"It is a rotten civilization." That's how a prominent, and rather off putting Salafist described ancient Egyptian civilization. This was actually one of the more balanced and sane attitudes among Islamists towards the original culture of the land they now live on. Positions ranging from destruction of all ancient sites, to their drowsing in molten wax to "stem idolatry" color the uniformly insane spectrum of Islamist views on the ancient Egyptians.
However, the Salafists are not unique in the Middle East and the Western world in their hate towards the ancient Egyptians. In fact, this ancient civilization presents a perplexing model that does not fit with the patriarchal, white, Abrahamic view of how man became human. But the reality is that The lower Nile is where humanity became itself. Attempts at demonizing the ancient civilization, shifting the credit to Mesopotamia, or simply ignoring the entire antiquity of humanity have consistently failed to stem the genuine interest of millions of young children in the ancient Pharaohs of Egypt. In two blog posts I will discuss just two aspects of how ancient Egypt represents a repository of human conscience. And in doing so I am ascribing zero credit to modern Egyptians regardless of their religions, for they have little in common with their ancestors.
One particularly nasty misconception about ancient Egypt is that its writing system, the Hieroglyphic writing, was intentionally complex. This is part of the great web of untruth weaved about the priesthood of Amun: That they kept writing intentionally unreachable that commoners could never use it. Regardless of the fact that in its late period Hieroglyphs developed into Demotic, literally the commoner writing, even the original Hieroglyphs themselves were astonishingly easy to read.
Perhaps the reason that many people find Hieroglyphs intimidating is that they try to measure them against modern writing systems. Egyptian writing was multi-layered, its main concern was clarity and unambiguity. A word was written, but multiple symbols were added just to make sure the reader would be able to sound it out correctly, and understand its meaning without confusion.
A very small group of Egyptian glyphs are "ideograms" or symbols that represent a whole word. For example a glyph of a mouth with a dash underneath represents a mouth or (ir) in ancient Egyptian. A glyph of an enclosure with a dash under it is a house or (per) in ancient Egyptian.
Although ideograms are few and far between they represent an idea of how the writing system came to be. At once Hieroglyphs are derived from mundane everyday symbols, and at the same time they represent a stroke of genius in how they are employed to form bigger words. But what's eerie is that the writing system seems to pop out in a more or less complete form. The date where it first pops out keeps being pushed back by new discoveries. It's already been pushed back enough to deny the desperate attempt to describe Egyptian as a derivative of Sumerian.
The majority of Egyptian words are written by using the similarity of the sounds of certain words to form larger words. A common example that James Allen used to illustrate is using the glyphs for eye, bee, and leaf in English to describe the phrase "I believe" through similarity of sound. To sound out the words, Egyptians used glyphs that had three letters, two letters, and one letter. The glyphs containing one letter were added redundantly to make reading the two and three letter glyphs easier and definitive. In doing so, the scribe wanted to help readers, rather than hinder them. For example the word ANKHU (the living) is written using the famous glyph for ANKH (actually means sandal, but sounds like ANKH for life). It is followed by the single letter glyphs for N and KH. The W in the end (the chick) is the male plural marker.
But even with redundant two-layered phonetic writing, the ancient scribe was obsessed about clarity of meaning. So the majority of words ended up in a glyph that was not pronounced called the "identifier." The only job of the identifier is to classify the word and allow it to be easily identified. So for example ANKHU is not only spelled out phonetically at two levels at once, it also has an identifier glyph added to the end. The identifier is two people, indicating we are talking about a property of people. Three dashes indicates this is a plural.
In short, the writing system included elements of Syllabries, Alphabets, pure and impure Abjads, logographic writing systems, and ideogramatic signs all wrapped up in one. Hieroglyphs were a repository of human writing, foreshadowing every kind of writing system that would later spring up due to its obsessive and redundant nature. As Greek letters started to be used to write Coptic, Ptolemaics gave special mystical meanings to the use of certain glyphs to write certain words. This was never the intention of the ancient scribes who just used the glyphs because they sounded like the words they wanted to write. This Greek mysticism is the origin of the myth about the complexity of Egyptian writing.
However, it is worth noting that the Greek alphabet is itself a very intelligent daughter of Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Between the Middle and New Kingdoms, Egypt was embroiled in a long and bitter series of civil wars, and large parts of the North was occupied by invaders from the Levant. In the civil war, all sides used Semitic mercenaries in their armies. To allow these mercenaries to communicate, Egyptians taught them a simplified version of Hieroglyphs using only single sound glyphs. This was the alphabet used to write Semitic graffiti in Wadi-El Hol. As Egypt began to be liberated from the Hyksos, most of the mercenaries had to leave back to the Levant. We can find traces of Wadi El-Hol in Serabit el Khadim in Sinai. Later that became proto-Canaanite and then Phoenician, the so called first alphabet, but in fact the first abjad.
