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Kara Kavanagh
Professor Bryan Babcock
Rels 250-Cd
27 November 2012
Evolution of Writing in Egypt
Writing plays an important role in the development of a civilization. One
civilization in particular, Egypt, had a writing that would fascinate and intrigue people for
centuries. Egypt’s writing occurred simultaneously with its neighbors in Mesopotamia
who gave the idea to use writing. As the centuries proceeded, Egypt used four different
scripts that included hieroglyphs, hieratic, Demotic and Coptic. Egyptian writing
developed into a vowel-free language with ideographic and phonetic elements. The
artifacts that have been discovered helped show the importance of writing and whom it
was used to describe. These artifacts were predominantly ceremonial objects, stelae,
names of kings and labels on goods. This helped show the relation to the royal family’s
use of writing and how powerful the usage of words was becoming. Scribes became a
select class of Egyptian people who were in charge of the correspondence between Egypt
and other natures. But by the Late Period, Egyptians had been banned from writing
hieroglyphics which led into the knowledge of reading them to disappear. This
pictographic script was unable to be read until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799
that helped crack the code of the hieroglyphics. Ancient Egypt started out using writing
as a way to keep records that evolved into a complex language that developed throughout
the early centuries.

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Artifacts have become the key answer to unearthing the origin of ancient Egyptian
writing. Bone and ivory tags, pottery vessels and clay seal impressions have been found
in Abydos with hieroglyphic writing on them. They have been dated to about 3200 BCE
through contextual and radiocarbon analysis. These results have established them as
being from the predynastic era. These artifacts are the oldest known examples of
Egyptian writing (Mitchell 1). The bone and ivory tags that had been discovered were
attached to boxes and containers. The tags had the names of the places and institutions
involved in the exchange of the goods. The clay seal impressions, the oldest of the
artifacts, indicate the origins of the different economies. These artifacts have helped
provide Egyptologists with valuable information about the political organization and
resource distribution in predynastic Egypt.
The Egyptian professor, William Arnett, has studied the motifs and decorative
signs found on these artifacts including predynastic pottery. Through these studies, he has
clarified that a rudimentary writing system had indeed been in use several centuries
before the actual unification of Egypt. Despite this clarification, the “hieroglyphs”
determined by Arnett were most likely the Egyptians’ early way of portraying the natural
world. Despite that, they might be what the ancient Egyptians drew their inspiration for
the first hieroglyphics from. This could be used to apply to symbol for gods, shrines and
spiritual concepts such as the raised up arms for ka. These probably existed before the
Egyptian need for a formal system of writing (Ray 309).
However, in order to understand the development of writing in ancient Egypt,
research of its neighboring lands should be researched. Mesopotamia was located north
of Egypt and east of the Mediterranean Sea. Their close proximity originated in trade

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relations. It was through this interaction with Mesopotamia that Egypt was affected for
the rest of its history. Around 3000 BCE, Mesopotamia had a gradual emergence of
picture writing. It seemed to have been used as a form of accounting or similar record
keeping. As a country with extensive trade routes, Mesopotamia needed a way to keep
records. They found their answer through the invention of a writing system.
Through their interaction and trade with Mesopotamia, Egypt seemed to have
taken the idea of writing from them. Egypt was developing as a country and they must
have seen how vital of an invention writing had become. The Egyptian state had
developed to the point that certain agencies were responsible for the economic and
political aspects of Egypt. In order to successfully function, they needed a way to record
their activities. They probably utilized their early “hieroglyphics,” as explained by Arnett,
and added additional glyphs and developed a grammatical system (Ray 309). This
process evolved into the true hieroglyphics used during the dynastic era of Egypt.
The predynastic era of Egypt consisted of a royal court. The inscriptions dating
from the 1st Dynasty are nearly exclusively concerned with royal administration. This
included the major cult activities where the king played a dominant role, ceremonial
palace events or symbolic public works. According to Egyptian tradition, Menes of This
in Upper Egypt conquered the Delta and unified the country. He established Memphis as
his capital and introduced the traits that would be associated with pharonic culture. As
John D. Ray explains, Menes is not credited with the invention of hieroglyphics (310).
Instead, the development of writing is attributed to the god, Thoth. He is considered the
creator god according to the Memphite creation story. When Thoth created the world, “he
uttered words which were magically transformed into objects of the material world.” This

