Chapter 11

Deciphering Egyptian Art and Hieroglyphs

In This Chapter

Meeting the artists

Planning large pieces

Working as a team

Understanding artistic conventions

Working in two and three dimensions

Reading the ancient language

Egyptian art – including hieroglyphs, which are pictures that represent letters, sounds, ideas, and objects – is distinctive and appears strange to the untrained eye. However, after you begin to understand the codes behind the images, these ancient pictures start to speak and give loads of information about the places, events, and people represented, including their age, rank, occupation, and status.

Egyptian art survives primarily in the embellishments of tomb and temple architecture and in objects both beautiful and practical. See Chapter 12 for more on decorating temples and Chapter 13 for more on decorating tombs.

This chapter shows you how to carefully unravel these image-based codes and reveal the secrets of Egyptian art.

Recognising the Artists

Egyptian artists were very well trained and needed to be schooled in the many conventions of Egyptian art, which enabled the images all over Egypt to be the same.

This extensive training was carried out on the job, and like all Egyptian professions, it was passed on from father to son, starting in infancy (see Chapter 2 for more on occupations). First the apprentice practised his drawing and carving on ostraca – broken pieces of pottery and limestone used as scrap paper, rather like the modern sticky note. His tutor corrected these rough sketches in a different-colour ink. Many surviving examples show these errors and corrections.

Team players

Unlike the art of many civilisations, Egyptian art cannot be assigned to a particular artist due to the very strict artistic conventions of the time.

Saying that, the archaeological record has provided the names of artists who lived at Deir el Medina and worked on the royal tombs. Sadly, although historians know the artists’ names and the tombs they worked on, all the artwork was done in close-knit teams, so specific scenes can’t be attributed to an individual. From today’s point of view, this anonymity and the culture’s strict conventions may have been frustrating for artists because they had no means to express their individuality.

Each team was made up of approximately 30 people, including a number of different craftsmen:

A master craftsman who designed the original composition and double-checked and corrected all the work of his men

Plasterers who prepared the walls for painted relief

Stone masons who prepared the walls for carved relief

Outline scribes who drew the outline for both carved and painted relief

Sculptors who carved the outlines for carved relief

Artists who painted the images for both painted and carved relief

All workmen in a team worked at the same time on a sort of production line.

After the plasterers had prepared one area of wall, the outline scribes sketched the images and the plasterers moved on to another part of the wall. As soon as the outline scribes had finished one bit, the sculptors started their work and the outline scribes worked a little further along.

The entire process was well timed to ensure that the men carried out as much work as possible in the shortest amount of time. This process was used primarily on the large-scale compositions that range from one metre square to tens of metres square. The master craftsman had to prepare the entire composition in advance.

Following the master plan

Although the artists were all skilled in the various characteristics of Egyptian artistic style, a grid system was introduced to ensure the artwork was to scale and in proportion throughout a tomb or temple. This grid system was used for both painted and carved relief.

All compositions were initially sketched on papyrus and were copied and enlarged onto the walls of the tombs and temples. The master plan had a grid drawn over the images so artists could easily scale up the images through copying from the smaller grid to one drawn on the wall.

Artists created the grid on the wall by dipping string into red paint, stretching it across the surface, and then snapping it back into place to get a red line. This was repeated with multiple horizontal and vertical lines, creating a grid. These lines disappeared as the rock was carved or was painted over.

Equipping the Artists

The vibrant remains of Egyptian art in the form of tombs, temples, and carved statues are even more remarkable when you consider the very limited array of tools available at the time.

Paintbrushes were either bundles of plant fibres doubled over and lashed together at the doubled end to make a handle, or pieces of reed chewed at one end to make a frayed brush-type implement.

Paints were hand mixed and some ingredients for certain colours needed to be imported, which made paint an expensive commodity. Surprisingly, many of the colours are still amazingly vibrant, even though they were painted more than 3,000 years ago.

