Hieroglyphic means “mysterious,” yet hieroglyphs themselves are instruments of absolute clarity that present a pellucid record of the natural world. This is writing as it first was, a mirror of life. Eliminating the dimensions of time and place and decay, it was a holy thing because it worked.

I began the study of hieroglyphs with the mind of a child raised with a keen awareness of nature. I was a freshman in the Classics Department of Columbia University at the age of sixteen when I stood in line at Salter’s Bookstore on Broadway to purchase Sir Alan Gardiner’s massive Egyptian Grammar for eleven dollars on a whim. Hieroglyphs were still offered as a course at Columbia in those days, though they were being phased out for lack of interest. I was one of three students of Roger Bagnall, a papyrologist working in Egypt, sifting through remnant shreds of Greek words. Immersed as I was at the time in Catullus and Pindar and Sappho, my thoughts were primarily on the construction of the line, how each one of these masters, in their own distinct way, crafted a line as though it were a physical thing, an instrument made to have a deep and palpable effect:

sophos o polla eidos phua,

mathontes de labroi

The one who knows

Is one who knows much in his own nature,

Those who learn are like crows

—Pindar

Looking at Greek, you come to see words as tactile and alive. You are looking at words branching out from a phonic core, like the root of a plant. Though spelling varies, the root persists through root, red, rust, rose. The essence of writing was to get at the root and prod it into subtle tendrils of meaning.

Vivid imagery from nature, rhyming and elision, the beautiful construction of the line, were tools the Greek and Latin poets used to capture life in words. These devices were present throughout the literature of hieroglyphs. Yet hieroglyphs had a further dimension. The letters themselves had a living quality. They were composed of living animals and plants. In Egypt the phoenix is the blue heron rising in the swamp at dawn. The sky is green. The stars are flowers. In Egypt heaven is a wetland.

I was devoted in those days to Henry Fischer, the curator of the Egyptian collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, because of the beautiful books he wrote. In The Orientation of Hieroglyphs, he had the unusual insight that the words themselves were like the tableaux on the walls of tombs. Hieroglyphs were miniature paintings and sculpture; tomb reliefs were giant hieroglyphs. The pictures and letters were the same thing. Fischer so knew and loved Egypt that when I would run into him over the years at an annual New Year’s party in Sherman, Connecticut, where he lived, he would turn to me at midnight and say, as though we were in Egypt, kuli senna inti tayyiba! He told me once that susan, a word that appears in the Pyramid Texts, was, he thought, the blue lotus of the Nile—for he was particularly interested in the hieroglyphs themselves, what they actually were, their humor, the charm of the verb msbb (to turn), written with the oryx characteristically bending back its head along its flank, as the curlew with its scimitar beak in the sand was the verb “to find.” The letter was a study of the animal. The words were living pictures.

The years of my late teens were given over to transcribing and translating the literature of Egypt, the philosophy, the love poetry, The Dialogue of Trees. But what I was instinctively drawn to was the brilliance of these individual poetic conceptions, in the lines, the use of words, and in the words themselves. As Ezra Pound insists in his ABC of Reading, I knew that you had to see the original language, the original formulation, for the meaning lay not only in the content but in the structure. Writing was not simply about a thing: It contained the thing. It was the thing. This layered richness of meaning works on a level that is beyond analysis. It awakens the mind, as Yeats observed, in the realm of heightened perception, like falling in love. It should clearly be said that writing as we think of it today does not come close to the mastery in the formulation of words and imagery that was achieved in antiquity.

In Egypt the construction of the line was everything. When I lived in the Nile Valley in my twenties, village men and women who could not read or write would walk for miles to listen to a blind poet sing all night, or go to a holy man to have a poetic line scrawled out on a scrap of paper. They would put the scrap in a cup of water and drink the ink for the medicinal power of the words. Years later, Fischer, who devoted his retirement to writing books of poetry, sent me a poem that ended, “the words, the words, the words.”

At Columbia as an undergraduate, and continuing into graduate school in classics, I worked at the Brooklyn Museum for the German Egyptologist Bernard von Bothmer, whose preoccupation was trying to break through the conventional understanding that Egyptian sculpture was inferior to Greek, that it was idealized and bland. Bothmer tirelessly pointed out the brilliance and skill of the Egyptians, that they showed real things, real people, weariness, complexity, sorrow. Bothmer had a few years before finished the work of the Russian Egyptologist Alexandre Piankoff on the earliest version of the Pyramid Texts, in the Pyramid of Unis in 2323 B.C., for the Bollingen Series.

Piankoff died before finishing his exhaustive study. His commentary begins with a quote from Goethe, to paraphrase: “They pull a thing apart, and in so doing drive its life away.” In his first paragraph, in his very first sentence, Piankoff admits that the Egyptological approach, the dry cataloging of historical facts as they were understood, was not adequate to figure out the Pyramid Texts. Other Egyptologists have begun their books in exactly the same way: Rundle Clark in 1960 argues that although it is believed that the Egyptian religion is different from that of the rest of the world, “this cannot possibly be true.” The English Egyptologist Christopher Eyre, in his 2001 book on the section of the Pyramid Texts that Egyptology has labeled the “Cannibal Hymn,” laments on his first page, “The inaccessibility of Egyptian literature is not simply a matter of incompetent translation.”