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would explain why the ancient Egyptians called their pictographic script, medou netjer
which translates to “words of the gods” (Silverman 230). This religious relation may hold
the key to the creator(s) of hieroglyphs. The priests of Thoth, which would explain the
relation to that particular god, would have had the leisure and the training for abstract
speculation. But overall, temples throughout ancient Egyptian history were essentially
government departments. Royalty seemingly appointed temple officials during the
predynastic period. Therefore, it seemed only natural that the royal courts were involved
with the temples. Therefore, the argument that the temple priests created hieroglyphics is
the probable origin of writing in ancient Egypt.
The ancient Egyptian language is from the Afro-asiatic family that originated
from North Africa and the Near East. The Egyptian language has a unique series of
palatised consonants. It has one tense that is called the stative. Being from the Afro-
asiatic, it does have its signature triconsonantal root system. A unique factor about the
ancient Egyptian language is its complete lack of vowels. This is a striking because
vowels indicate a major shift in meaning. There may be a reason behind their absence
though. There is a clear tendency for all ancient Egyptian words to be written with one
pictorial sign that was chosen from one of the three roots. By grouping words together
into a certain root under a pictorial sign, the use of vowels became irrelevant. However
when it comes to writing the Egyptian language, the grammar becomes more
complicated.
Egyptian writing consists of ideographic and phonetic elements. These elements
are used as word-signs to express whole words, as phonograms to express sounds as parts
of words and as determinatives (Griffith 154). Oddly enough, the phonogram that

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represents a single sound, more commonly known as the alphabetic script, was never
fully utilized. When hieroglyphics were first being used, Egyptians had developed a
twenty-five-letter alphabet that represented single sounds. If they had chosen to proceed
with this alphabet, they could have written these alphabetic signs with a determinative
added at the end of each word. The only reason alphabetic signs even originated was the
ancient Egyptians’ desire to express separately the formative and flexional consonants
that modified the meaning of words and the sounds being found useful. Their
employment increased but there was never an advancement made towards an exclusive
alphabetic script that only rendered consonants and semi-consonants. If they had adopted
this, the ancient Egyptians would have had to completely change their writing system.
They were too conservative but most importantly they loved the decorative effect that
hieroglyphics made. If the alphabetic script had been pursued, there would have been
limitations on their choices of signs and thus longer scripts that would lead the scribes
into greater complications when writing them. By returning to the aforementioned three
functions of hieroglyphics, the use of this writing for Egyptians is becomes more
comprehensible. Word-signs represent the name of the objects or actions pictured by
them. Phonograms represent sounds that are used as parts of words are derived from
word-signs. These are then divided into two separate groups. The first group of
phonograms that represent single sounds are referred to as unilateral. The other group
represents two sounds that are referred to as bilateral. Finally, there are determinatives
that may be either specific or general. Though overall, a single sign may combine all the
functions of word-signs, phonograms and determinatives. It is through the combination of

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word-signs, phonograms and determinatives that the Egyptians were able to create a
successful writing form.
The Egyptians expanded on their writing as the centuries progressed. The
grammar broadened and new symbols were added. As Egyptian history continued, the
use of hieroglyphics heightened and expanded. During the Old Kingdom, about one
thousand hieroglyphics were in use. Despite this vast amount, determinatives were still
used sparingly in writing at this time. Throughout the Old Kingdom, the priestly class
began to use a more cursive writing called hieratic. Hieratic was mainly written on
papyrus and isn’t often found carved on stones like hieroglyphics are. It was so
successful that it continued to be used for religious texts until the Ptolemaic Age (Griffith
157). By the time the Egyptians reached the 6th Dynasty, they were writing long texts. As
they entered into the Middle Kingdom, the amount of hieroglyphics dropped to about
seven hundred fifty but an increase in literature, especially poetry, and other writings
helped perfect the hieroglyphic system. The Middle Kingdom is known as the “Classical”
Egyptian. Language had now been formalized and became the standard medium for
religious, legal and monumental texts and some literary works (Silverman 236). The
ancient Egyptians had trouble with foreign rule. One such problem was during the period
of Hyksos domination during the Second Intermediate Period. There was an existence of
official bilingualism during the Hyksos rule. The sphinx of Serabit el-Khadim has
inscriptions in both hieroglyphics and Semitic alphabetic script. Continuing into the New
Kingdom, King Akhenaten built a new capital city, Akhetaten, in Amarna where an
archive of letters was discovered. There were three hundred fifty written to and from the
Egyptian court. An important fact about these letters was that they were written in