Through chemical analysis, researchers have been able to identify the minerals used to make the paint:

Red was made from red ochre or iron oxide, which are both resources of Egypt.

Blue was made from azurite, a carbonate of copper found in the Sinai and the eastern desert. The hue was also made of a combination of silica, copper, and calcium.

Yellow was made from yellow ochre, iron oxide, or orpiment (a sulphide of arsenic); all are found in Egypt.

Green was made of malachite from the Sinai. It was sometimes made by blending blue frit and yellow ochre, which were both available in Egypt.

Black was made from soot, lampblack, charcoal, or plumbago (a blue flowering plant), all readily available in Egypt.

White was made from gypsum, calcium sulphate, or whiting calcium carbonate, all natural to Egypt.

Brown was created by painting red over black.

Lamps, which lit the dark tombs throughout the work, were also important. Shallow lamp dishes were filled with oil and included flax (a plant) or linen wicks. Because these light sources produced a great deal of smoke, some unfinished tombs show black soot marks on the ceiling – the most famous soot-covered tomb being that of Tutankhamun.

Figuring Out Egyptian Art

Egyptian art is not a photograph. When considering Egyptian art, modern viewers must remember that the Egyptians rarely recorded ‘the truth’ – a realistic depiction of an object or person.

Although the images can never be viewed as portraiture or a true rendition, every element of a composition is designed to tell you something about the person, event, or ritual. This notion explains the lack of perspective and three-dimensional qualities in Egyptian art, as well as the somewhat bizarre (to our eyes at least) representations of people, animals, and gods.

Everything in ancient Egyptian art is presented from the most recognisable viewpoint, in an effort to eliminate all ambiguity. However, modern Egyptologists aren’t the intended audience for these ancient works, so an understanding of some of the key conventions is necessary even to begin to decipher the images.

The following sections explore several key conventions in Egyptian art.

Toying with views

To really understand an object, you often need to look at it from various angles or views, including bird’s eye, front, and profile. Led by convention, Egyptian artists consistently used certain views of specific objects in their art and sometimes included more than one view of an object in a single image.

For example:

A container is often shown with its contents on the top, even if the contents are sealed within.

Chairs and stools are shown from a side view with two legs visible, and the seat is shown from a bird’s eye view on top. If someone is seated on a chair, the cushion is draped over the seat and the back of the chair.

Sandals and scribal palettes are always shown from a bird’s-eye view to give the clearest view of the object.

In garden scenes, a pool is shown from a bird’s-eye view, but surrounding trees are shown from a front view, which gives them the appearance of lying flat on the ground. Objects in the pool, like fish, boats, or people, are drawn on top of the water with no indication of depth.

Forming an orderly queue

The ancient Egyptians were a very organised people, and their artwork reflects this.

All Egyptian art is divided into a series of registers and larger scenes or figures:

Each register is separated by a base line, which often serves as a ground line for figures within the registers.

Large figures (often the tomb owner or god/king) often occupy the end of a wall composition, covering four or five registers. The figures are, to a certain extent, overseeing the smaller scenes.

Although many tomb and temple scenes have the appearance of a comic strip, scenes next to each other don’t necessarily follow in the narrative of the event. Compositions were planned well in advance, but individual scenes were often moved around to fit the space available. So a master craftsman might place a short scene on a short wall to allow the larger walls to be free for the larger scenes, regardless of chronological order. (This lack of linearity can be really confusing in tomb art depicting the 12-hour journey of the sun god, for example, because hour one is not necessarily next to hour two!)

Furthermore, registers do not necessarily join the larger scene or scenes in the composition, and in fact registers and scenes can be totally unconnected in space and time. (The ancients sure didn’t make things easy!) Registers and scenes, however, are typically connected by a general theme: offering, hunting, war, and so on.

Other conventions related to registers include

Walking in step. The feet of all Egyptians are typically on the base line and pointing in the same direction, even when large groups are depicted. Egypt represented its orderly, organised culture through this convention.