Great minds over the ages, among them Plato and Newton, had heard that hidden within the pyramids was a treasured body of writing, long sought for the scientific observations and philosophical insight it contained. Yet the actual discovery of the Pyramid Texts made barely a cultural ripple in the world. When the director of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, Gaston Maspero, heard that the small Old Kingdom pyramids at Saqqara were opened in the winter of 1880 and 1881 and that their inner walls were covered with incised columns of minute hieroglyphic writing that had been buried in the dark for nearly four thousand years, he wrote, “The so-called ‘dumb’ pyramids at Saqqara had spoken.” The newly created academic discipline of Egyptology dismissed the hieroglyphic text as a disconnected collection of magic spells about snakes mixed into an incoherent myth involving the dead pharaoh with various animal gods, Osiris, and a sun god named Ra.

I became familiar with the Pyramid Texts by copying out the numbered lines of “utterances,” as they were called, in the German Egyptologist Kurt Sethe’s Die Altaegyptischen Pyramidentexte from the 1920s. The practice that I was taught as a student of Egyptology was to copy out the line recorded in the book, often reversing the letters in order to read it, combing through grammatical analysis and parallel lists of the usages of hieroglyphic words. The beauty and power of the individual lines were unmistakable:

Sew emerald, turquoise, malachite stars

And grow green, green as a living reed

When I received a Guggenheim to translate the Pyramid Texts in 2006, and spent the subsequent years studying every line, I looked for the most recently published translation:

Pull back, Baboon’s penis! Open sky’s door! You sealed door, open a path for Unis on the blast of heat where the gods scoop water. Horus’ glide path TWICE... Unis becomes a screeching howling baboon... Unis’s anus on Unis’s back and Unis’s back-ridge on Unis’s head. Unis will make ululation and sit among the youngsters...

Unis has come to you, falcons, in your enclosures—become peaceful to Unis—with his bent tail, of the intestine of a baboon, at his rear...

Plait has been entwined by Plait, the toothless calf that emerged from the garden has been entwined... face has fallen on face, face has seen face. The dappled knife all black and green has emerged and swallowed the one it has licked.

—James P. Allen, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts

(Atlanta: Brill, 2005), 60, 52, 17

A reader might conclude, as I did, one of two things. Either Egyptian hieroglyphs were coarse, stupid, and pointless, or, to paraphrase the biochemist Karl von Frisch, it is easier to believe that Egyptology has come to a false conclusion than that Egypt has made an absurd mistake.

As I looked at the original in depth, I saw what the problem was: two foreign ideas are being superimposed on the Egyptian original. The first is that the writing is primitive. The second is that it contains a myth. The English does not track because the translator is following this preconception rather than the actual hieroglyphs, and the translation does not make sense because the myth is not there. Yet the hieroglyphic work is far from unreadable. The words themselves are clear and simple, the vocabulary familiar, and the sense readily made out.

I began to realize, almost in shock, that the columns of hieroglyphic writing formed a progression of complex, interrelated poetic verses. Plutarch wrote that the Egyptian priesthood used the poetic riddle, the word in Greek for which is enigma, as a vehicle to convey religious secrets. That this method was known in antiquity is captured by the story of the riddle of the Sphinx, which stands for the larger tradition. You have to solve the riddle to pass the threshold and enter this body of knowledge.

Puns and riddles depend on concealed meaning, a double sense that opens up a word or a phrase the way a hidden spring opens a box, revealing what is within. Indeed this is what hieroglyphs themselves are all about. The astonishingly naturalistic hieroglyphs that comprise the Pyramid Texts belong to the realm of empirical observation that is the basis of both science and poetry. They are both things, and metaphors arising from the astute observation of the intrinisic qualities of things. This is what enabled written language to develop: abstraction developed from metaphor. As Emerson wrote, “Language is fossil poetry.”

In considering this one might look to Piankoff’s realization about the pervasive use of symbolism in Egyptian representation. “For the Egyptian,” he wrote in his Wandering of the Soul, “every so-called physical fact of life had a symbolic meaning, and every symbolic act had a material background. Both were equally true and real.” Henry Fischer’s insight reveals what is essentially the economy of the Egyptian execution of art, architecture, and writing, that they are, in his words, interrelated to a degree that is unparalleled in any other culture. Everything has a meaning. Temples are marshlands cast in stone, the field of rushes, the luminous marshland of the dawn.

The star-covered ceilings of the pyramids in which the Pyramid Texts appear conjure the vivid and stunning reality of the night and twilight sky, in which the opening line, the penis of Babay, is not the penis of a baboon but a familiar sight: the sword of Orion. The sword of Orion opens the doors of the sky. The sharp falcon is a hieroglyphic formula for the star Sirius, much as we recognize the constellation Aquila, the eagle, and within it the bright star Al Tair, the bird.

In other words, this extensive poetic work opens by stating the place and the time. It presents this not as we would today, as an abstract historical notation, but as a truth of the physical world. The text begins with the coordinates of a star map, embedded in a visual image in the form of a riddle, a four-line verse ended by a horizontal line across the vertical column of hieroglyphs.