Writing was independently discovered in antiquity in only four locations: China, Central America, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. Central American (Mayan) and Mesopotamian (cuneiform) writing died out. Chinese lived and flourished and inspired Japanese and Korean. But every other writing system everywhere is descended from the holy drawings of the ancient Egyptians. Some writing systems picked only single letter symbols, and became alphabets, whereas others used multi-sound symbols and became syllabries, but they all share a single ancestor.
However much the Salafists might hate it, the fact is everything from Arabic and Indian scripts to Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are due to a civil war in the countryside of Asyut. And however much a lot of people would rather owe their writing system to the mysterious Sumerians; the fact is, it was in the Nile Valley that a bunch of people of maddeningly indeterminate race said: World, meet writing!
However, the Salafists are not unique in the Middle East and the Western world in their hate towards the ancient Egyptians. In fact, this ancient civilization presents a perplexing model that does not fit with the patriarchal, white, Abrahamic view of how man became human. But the reality is that The lower Nile is where humanity became itself. Attempts at demonizing the ancient civilization, shifting the credit to Mesopotamia, or simply ignoring the entire antiquity of humanity have consistently failed to stem the genuine interest of millions of young children in the ancient Pharaohs of Egypt. In two blog posts I will discuss just two aspects of how ancient Egypt represents a repository of human conscience. And in doing so I am ascribing zero credit to modern Egyptians regardless of their religions, for they have little in common with their ancestors.
One particularly nasty misconception about ancient Egypt is that its writing system, the Hieroglyphic writing, was intentionally complex. This is part of the great web of untruth weaved about the priesthood of Amun: That they kept writing intentionally unreachable that commoners could never use it. Regardless of the fact that in its late period Hieroglyphs developed into Demotic, literally the commoner writing, even the original Hieroglyphs themselves were astonishingly easy to read.
Perhaps the reason that many people find Hieroglyphs intimidating is that they try to measure them against modern writing systems. Egyptian writing was multi-layered, its main concern was clarity and unambiguity. A word was written, but multiple symbols were added just to make sure the reader would be able to sound it out correctly, and understand its meaning without confusion.
A very small group of Egyptian glyphs are "ideograms" or symbols that represent a whole word. For example a glyph of a mouth with a dash underneath represents a mouth or (ir) in ancient Egyptian. A glyph of an enclosure with a dash under it is a house or (per) in ancient Egyptian.
Although ideograms are few and far between they represent an idea of how the writing system came to be. At once Hieroglyphs are derived from mundane everyday symbols, and at the same time they represent a stroke of genius in how they are employed to form bigger words. But what's eerie is that the writing system seems to pop out in a more or less complete form. The date where it first pops out keeps being pushed back by new discoveries. It's already been pushed back enough to deny the desperate attempt to describe Egyptian as a derivative of Sumerian.
The majority of Egyptian words are written by using the similarity of the sounds of certain words to form larger words. A common example that James Allen used to illustrate is using the glyphs for eye, bee, and leaf in English to describe the phrase "I believe" through similarity of sound. To sound out the words, Egyptians used glyphs that had three letters, two letters, and one letter. The glyphs containing one letter were added redundantly to make reading the two and three letter glyphs easier and definitive. In doing so, the scribe wanted to help readers, rather than hinder them. For example the word ANKHU (the living) is written using the famous glyph for ANKH (actually means sandal, but sounds like ANKH for life). It is followed by the single letter glyphs for N and KH. The W in the end (the chick) is the male plural marker.
However, it is worth noting that the Greek alphabet is itself a very intelligent daughter of Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Between the Middle and New Kingdoms, Egypt was embroiled in a long and bitter series of civil wars, and large parts of the North was occupied by invaders from the Levant. In the civil war, all sides used Semitic mercenaries in their armies. To allow these mercenaries to communicate, Egyptians taught them a simplified version of Hieroglyphs using only single sound glyphs. This was the alphabet used to write Semitic graffiti in Wadi-El Hol. As Egypt began to be liberated from the Hyksos, most of the mercenaries had to leave back to the Levant. We can find traces of Wadi El-Hol in Serabit el Khadim in Sinai. Later that became proto-Canaanite and then Phoenician, the so called first alphabet, but in fact the first abjad.
Writing was independently discovered in antiquity in only four locations: China, Central America, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. Central American (Mayan) and Mesopotamian (cuneiform) writing died out. Chinese lived and flourished and inspired Japanese and Korean. But every other writing system everywhere is descended from the holy drawings of the ancient Egyptians. Some writing systems picked only single letter symbols, and became alphabets, whereas others used multi-sound symbols and became syllabries, but they all share a single ancestor.
However much the Salafists might hate it, the fact is everything from Arabic and Indian scripts to Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are due to a civil war in the countryside of Asyut. And however much a lot of people would rather owe their writing system to the mysterious Sumerians; the fact is, it was in the Nile Valley that a bunch of people of maddeningly indeterminate race said: World, meet writing!
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