Rowdy foreigners. Any people from outside the Egyptian borders are displayed in a more chaotic fashion, not in tidy rows.

Wild locations. Any environment not within the confines of Egypt’s borders – such as a desert or a foreign country – is represented through the use of undulating base lines.

Representing the human figure

The ancient Egyptian depiction of the human figure is one category of image that modern eyes find most bizarre – and most recognisable.

You have probably seen renditions of the ‘Egyptian walk’ – figures with one arm in front at head height and the other behind at waist height. Although comical, this image does not exist anywhere in actual ancient Egyptian art; modern artists have simply developed it over the years as an attempt to represent the Egyptians’ unusual perspective of the human figure.

Ancient Egyptian artists depicted the human body in the same manner as other objects (see the section ‘Toying with views’, earlier in this chapter). Human figures are a collection of body parts assembled from their most recognisable viewpoints. For this reason, the human figures shown on tomb walls and decorated items stand in positions that are impossible to replicate with a real human body – without dislocating half your joints! (See Figure 11-1.)

Figure 11-1: A typical Egyptian figure.

Specifically, the human figure in Egyptian art includes

A head shown in profile – but with a single front view of an eye and eyebrow and a profile mouth.

Shoulders shown in full front view with the nipple or breast (on a woman) in profile, often under the armpit.

The waist, elbows, legs, and feet shown in profile; it was traditional to show both feet from the inside with a single toe, normally the big toe and an arch, although from the New Kingdom some images show all five toes on both feet.

Hands normally shown in full view, either open (from the back showing the nails) or clenched (from the front showing the knuckles).

Although the two-dimensional Egyptian figures can sometimes look a little bizarre to us (with the hands on the wrong arms and the feet on the wrong legs), many images show careful musculature, and statues display the Egyptians’ amazing artistic talent.

Hand in hand

Hands caused major problems to ancient Egyptian artists, especially if the hands held objects.

For example, convention often dictated which hands held particular staffs. Old Kingdom officials held long staffs in the left hand and short sceptres in the right hand, close to the body. If the person was looking to the left, this arrangement was no problem, and the staffs are easily depicted in the correct hands. But if the figure faces right, big problems result. The left arm with the long staff becomes the front arm and the right hand becomes the rear arm. The long staff then runs the risk of obscuring the face, which spoils the whole image. This problem was typically solved by placing the long staff in the rear arm and the short sceptre in the near arm – but still in the correct hands. The only problem was that the right hand is on the left arm and the left hand on the right arm.

The hands were also sometimes swapped over to ensure the figure always has two thumbs facing away from the body but visible to the observer. These confusions are often viewed as artistic incompetence, but the fact of the matter is the opposite. In order to place the hands in unusual positions and still maintain the recognisable characteristics and strict artistic conventions, the ancient Egyptians had to work with great anatomical drawing skills.

Depicting eternal youth

Most people in ancient Egyptian imagery are shown at the height of physical fitness – young and fit. Even those individuals who are known to be elderly when they were depicted (such as Ramses II who was more than 90 years old when he died) are shown at about 20 years old.

Ancient Egyptian depictions of people were designed to last for eternity on temple or tomb walls and other decorated objects. Who wants to be shown warts and all? Human beings want to be remembered at their best, and the Egyptians were no different.

A handful of tombs at Deir el Medina (see Chapter 2 for more details on this village) show elderly relatives with salt-and-pepper hair or fully white hair. Granted, their skin and bodies don’t show the ravages of time, but their hair colour does give away their advanced years.

The only age that is easy to identify in Egyptian art is for pre-pubescent boys and girls. Egyptians below this age are depicted with totally shaved heads and a side lock down the right side of their heads. (At puberty – between 10 and 15 years old – children had their side locks shaved off as a rite of passage.)

Even among the pre-pubescent children, you can further divide them into infants and children. Infants are shown nude, whereas older children are shown wearing clothes.

