- What is Middle Egyptian?
- Hieroglyphs and their uses
- Gardiner codes
- Summary
- Exercises
- Sidebar: The other Egyptian scripts
What is Middle Egyptian?
The term Middle Egyptian has two meanings:
- Most naturally and accurately, it refers to the language used as the everyday language of the Middle Kingdom, which peaked in the 12th Dynasty (very roughly 2000 to 1800 BCE).
- It is also used, a bit loosely, for a sort of “idealized” language, which is more accurately called égyptien de tradition, a term coined by Pascal Vernus (1982), roughly translatable to English as “Traditional Egyptian”.
There’s a lot of debate on what exactly constitutes Traditional Egyptian (Vernus 2016), but a rough approximation for beginners is: it is mostly Middle Egyptian, but with some “Late Egyptianisms” (Hoch, p. 302) which gradually appear, as the everyday Egyptian language shifted into Late Egyptian, then eventually into Demotic Egyptian and finally Coptic. Egyptologists can spot these “Late Egyptianisms”, and so often can tell a text that was genuinely composed in the Middle Kingdom from one that was composed later, in Traditional Egyptian.
Why did the Egyptians of later generations want to preserve a language that was pretty much Middle Egyptian? You probably know how important a connection to the past was in Egyptian culture. The fact that a monument from the Middle Kingdom could still be read by a well-educated person in the Late Period is remarkable. (Or, even, from the Old Kingdom, as Old Egyptian and Middle Egyptian have enough similarities.) Furthermore, consider how much magical power the Egyptians believed was inherent in the hieroglyphs, a system of writing they believed was devised by the gods themselves.
Also, many of the finest literary works which have survived to the present day were composed in the Middle Kingdom in Middle Egyptian, notably the three “big” ones: The Story of Sinuhe, The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, and The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, not to mention wisdom texts like the teachings of Kagemni, Ptahhotep, and more.
So if you learn Middle Egyptian, even though it was only an everyday language for a few dynasties, you can read a lot of fine literature, plus inscriptions in tombs and temples all the way to the 30th Dynasty with a few extra variations, since it is the basis for Traditional Egyptian.
These lessons focus, as do the most widely read sources (Gardiner 1957, Hoch 1997, Allen 2014) on Middle Egyptian, but will note “Late Egyptianisms” when they are introduced.
Hieroglyphs and their uses
Hieroglyphs are the symbols used by the ancient Egyptians to record their language in monuments, like tombs and temples. The term comes from Greek, as a compound of the Greek words ἱερός (hierós, “sacred, holy”) and γλυφή (gluphḗ, “a carved work”).
The Egyptians used a number of other writing systems during their long history, but until the invention of the Coptic alphabet (a derivative mostly of the Greek alphabet), all the other systems were simplified derivatives of hieroglyphs. See this lesson’s Sidebar if you want to learn about the other scripts used to write Egyptian.
As we will see, a hieroglyph can be used in three ways:
- phonograms, which represent sounds;
- determinatives, which help “determine” the meaning of a word spelled out with phonograms;
- ideograms, which represent a thing, possibly abstract, in a single glyph.
We will learn about each of these uses in the coming lessons.
Gardiner codes
Being able to tell two hieroglyphs apart, and describe accurately which one you’re talking about, is much easier if you know about Gardiner codes. The famous grammarian of Egyptian, Sir Alan Gardiner, devised an elegant classification system for hieroglyphs.
Gardiner worked out 26 categories of what glyphs depict: men, women, birds, mammals, weapons, temple furniture, and so on. He assigned every category one or two letters: “A” is officially “Man and his occupations”, “B” is “Woman and her occupations”, “G” is “Birds”, and so on. (The only category with two letters is category “Aa”, “Unclassified”, mainly for glyphs that even Gardiner couldn’t figure out what was being depicted. For whatever reason, he used “Aa” but skipped “J”, so, still 26 categories.)
Then within each category, he arranged the glyphs in some sort of order that made sense to him; usually the simpler or more common glyphs come first. Each glyph then got a number within its category, and that’s it: each glyph has a Gardiner code. In a few cases, Gardiner or later authors added another letter after the number to identify two very closely-related glyphs, like the “ripple of water” glyph and the “three ripples of water” glyph.
Here are the Gardiner categories and codes for a few widely recognized glyphs.
| Glyph | Description | Category | Code |
|---|---|---|---|
| 𓀀 | Seated man | A (Man and his occupations) | A1 |
| 𓁐 | Seated woman | B (Woman and her occupations) | B1 |
| 𓂀 | Eye of Horus | D (Parts of the Human Body) | D10 |
| 𓃩 | Set’s animal | E (Mammals) | E20 |
| 𓅝 | Ibis on stand | G (Birds) | G26 |
| 𓈖 | Ripple of water | N (Sky, earth, water) | N35 |
| 𓈗 | Three ripples of water | N (Sky, earth, water) | N35a |
| 𓋹 | Sandal strap (ankh) | S (Crowns, dress, regalia) | S34 |
| 𓏏 | Loaf of bread | X (Bread) | X1 |
| 𓏛 | Papyrus scroll tied with ribbon | Y (Writings, games, music) | Y1 |
| 𓏤 | Single stroke, “tally mark” | Z (Strokes and geometrical figures) | Z1 |
| 𓐍 | Unknown (sieve? flatbread? placenta?) | Aa (Unclassified) | Aa1 |
Summary: Middle Egyptian and Hieroglyphs
- Middle Egyptian was the everyday speech and contemporary literary language of the Middle Kingdom, but we study it because it was the foundation of Traditional Egyptian, used for monuments for the rest of Egyptian history.