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Akkadian, a form of Babylonian, as opposed to Egyptian. These letters are clay tablets
inscribed with cuneiform script. This was the common format for diplomatic
communication around this time as the letters date from approximately 1360 to 1330
BCE. This discovery would help demonstrate the development of demotic three centuries
later. By the 25th Dynasty, the ancient Egyptians came under control of the Nubians. The
small and highly developed cursive demotic began to be applied for business purposes.
By the Ptolemaic Period, it became common writing for everyday life (Knight 1). The
final Egyptian language that developed was Coptic during the second century Common
Era. Astrologers and foreign scholars who lived in Egypt attempted to reproduce the
Egyptian language in Greek letters with the aid of a few signs borrowed from the demotic
alphabet to express special Egyptian sounds. Their efforts resulted in the foundation of
Coptic (Griffith 157). Overall, Coptic consisted of Greek letters with eight Egyptian
letters added. By the fourth century, paganism was dying as Christianity began to spread
throughout the world. This exterminated the ancient system of writing all together and
Coptic became the universal language. Christian Egyptians used this as their liturgical
language. It continued to be used until the Middle Ages but some of the language is still
practiced in Coptic liturgy today. So it is no surprise that the early French Egyptologist,
of the 1500s Joseph Scaliger, knew that it was an ancient Egyptian language. In 1598, he
was able to recognize the etymology of the word “Copt” has being the corruption of a
Greek word. Scaliger saw that Coptic had no connection to other oriental languages such
as Hebrew and Arabic. But another important aspect that he noticed was that Coptic
consisted of Greek with some additional letters (Dijkstra 73). These four Egyptian

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writing systems help explain the development of Egypt throughout its history and how its
writing styles were effected.
Aforementioned, the earliest Egyptian writings were primarily inscriptions on
ceremonial objects, stelae marking tombs, labels on the goods in tombs and the seals of
kings, queens and officials. These all show a correlation between ritual, royal power and
funerary preparations. This then leads into the treatment of the names of kings and
queens in ancient Egyptian texts. The system of using five names for the kings and
queens was established in the Middle Kingdom. The first name was the Horus name
because it represented the king as a manifestation of the god Horus and it was prefixed
with Horus’ name. This name is depicted in a serekh that is shaped like a banner. It
represents a fortress protecting the name of the king and essentially the king himself.
During the early periods of Egyptian history, the Horus name was the most important
name and was used exclusively on monuments. The second and third names weren’t as
important and were not written in a special enclosure despite their standard prefixes. The
second name was the Nebty name that proclaimed the king or queen as the ruler of “the
two ladies”, Upper and Lower Egypt (Knight 6). The third name was the Golden Horus
name. The last two royal names were the praenomen and the nomen. During the New
Kingdom, the praenomen had become the name for official usage totally displacing the
Horus name. Formal letters written to the king or queen from foreigners addressed the
king or queen by their praenomen. A vast majority of praenomens before the 11th
Dynasty and all of them afterwards, contained the name of the sun god, Ra. This
represents the king or queen as Ra’s viceregent on earth as ruler of all of Egypt. During
the New Kingdom, the praenomen would be the name to be written if only one name was