Colouring their world

When depicting humans, artist adhered to various colour conventions in order to identify the ethnicity of an individual:

Egyptian men have red-brown skin, while Egyptian women are usually shown with yellow skin.

Nubians – people from Nubia (modern Sudan), which was under the control of the Egyptians – have dark brown or black skin and short, curly black hair.

Near Eastern people (from the area which is now Israel, Lebanon, and Syria), are shown with yellow skin and dark, shoulder-length, mushroom-shaped hair.

Libyans (nomadic tribes from the western desert) are sometimes shown with fair skin, blue eyes, and red hair, or have elaborate side locks down one side of their head.

If a crowd of people of the same race are shown standing together, such as a group of Egyptians or Nubians, artists vary the skin colour between darker and lighter shades so no two skin tones of the same shade are next to each other.

Considering fashion

Egyptians are also only ever shown wearing plain white clothes – either tunics or kilts – with the exception of leopard-skin cloaks for funerary and high priests.

In addition to differences in paint colour, non-Egyptians are easily distinguished from Egyptians in temple art by their style of dress:

Nubians wear gold earrings and loincloths made of cow, giraffe, and leopard skin.

Syrians have shoulder-length hair with a hairband around the forehead. Their long tunics are white with a red trim to indicate that their garments were made of rectangular pieces of fabric, wrapped two or three times around the body.

Libyans have elaborate hairstyles of shoulder-length hair with plaited side locks decorated with feathers. They also wear elaborately decorated woollen cloaks with long fringes.

Asiatics (a general term for the people of the Syro-Palestinian region) wear beards and elaborately decorated tunics and cloaks. Asiatic women also wear little booties, which were not worn in Egypt due to the climate.

Most art shows non-Egyptians being suppressed by the Egyptian king, overcome in battle, acting subserviently to the Egyptians, or bringing tribute to the king or an Egyptian official. However, many non-Egyptians lived in ancient Egypt and adopted the Egyptian way of life, including Egyptian names and the language. These individuals are presented as Egyptian in their tomb art.

Size is everything

Egyptian artists used size as a method of depicting rank and status.

As the saying goes, ‘The bigger the better’. In Egyptian art, the larger the individual, the more important he or she was. In tombs, the biggest individual is normally the tomb owner; in temples, the large images represent the king or the gods.

In scenes where people are all presented at the same scale, you can still easily identify who is the more important. Individuals of higher status have their feet at a higher level through sitting or standing on a plinth or dais.

Carving Masterpieces

Egyptian sculptors created their art on two-dimensional surfaces – walls, signs, and plaques – as well as three-dimensional creations. Many of the tools used for carving stone were simply made of a harder stone than the one being cut. Other tools used include

Copper hand saws were used from the Old Kingdom.

Metal wedges were used for splitting stone blocks (made of bronze from the 26th dynasty, and iron from the late period).

Wooden wedges were used for splitting blocks. The blocks were inserted into a gap in the stone and then made wet. As the wood expanded in the water, the stone split.

Blunt chisels were made from all kinds of stone, sometimes with a wooden handle. The chisels were hammered using a stone hammer, sometimes attached to a wooden shaft.

Drills with metal drill bits were used from the Old Kingdom. The bow drill was a wooden shaft with a stone or metal drill bit. The drill bit had to be harder than the stone it was carving. A drill cap at the end of the shaft enabled the sculptor to apply pressure by hand. Instead of a drill cap, weights of stones in sandbags enabled a greater weight to be applied, which was particularly useful for a hard stone.

The finished statue was smoothed using sand in the same way we use sandpaper to smooth a surface. The statue was buffed to create a shine if the stone wasn’t intended to be painted.

On the march

From the 18th dynasty, the non-royal tomb of Horemheb at Memphis features many carved scenes in which Egyptian artists have carefully depicted Horemheb’s military life.