- Hieroglyphs have three main uses: as phonograms, determinatives, and ideograms, each of which we will cover in later lessons.
- Gardiner codes are codes which identify each hieroglyph, by a lettered category, and a number within that category; for example, the seated man is A1, the seated woman is B1, and the loaf of bread is X1.
Exercises
Click here to do the exercises for Lesson 1.
Sidebar: The other Egyptian scripts
You may find it helpful or interesting to know, if you did not already, that there were other scripts for writing the Egyptian language, but generally today Egyptologists learn hieroglyphs first. Hieroglyphs are usually only found on things meant to last forever, like temples, monuments, and funerary gear.
Almost as soon as hieroglyphs were invented in the Predynastic period, the need for a quicker and simpler form of writing, suitable for use on less permanent materials like softer materials like papyrus, wood, pottery, and leather, became apparent, and a cursive form of hieroglyphs developed, which continued to evolve all the way into the Christian era.
But to modern people, most of these cursive forms are hard to read compared to hieroglyphs, just like printed letters in the Roman, Greek, or Cyrillic alphabets are easier for a beginner to read than their cursive equivalents. Students of Egyptian generally get a solid grounding in hieroglyphs before they tackle the more cursive scripts.
Hieratic
This cursive script became known to European scholars as hieratic (from the Greek for “priestly”). It got that name because by the time a European scholar gave it a name in the 2nd century of the Christian era, it had not been used for centuries except for religious texts.
But prior to the 26th Dynasty, it was used as the “everyday” script for Egyptian. It is a streamlined cursive script, and it evolved a lot during the millenia it was used. If you could read and write, this is the script in which you wrote letters, kept tax documents, made shopping or inventory lists, and so forth, until Demotic came along.
Cursive Hieroglyphs
But the Egyptians always held “real” hieroglyps in reverence and preferred them for religious texts. By the First Intermediate Period, the cursive used for religious texts still resembled hieroglyphs very closely, while everyday hieratic just kept simplifying. So at this point, we recognize the religious texts as using a different cursive form: cursive hieroglyphs, which are just what the name suggests: recognizable hieroglyphs written in a somewhat simplified manner, to be suitable for writing on papyrus.
Unlike hieratic, cursive hieroglyphs are pretty readable if you can read “real” hieroglyphs. You should be able to start reading copies of the Book of the Dead as you learn hieroglyphs (at least, until those start to be written in hieratic around the Third Intermediate Period).
Abnomal Hieratic
In the late 20th Dynasty, a more streamlined hieratic now known as Abnormal Hieratic developed in the Theban region in Upper Egypt. However, it never seems to have spread beyond that area, and (for reasons you are about to learn) stopped being used in the 26th Dynasty.
Demotic
A completely different simplification of hieratic called Demotic developed in Lower Egypt in the late 25th Dynasty. When Psamtik I (who was from Saïs, in the Delta) united Egypt under his rule, Demotic became the standard script, “defeating” Abnormal Hieratic since Psamtik’s dynasty were from the region which invented Demotic.
Demotic became the standard script for non-religious texts (anything commercial or official); religious texts continued to be written in hieroglyphs and “full” hieratic (which is why hieratic was given the name “priestly” centuries later).
Demotic lasted for roughly a millenium; the last known text written in Demotic dates to 12 December 452 of the Christian era, centuries after Rome conquered Egypt, and after Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire!
Coptic
The final Egyptian script is Coptic, which unlike its predecessors does not derive (mostly) from hieroglyphs, but is essentially the Greek alphabet. Egyptian had sounds that Greek did not, however, so a few extra letters (6 or 7, depending on the dialect) were added from Demotic, and thus ultimately descended from hieroglyphs. The term “Coptic” is also used for this phase of the language itself, not just the script.
There had been some attempts to write the late dynastic Egyptian language in Greek letters for a few centuries, but nothing seems to have really caught on; even the Ptolemaic Dynasty wrote texts in either Greek or Demotic, but not a mixture of the two. Coptic as we know it appeared in the 1st century of the Christian era.
Coptic is of particular interest for two reasons. First, it is very important for our understanding of Egyptian because it is the first (and only) Egyptian script in which the vowels were properly written. The pronunciation of Egyptian changed greatly during the millenia of dynastic history, but at least Coptic gives us a point to start working backwards from, in reconstructing what Egyptian may have sounded like in earlier periods.
Coptic is also notable because it is still used today, albeit in a limited capacity. Egyptians did not stop speaking their language when Christianity became the official religion of the Empire; they simply translated the Bible into Coptic and wrote it with the Coptic script!
After the Arab conquest of Egypt and the spread of Islam, Christians eventually switched to Arabic for everyday speech. But for their liturgical use, the Coptic language became “frozen” and is still used today by Coptic Orthodox and Coptic Catholic Christians around the world, just like Latin is still used by the Roman Catholic Church for many documents, and for traditional celebration of the Mass.