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being used. The nomen was used if a second was included. Finally, the nomen was the
king or queen’s personal name. It was their name before they became sovereign over all
of Egypt. The prefix to the nomen was “son of Ra.” This prefix helped reaffirm their
personal relationship to the deity. An interesting factor about the 20th Dynasty is that all
the kings used “beloved of Amun” in their nomen except for Ramses IV. The praenomen
and nomen were always encircled within a loop called a cartouche. The cartouche was
used to dignify anybody of importance mainly royalty and deities. Hieroglyphics were
becoming powerful symbols to the ancient Egyptians through their usage as the king or
queen’s five names.
In ancient Egypt, words were regarded as powerful devices. It was soon believed
that whatever was written would be eternally alive. It seemed that writing converted an
inanimate object into an animate one. Just by simply writing a person’s name would
make them immortal (Adams 82-3). The ancient Egyptians used this belief to their
advantage particularly with burials and spells. During the Old Kingdom, the king’s burial
chamber contained hieroglyphics of food, drinks and incantations to help them overcome
any obstacles on their way to the kingdom of the dead. These words were written to
effect the “magic” permanently on the deceased’s behalf. The power of words was such a
widespread belief that by the Middle Kingdom, Coffin Texts showed the power of using
words to cross the barrier between the World of the Living into the World of the Dead.
The profound use of words in ancient Egypt can truly be found in the “Book of the
Dead.” This book, from the early New Kingdom, contains a collection of spells,
instructions and poems that would help assist the deceased on their journey to the
underworld. This mythical-magical association of fixed words was also present in the

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Egyptian belief that symbols themselves have benign or maleficent powers. Egyptians
had pictorial symbols of dangerous animals. But by the end of the Middle Kingdom,
these began to be depicted in a mutilated fashion. Such manipulation of symbols
indicated that they were liminal objects that were piercing the protective barrier between
the World of the Living and the World of the Dead. This liminality could make
hieroglyphics either threatening or useful such as the depiction of a scorpion versus the
hieroglyphics for bread. The Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead may have
symbolically focused on the dead, but they did play a role in the networks of power. This
included the social hierarchy but most importantly the royal court.
As a result of the overwhelming progression of writing in ancient Egypt, a new
class was created. Scribes were a small group in the literati of Egyptian society. This
group was comprised of semi-literate doctors, ritualists, priests, political officials, young
students and key advisors in the kingdom’s affairs. Scribes held a considerable amount of
interpretive power. The correspondence between various nations required translations not
just from the language of the sender to the language of the receiver but often to and from
a third language. First the scribe needed to translate speech to hand to clay. The message
then needed to be translated when it reached its destination. As mentioned earlier, the
god, Thoth, is associated with the creation of writing. This origin helps explain how the
scribes were considered a form of a spiritual elite. There seemed to be a “mysterious
power of writing in recording, transmitting and freezing affirmations and commands soon
endows it with an awe-inspiring prestige and causes it to be fused with the authority of
ritual specialists” (Adams 79). But overall, the idea of a divine origin to writing gave
people a “profound sense of the existential importance of writing to political power and

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order, to justice and to the preservation of human life and to human destiny” (Adams 81).
The power that scribes held was immense. It was so respected that elite Egyptian men
would sometimes have themselves depicted in the characteristic scribal posture. This
class is able to depict how influential writing was in ancient Egypt.
Egypt’s various conquerors during its Late Period, which included Greece and
Rome, were fascinated by the ancient Egyptians’ hieroglyphics. But by the time of
Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt, the use of hieroglyphics was outlawed. As the
centuries proceeded, the Western world became fascinated by these beautiful pictographs.
The problem was that they had lost the knowledge needed to read them. Hieroglyphica
was discovered on the Greek island of Andros in 1419. Its author was the fifth-century
Alexandrian professor of philosophy, Horapollo. Hieroglyphica was published in 1505.
His book makes a futile attempt at interpreting the hieroglyphics as images because at the
time that Horapollo wrote it the script had fallen out of use. The Renaissance scholars had
heard of references of hieroglyphics from other classical authors but this was the only
written work that was entirely devoted to the script. But they were sorely misinformed
because Horapollo completely left out the phonetic value of hieroglyphics which, as
discussed earlier, is very important to understanding and reading hieroglyphics. Despite
their possible glimpse into the ancient Egyptian world, the Western world was denied the
knowledge behind hieroglyphics (Dijkstra 60). It wasn’t until 1799 when a monumental
discovery was made. In the Delta town of Rosetta, Napoleon Bonaparte’s soldiers
discovered a slab of black basalt with a commemorative inscription written in three
different scripts. Hieroglyphics were in the upper register, demotic was in the middle
register and Greek was on the lower register. The stone was dated back to the ninth year,