In one scene, an officer is leaving his tent, which is supported by a decorative tent pole in the centre, in order to speak to his commander, probably Horemheb. His batsman is standing at the door of the tent in a respectful manner, and a young naked boy is on his way to the tent carrying water skins. On the other side of the tent, another man gestures to another water carrier with two large water jars on a yoke over his shoulders. Two additional servants are working in the tent – one is pouring water on the floor to settle the dust, while the other sweeps up with a makeshift broom made from a bundle of tied-together sticks. The tent is filled with the possessions of the officer, including a table piled with food and a folding stool, which was easy to carry from camp to camp.

Another damaged scene shows the military cooks preparing food for the soldiers. The fragmentary state of the scene makes identifying what is being prepared difficult, although a clear portion of the image shows a squatting soldier eating a raw onion like an apple. (With this as a dietary staple, it would take more than ‘double-mint’ to freshen his breath.) Another cook is preparing meatballs or bread by rolling a ball in his hands, and a soldier is helping himself to a bowl of pre-prepared food.

The scene continues by showing the camp on the march. The terrain has undulating base lines, showing that the soldiers are not in Egypt. The tents have been dismantled and rolled up, and soldiers are carrying one tent on their shoulders. These soldiers are wearing openwork leather loincloths with a square patch at the back to provide added comfort while sitting down. The abundance of movement in these scenes gives an insight into busy military life.

Chiselling reliefs

Both painted and carved relief are common in Egyptian art. Painted relief was obviously easier than carving and was often the chosen method if the stone was of poor quality.

For carved relief projects, sculptors used copper chisels in one of two ways:

Raised relief required the background to be cut away, leaving the figures standing out. This more time-consuming technique was used mostly inside tombs and temples, because the shadows created by dim lighting were very dramatic.

Sunk relief was quicker to carve and involved cutting the figures away from the background. This technique was often used on outside walls and produced very dark shadows, which were good in bright sunlight.

The carved images were then painted in many colours, which to modern, minimalist minds may seem gauche and a tad tacky. For the Egyptians, the inclusion of colour offered another opportunity to display wealth and status.

Mistakes happened – even in the distant past. Carving goofs were easily covered with thin layers of plaster. The outlines were then redrawn and carved. However, 3,000 years or so later, the plaster has come off, often revealing extra carved lines. Just goes to show that no one is perfect.

Carving in 3D

Hundreds of statues have survived from ancient Egypt that represent both royalty and officials. The Egyptians didn’t really believe in having statues purely for aesthetic purposes, so all the statues have a function. Statues were placed in both temples and tombs and were all ka statues, vessels for the spirits of the individuals depicted. Wherever the statue was placed, Egyptians believed the deceased’s spirit could participate in the rituals and offerings being carried out.

Statues were of varying sizes and of many materials, depending on the wealth of the individual. Statues were made of stone, metal, or wood; the cheaper ones with resources from Egypt, and the more expensive using imported materials, including

Limestone from quarries at Giza and Tell el Amarna

Red granite from Aswan

Quartzite sandstone from Gebel Ahmar (near Cairo)

Alabaster from Hatnub, south east of Tell el Amarna

Cedar from Lebanon

Sycamore from Egypt

Copper from the Sinai and Cyprus

Statues, such as wall reliefs, followed a number of conventions to indicate rank and position. For example:

A figure sitting cross-legged on the floor was a scribe.

A bald figure with a leopard-skin cloak was a high priest.

A figure in a wig with a leopard-skin cloak was a funerary priest.

A bald figure with a long kilt tied at the chest was a vizier.

Stylised rolls of fat on the abdomen show affluence and wealth.

Hatshepsut: Miss, Mr . . . What?

Hatshepsut (see Chapter 5 for more on this ruler) started her time on the throne as a consort to her brother/husband Thutmosis II. When he died, she married her young stepson Thutmosis III and ruled as regent until he was old enough to rule alone. However, she wanted the power wielded by her young husband and took over the throne and ruled as king. Her actions caused a number of problems – both in artwork and in accompanying hieroglyphic inscriptions.

