Hieroglyphs 101 · Chapter 09

The signs that say nothing

Chapter 05 left a debt. Pepi’s name ended in a box — “a seated-figure sign that classifies the word as a person’s name,” this course said, and promised you would own it here. Time to pay up, and to meet the whole family of signs that make no sound at all and still run the show.

The people, seated

These are classifiersEgyptology's name for a determinative — the silent sign closing a word to say what kind of thing it is: person, speech, plural, idea — Egyptology’s other name for the determinativesa silent sign at the end (in cuneiform, often the front) of a word that classifies it — person, god, place, motion — never pronounced you met in chapter 03. They are never pronounced. They stand at the end of a word and answer one question before you even read it: what kind of thing is this? A person? Which sort? Something said, eaten, felt? Egyptian is the only major script family that built a full semantic filing system into its spelling — and once you can see it, you can skim a wall the way its owners did.

Nut takes your arms

Watch the seated woman work. On a Late Period tomb wall, the sky goddess receives the dead:

Every sounding sign in that line is an old friend — the duck, the pot, the giving loaf from chapter 06, water, basket, forearm. The one sign you could not have read is the one that says nothing: 𓁐B1 · seated woman — classifier: woman, quietly filing Nut where she belongs.

Three more, sorting everything else

The papyrus roll is this course’s favorite of the six: when an Egyptian word means something you cannot hold — a plan, a teaching, a memory — it is filed under scroll, because that is where such things live. The classifierEgyptology's name for a determinative — the silent sign closing a word to say what kind of thing it is: person, speech, plural, idea system is a map of how Egyptians sorted the world, and it agrees with us more often than not.

Everyone is talking

From the same Late Period biography — a wall that reports what the neighborhood was saying:

Everyone says… the others say… — a piece of gossip four classifiersEgyptology's name for a determinative — the silent sign closing a word to say what kind of thing it is: person, speech, plural, idea deep, and you just read the sorting: a person (seated man), a crowd (strokes), an abstraction (scroll). The sparrow gets its turn on a name you already know:

Henutsen Junior. Some things about families have not changed in four and a half thousand years.

Pepi, at last — and a confession

Now the debt. The box at the end of Pepi’s name in chapter 05 was this sign — shown here as an exhibit, one size up from the plain seated man:

And the confession, because this course promised you honesty along with the signs: the papyrus that spelled Pepi’s name is not about the king at all. It is the Satire of the Trades — the teaching a father named Dua-Khety composed “for his son, Pepi by name,” on the boat ride to school, cataloguing every other profession’s miseries so the boy would appreciate his desk. A namesake schoolboy, not a pharaoh — carrying a king’s name the way chapter 08’s Teti and Bebi carried theirs. The world’s oldest surviving “stay in school” speech, and its addressee has been your classmate since chapter 05.¹

Drill before you go on

1. Draw all six classifiersEgyptology's name for a determinative — the silent sign closing a word to say what kind of thing it is: person, speech, plural, idea from memory and say, for each, what kind of word it closes.
2. Read the gossip pair cold, covering the gloss column.
3. Why does “others” end in a scroll and three strokes? One sentence.
4. A word ends in 𓀁A2 · man with hand to mouth — classifier: eat, speak, think. List three things it might involve, and one it certainly does not.
5. Explain to an imaginary student why Pepi’s box turned out to be furniture-upgraded 𓀀A1 · seated man — classifier: man, I — and who Pepi turned out to be.

Next: the four signs everyone in the museum gift shop already knows — life, beauty, becoming, and god.