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about 196 BCE, of Ptolemy V Epiphanes’s reign during the Ptolemaic Period. The text is
a decree by the priests of Memphis listing the king’s honors. In 1802, under the terms of
the Anglo-French treaty of Alexandria, the stone was given to Britain. It was an
Englishman, Thomas Young, who was responsible for the initial decipherment. But it
was still a French scholar, Jean-Francois Champollion, who began to identify the signs
that were used to write royal names such as Ptolemy. But it was through his knowledge
of Coptic that he was able to assign phonetic values to other signs. His breakthrough in
cracking the hieroglyphic script was published in 1822. Scholars were soon able to
unlock a language that hadn’t be read or written for more than fourteen hundred years
(Silverman 231). For almost two centuries, scholars have continued to research and
further translate hieroglyphics. New artifacts are still being found with different
pictographs. Furthermore, there has been a development in the translation of predynastic
hieroglyphs. Currently, seventy percent of these hieroglyphics have been translated. They
represent a rebus system which is when pictures are used according to the way they
sound. Despite Mesopotamia having the oldest examples of writing, it has been
discovered that the earliest evidence for phonetic writing now comes from Egypt
(Mitchell 1). The research of hieroglyphics is continuing with new discoveries continuing
to be made.
Artifacts have always been the best way to discover and learn a language as it has
been used for years with ancient Egyptian artifacts. These artifacts have found that Egypt
was the center of the first phonetic writing as their grammar is testament to. Being an
Afro-asiatic language, ancient Egyptian has a triconsonantal root system that led to the
disappearance or rather lack of vowels in ancient Egyptian writing. Since it began in the

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predyanstic era, Egypt was composed of a royal court that led into the five names of the
king. These names gave him power and helped reaffirm his relationship to the gods. The
names changed over time, as did Egyptian with its language being affected by their
relationship with the cultures that dominated them. An example of this relation was the
creation of demotic which contains all Greek letters except for eight Egyptian letters that
were needed for pronunciation reasons. But it was soon after this that ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphics were banned altogether and the Greeks took full control of Egypt. The
language of the Egyptians was lost for centuries and Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica proved
useless to Renaissance scholars, as he gave no mention of the phonetic use in
hieroglyphics. It wasn’t until about three hundred years later that the code was cracked by
Napoleon Bonaparte’s soldiers’ discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Two scholars, an
Englishman, Thomas Young, and a French scholar, Jean-Francois Champollion, were
able to decipher the hieroglyphics on the stone. Champollion published his works and
more and more hieroglyphic scripts began to be translated. To this day, more scripts have
been deciphered and the predynastic hieroglyphics that are being studied have added to
an even richer knowledge of early Egyptian history. By being able to read the
hieroglyphics, an understanding of Egyptian culture, society and development has been
successfully established.

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1997. Print.
Adams, Paul C. “Networks of Early Writing.” Historical Geography Volume 38 (2010):
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Dijkstra, Jitse H. F. “Mysteries of the Nile? Joseph Scaliger and Ancient Egypt.” Aries
Volume 9 (2009): 59-82. Print
Dykstra, Darrell. “Pyramids, Prophets, and Progress: Ancient Egypt in the Writings of
Ali Mubarak.” Journal of the American Oriental Society Volume 114. Number 1 (1994):
54-65. Print.
Griffith, F. Ll. “The System of Writing in Ancient Egypt.” The Journal of the
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Volume 30 (1900): 153-159. Print.
Knight, Shawn C. “Egyptian Writing Systems and Grammar.” Spring 2009: 1-10. Web.
18 November 2012.
Lemaire, Andre. “The Spread of Alphabetic Scripts (c. 1700-500 BCE).” Diogenes
Volume 55. Issue 2 (2008): 45-58. Print.
Mitchell, Larkin. “Earliest Egyptian Glyphs.” Archeology Volume 52. Issue 2 (1999): 1-2.
Print.
Ray, John D. “The Emergence of Writing in Egypt.” World Archeology Volume 17.
Number 3 (1986): 307-316. Print.