In order to be recognised in art as king, Hatshepsut needed to be displayed as such – with kingly attire including a kilt, crown, false beard, and crook and flail. This apparel has led some people to claim she was a transvestite, but this is not the case. Ancient Egyptian art was not a portrait; it displayed Hatshepsut in the role she held as king. In fact, some of her statues show her with a combination of kingly attire and feminine features, making her statues easy to identify because the face is clearly that of a woman. Some of the statues of Hatshepsut as king also show her with breasts, but wearing male attire.

This combination of male and female attributes also confused the scribes. In inscriptions, Hatshepsut is described as both male and female; as both the son and daughter of the god Amun. The guidelines the artists and scribes learnt while training did not work when the king was female. I’m sure they were pleased to see the end of her reign so they could get back to normal.

Reading Hieroglyphs

In order to further identify tomb and temple scenes, it is useful to be able to read some of the cartouches – the lozenge-shaped enclosures that contain the king’s name and names of the gods.

Cartouches are composed of hieroglyphs – pictures used to represent letters, although the situation is not quite that simple. Hieroglyphs form a proper language with case endings, tenses, verbs, nouns, and prepositions. More than 700 hieroglyphic signs existed in the Middle Kingdom and the number grew to more than 1,000 in the Ptolemaic period. (As new foreign words were introduced, the Egyptians needed new signs to be able to spell them!)

Losing the language

The hieroglyphic language first appears in Egypt in approximately 3100 BC and the last-known inscription was at the temple of Philae in AD 394 – a history of nearly 3,500 years.

From AD 394 until 1799, with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the beginnings of decipherment, knowledge of this ancient language was lost, although many theories arose:

In the 16th century, the hieroglyphic language was believed to have developed from Armenian or Chinese.

In the 1630s, a Jesuit priest and scholar, Athanasius Kircher, tried to decipher hieroglyphs and believed each sign represented an individual philosophical concept.

In the 1750s, people believed that priests had invented hieroglyphs to conceal sacred knowledge.

Cracking the code

By the end of the 18th century, a number of discoveries had been made:

The Coptic language developed from ancient Egyptian and was used by the Christians in Egypt. Coptic uses the Greek alphabet for the Egyptian words.

Hieroglyphs (picture writing), and hieratic (shorthand hieroglyphs used for paper documents), and demotic (the Egyptian script which developed from hieratic used from 650 BC) languages were connected.

Cartouches contained royal names.

The hieroglyph system included phonetic elements.

These breakthroughs were aided in 1799 by the discovery of an engraved stone in the town of el-Rashid (Rosetta). The granite-like Rosetta Stone changed Egyptology forever. The stone was written in three scripts:

Ancient Greek

Egyptian hieroglyphs

Demotic (a late cursive form of hieroglyphs)

Most historians could read ancient Greek, so this part of the stone was easily translated. In the race to decipher the hieroglyphic text, two main contenders emerged:

Thomas Young, who published his findings anonymously under the name ABCD in case the unrelated research affected his credentials as a physician. Young deciphered the demotic text and identified the names of Cleopatra and Ptolemy within their cartouches. He also identified that the hieroglyphic signs were phonetic and did not individually represent words or concepts.

Jean-François Champollion, who corresponded with Young, but was in competition with him to decipher hieroglyphs. At Young’s death in 1829, Champollion continued the work and made the final breakthrough in identifying the phonetic value of many signs, thus enabling the transcription of many inscriptions. He also deciphered some of the linguistic and grammatical elements of the language.

Both Young and Champollion read the Greek inscription and matched the occurrence of recognisable words like ‘king’ and ‘god’, and looked for a similar number of occurrences in the Egyptian and demotic inscriptions. Real code breakers!

Identifying the signs

The many signs in the hieroglyphic language are divided into four sign types:

Single (or uniliteral) signs, like the alphabet, which only have one letter sound; for example i.

Biliteral signs, which have a two-letter sound (for example, mn)

Triliteral signs, which are three-letter signs (for example, htp)

Determinative signs, which have no sound, but are put at the end of a word to reinforce its meaning. For example, the word for cat is spelt out (miw) and would have an image of a cat at the end to show it was a cat.

