish is my command. In terms of other cultures using hieroglyphs, because this feeds in here. Hieroglyphs didn't have a complete death then, because a long time before that Roman period, hieroglyphs had sown the seeds of their legacy. Turquoise was a very valuable and precious material to the Egyptians, and there was a good mine for it out in the Sinai Desert. The problem is no one wants to go to the Sinai Desert. They often get, you know, civil servants talking about threatening to send their juniors there because it's sort of the worst job you can get. It's. It's a desert. It's not fun. But they needed this turquoise. So they'd send some overseers there to manage this mine. But they'd get most of their labor from the nearby Levant rather than using Egyptian laborers. And these Levantine laborers would come and see these Egyptian overseers writing in hieroglyphs back to the Nile, talking about things and also erecting monuments. They There was a temple of Hathor, the goddess of turquoise. And these laborers thought, oh, that's a good idea. We should have some of that. And they took these hieroglyphs and they adapted them for their own language, and they made these hieroglyphs for their own sounds, and they brought them back home in this writing we call proto Sinaitic. And this explodes outwards. So they bring it back to the Levant, where it becomes the Canaanite script and then the Phoenician script, now the Phoenicians of what is today Lebanon. The master sailors and traders of the ancient world spread this script everywhere, went on to become the Greek script, which became the Etruscan script and the Latin script. And today, of course, our script, it also went eastwards and became the Aramaic script, which became the Arabic script, and a bunch of others from there. So much so that every country in the world outside a bloc in East Asia, every other country in the world today uses a writing system primarily descended from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. And you can actually see it. You know, just take the first one, right? If you take a capital A, for instance, picture that in your head, sort of flip it upside down and you can actually see the bull's head which it descends from. You can see that kind of pointed face and the two horns. Throughout our day we go around and we see these things. We don't think much of our letters. We think, oh, you know, they're symbols made arbitrarily for some reason, but they really root back to, to this turquoise mine in the desert and to Egypt and seeing what images people were sticking onto sounds and how Egypt has influenced the entire world in a way that it's not often given due credit for.
- [57:24]
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Well, Hugo, how about that? The origins of the Alphabet stemming back to this mine in the Sinai Desert. What a thought to leave it on there. A lovely thought as well for emphasizing that great legacy of hieroglyphs.
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2.
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Hugo, your passion for hieroglyphs has been evident throughout this conversation, this interview, and it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.
- [57:45]
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Thank you so much for having me.
- [57:49]
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Well, there you go. There was Hugo Cook talking all of things hieroglyphs. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thank you for listening. Please follow the ancients on Spotify or wherever, wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Don't forget you can also listen to us and all of Historyhit's podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe@historyhit.com subscribe that's enough from me and I'll see you in the next episode.
- [58:29]
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Acast.
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Com.