The Temple of Mentuhotep II

The Hieroglyphs

This painted limestone relief from the tomb of Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II dates to about 2000 BC. It was discovered by Herbert Winlock during one of his early expeditions sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it now resides. Mentuhotep II, an 11th dynasty ruler, built an unusual terraced mortuary complex at Deir el Bahri during his reign, and much of the complex was decorated with these limestone reliefs. This example, showing Mentuhotep as a god in the afterlife also includes his name in the cartuoche. It is a good example of formal hieroglyphic and clearly shows the skills of the royal workshops.

Writing in the Nile River Delta appeared around the beginning of the First Dynasty, ca.3200 BC. Unlike Sumerian cuneiform, however, the earliest examples, such as the Narmer palette, appear fully formed, and are clearly based on artistic traditions. Over the next three millenia hieroglyphs would appear everywhere: as temple wall lapidary, on faience statues, on alabaster canopic jars (my personal favorite), on papyrus Books of the Dead. On pretty much everything.¹ The Egyptian artisans saw little difference between text and illustration; it was all the same to them. Imagine if Da Vinci had painted “Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, Florence” next to Mona Lisa’s head. O.K., maybe not the best example, but you see what I mean.

It is no suprise then, that by the time of Alexander's conquest of Egypt in 332 BC, the Greeks thought they were magical symbols and gave them the name hieroglyphiká.² These strange symbols captivated the Greeks and ca.500 AD Horapollo wrote Hieroglyphia, the first authoritative text on the subject. After Hieroglyphia was discovered again in the middle ages it became widely influential with the 15th century Humanists. Colonna included hieroglyphs in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) and Athanasius Kircher published his own study in his massive 3-volume Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652) The only problem was that Heiroglyphia was completely wrong. It would take the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, some 200 years later, before there was a proper decipherment.

Hieroglyphic examples from Champollion’s Grammiare³

The Rosetta Stone, a basalt stele written in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek was discovered in 1798 by French archeologists after Napoleon conquered Egypt. Almost immediately experts began to decipher the hieroglyphic signs. The English polymath Thomas Young attempted the translation with the help of a partial demotic alphabet but it would be the French Egyptologist and polyglot Jean-François Champollion who would unlock the secrets of the magical Egyptian symbols.⁵ He detailed his translation and key to Egyptian grammar in his now famous Lettre a M. Dacier (1822) and Précis du système hiéroglyphique (1824), and found hieroglyphic to be “…a complex system, writing figurative, symbolic, and phonetic all at once, in the same text, the same phrase, I would almost say in the same word.”

1. E.g.: of the 110,000+ Egyptian items in the British Museum 30% of them are inscribed with hieroglyphs.

2. ἱερογλυφικά (hieroglyphiká) from ἱερός hierós (’sacred’) and γλύφω glýphō (‘engrave’).

3. Champollion le Jeune. Grammaire Egyptienne. Paris: Typographie de Firmin Didot Frères, 1836.

18 Dec 2008 ‧ Typographia Historia