Hieroglyphs 101 · Chapter 02

Pictures that talk

This chapter is about labels on jars of oil and wine — so its sign is the stand such a jar stood on:

A round-bottomed jar cannot stand on its own; Egyptian households propped theirs on rings like this one. Draw it — a squat ring seen from the side — and notice, once more, the pattern from chapter 00: a piece of kitchen furniture, borrowed to spell the sound g, nothing jar-like about it. Why pictures behave this way is exactly this chapter’s story.

A picture of an owl is just an owl. Writing begins at the moment a picture stops meaning what it shows and starts meaning what it sounds like. This chapter is about that moment on the Nile.

Tags on jars

The oldest Egyptian writing we can point at comes from a tomb at Abydos known as U-j, from around 3250 BCE — as early as anything from Mesopotamia. It is not literature. It is inventory: small labels of bone and ivory, each pierced with a hole for a cord, each carved with a few signs and once tied to goods — oil, cloth, deliveries from named estates.

Sound familiar? It should. Cuneiform’s story starts the same way — counting first, language later. Writing was not invented to record poetry. Poetry moved in later, the way people move into a house built for the shop downstairs.

The king with a catfish for a name

By about 3100 BCE the trick is unmistakable. A great ceremonial palette — a slab of carved slate celebrating a king who unified Egypt — writes its royal name at the top with two pictures: a catfish and a chisel. In Egyptian, catfish is nꜥr and chisel is mr. Put the sounds together: Nꜥr-mr — Narmer.

The pictures have stopped showing and started spelling. Narmer is not the fish-and-chisel king; the fish and the chisel are borrowed purely for their sounds, exactly as if English wrote “Carson” with a drawing of a car and a drawing of a sun. This borrowing — the rebusborrowing a picture for its sound instead of its meaning — drawing a sun to write "son" — is the engine inside every early writing system, and Egypt’s version of it is the direct ancestor of the signs you will learn in chapter 04: an owl that means nothing owlish, only the sound m; a mouth that has stopped being about mouths and become the sound r.

One more detail worth noticing: Narmer’s name sits inside a frame — a rectangle representing the royal palace facade, called a serekhthe palace-facade frame around the earliest Egyptian royal names — the cartouche's ancestor. The habit of putting a king’s name in a protective enclosure is as old as Egyptian kingship itself; in chapter 05 you will meet its famous successor, the ring-shaped cartouchethe rope ring drawn around a royal name in Egyptian writing, and read real names inside it.

From names to sentences

For its first few centuries, Egyptian writing stays terse: names, titles, labels, year-records — language compressed to tags. Whole grammatical sentences appear in the Old Kingdom, and by the Middle Kingdom (around 2000 BCE) the script carries everything: teachings, stories, hymns, medical recipes, tax rolls, love songs. The system you will learn in the next chapter is the mature machine — but every part of it, sound-signs, word-signs, and silent classifiersEgyptology's name for a determinative — the silent sign closing a word to say what kind of thing it is: person, speech, plural, idea, is already visible in embryo on a slate palette five thousand years old.¹

Drill before you go on

1. Explain the rebusborrowing a picture for its sound instead of its meaning — drawing a sun to write "son" to an imaginary student using the catfish and the chisel — then invent one for your own name in your own language.
2. Why do the earliest written objects record deliveries and counts rather than stories?
3. What is a serekhthe palace-facade frame around the earliest Egyptian royal names — the cartouche's ancestor, and what later device plays its role?

Next: the spine of the course — how signs mean. Read it twice.