Rosetta . . . again . . . and again

The text on the Rosetta Stone states that there was a copy of the stela (the curved top stone monument with carved inscriptions) in every temple in Egypt. A number of stelas have been found, and most are currently in the Cairo Museum:

One was found in Minuf (Nile Delta), being used as a bench in front of a house. The surviving text is in Greek and demotic, although it is badly damaged.

A basalt stela was found near Tell el Yahudiyeh (Eastern Delta) being reused as an oil press. Only the Greek text survives, although the stela was bilingual originally.

Fragments of a trilingual stela of sandstone were found at Elephantine and are now in the Louvre. The section that is badly damaged on the Rosetta Stone is complete here.

A sandstone stela found at Naukratis has a number of errors and was clearly copied from an original by an inexperienced stone cutter who could not read hieroglyphs.

In general, there are no written vowels in hieroglyphs; well, at least not the same as in English. This is the reason there are so many discrepancies in the spelling of names of gods – Amun, Amon, or Amen (from imn) – and of kings – Amenhotpe or Amenhotep (from imn htp), for example.

Understanding direction and honorific positioning

You can read hieroglyphs from right to left or left to right, as well as from top to bottom.

Don’t panic! An easy method tells you which way the text should be read. Look at the direction the animals and birds are facing and read towards them. So if the animals are facing to the right, read the text from right to left, and if the faces are towards the left, read the text from left to right. Simple. If the text is above an image of a person and the animals are facing the same way as the person, it is clear that the text is describing the person depicted.

In kings’ names inside a cartouche, you find a hierarchy of signs, which makes reading them difficult. If a god’s name forms part of the king’s name (like Ramses), the name Ra is placed at the beginning of the cartouche, even if it is not to be read in that order. This is called honorific positioning, with the most important name being written first.

Hieroglyphic signs are positioned to fit within a small invisible rectangle in order to make them aesthetically pleasing, rather than placing each sign next to each other in a long line. This is done by placing horizontal signs together and vertical signs together, while at the same time keeping them in the order they are to be read as much as possible. In addition to looking good, this method of positioning enables more text to be placed in a small space. Also, no spaces or punctuation are between the words, keeping the inscription compact.

Learning the alphabet

Although hieroglyphic writing includes more than 700 signs, a number of unilateral signs can be used as an alphabet. Take a look at some of the most common unilateral signs in Figure 11-2. This figure shows you the hieroglyph and its English-language equivalent.

Figure 11-2: Unilateral hiero-glyphics.

Figure 11-3 shows signs used to express common Western names.

Hieroglyphic writing does not include many vowels. Also, the sign at the end of each name (the determinative sign) tells you whether the person is male or female.

Figure 11-3: Western names expressed in hieroglyphs.

Reading the names of the divine

Most of the royal names and those of the gods are written using bi- and triliteral signs (two- or three-letter sounds). However, some of these signs are common in both royal and gods’ names. Figure 11-4 shows some of the best-known gods, as well as some common kings’ names that incorporate gods’ names; all would appear within a cartouche.

These signs aid in identifying the gods and goddesses in artwork and inscriptions. These signs appear on the heads of figures and to identify specific gifts given to the king by the gods.

Some of these gods’ names appear in the most common kings’ names within a cartouche, as shown in Figure 11-5.

Figure 11-4: Common gods’ names.

Figure 11-5: Common gods’ names appear in common kings’ names.

Reading Egyptian art

Hieroglyphs also appear in Egyptian art to represent concepts and gods.

Knowing some of the signs featured in Figure 11-6 can make interpreting all Egyptian art a little easier – without needing to read the long inscriptions.

Nothing in Egyptian art is random; everything has a purpose and is carefully placed within the final composition to give a clear description of what is represented.

Figure 11-6: Common Egyptian concepts as hiero-glyphics.