The four-line verse is followed by a second verse, a poetic line so vividly illustrated that the reader can easily make out the meaning of the words. Although the words are spelled out in hieroglyphic letters in a phonetic alphabet much like our own, each spelled-out word ends with a hieroglyphic picture that defines it. This is how hieroglyphs work: they are a combination of pictures as letters and pictures as pictures. The defining pictures of the bull, the fingers, the horizon, and the horns are all clearly there to see in the line Would that the bull break the fingers of the horizon with its horns. Taurus is told to rise, to get out of the way of Orion and Sirius on the rising diagonal.

What is conjured is motion. One is actually entering the night sky. The language that conjures this imagined and mysterious reality is not the language of myth but of metaphor. To think about how the poetic riddle is used as coding in English, one might look to The Four Quartets:

Garlic and sapphires in the mud

Clot the bedded axletree

The hidden meaning is presented as a cryptic image, and then the image is explained:

The trilling wire in the blood

Sings beneath inveterate scars

Appeasing long forgotten wars

The dance along the arteries

The circulation of the lymph

Are figured in the drift of stars

In the coded language of a riddle, Eliot presents the ultimate question: What is a human being? What is the body (its flesh, the mud embedded with garlic and sapphires, its skeleton, the tree)? What survives death? And then the answer: the eternal nature of the body, of the human being, resides in its dissolution. It is a paradox, an enigma.

This is both the subject and the method of the Pyramid Texts. There are two streams of subject matter in the compendium of mystical poetry that covers the walls of the pyramid beneath the peaked ceiling’s gilding of stars. The first is the night sky, the moon and its phases, the movement of stars, violent sudden storms with their thunder and lightning. The second stream is the dissolution of the body. The life energy that resides in the body, as in all living things, is light, like starlight, like lightning. The medium by which the energy is freed is death. The two streams come together within the numinous representational atmosphere of the monument as the absorption of the freed light energy rising into the sky.

The task of this book is to demonstrate that far from being alien and incomprehensible, religious thought, and with it writing as high art in deep antiquity, is superbly lucid. That far from being ugly and stupid, it is supremely intelligent. The plan is to provide a map of the verses, as ideas and images are introduced and elaborated upon, to talk about the natural history of the hieroglyphs themselves, the poetic devices used, and to track throughout the presentation of religious thought, the ultimate focus of which, then as now, is truth: What is life on earth, how does it relate to time and the interrelationship of all things, what is death, what survives death?

This is what written language, perhaps not far removed from the paintings on the walls of caves, is for: to capture and conjure a reality that stands outside of time. The Pyramid Texts are irrefutable proof that this is what writing is, and that it is a sophisticated, multifaceted device, meant to work on different levels at once, not simply a method of note taking that emerged to preserve a longstanding oral tradition, as is generally taught. It is a separate stream of human creativity and insight, where the visual component is as strong as the aural component in speech. The beginning of written language is language as writing.

But do not take my word for it. See for yourself.

•

We regard grammar as superfluous, because it does not need to be known. It is embedded in the mind. Its analysis is thought to be merely a mechanical exercise, and inherently dry. But the opposite is true: the life is in the grammar, and it is there that you look. The way in is to proceed down a trail or a track or a corridor of grammar, which has the effect of breathing life into the apparent artifacts that are hieroglyphs.

I found this in an old notebook the other day. I don’t know why I copied it down, but seeing it years later I was struck by how easy it was to read, and how it could be used to quickly illustrate the arrangement and grammar of hieroglyphs. It is a short poem that reads in columns from right to left. The first and last words are left out. The poem is set up as a pattern of the same words repeated, with subtle variation, as new words thread through them. The refrain, repeated in the first, the third, and the fifth columns, is Death is before me today.

Death is before me today

Like the smell of myrrh

Like sitting under sails in the wind

Death is before me today

Like the smell of lilies

Like sitting on the shore

Of a drunken land

Death is before me today

If you wanted to think about it further, you might look at the mix of pictures that are letters and pictures that are pictures which make up the range of hieroglyphic signs. There is nothing dated or stylized about them. There is some overlap between the pictures as letters and pictures that are meant to mean something in themselves. You are looking at something that is familiar and simple, and yet highly intelligent and able to convey a deeper meaning. It is not archaic. It is not alien.

The real pleasure in hieroglyphs is looking at words in all of their dimensions of meaning; the sound, the image, the range of associations arising from the common experience of the physical world, and in the surprise recognition that you know it already. These are associations drawn from the poetic underlay of language itself, the tactile sense of the world that everyone knows.

Look, for example, at the birds. The owl is one of the most common hieroglyphs. It is the letter m. It is the same owl I saw and heard on the barn roof last night. The letter is the sound the owl makes, the name of the owl in Egypt, buma. The owl as m alone functions like the w in shorthand, for the small directive words that begin with w in English, what who while when with, begin with m in hieroglyphs as in their close relative Arabic: maa, with; min, from; min, who; ma, what; etc. (a variation on this sound, for example, is manna from heaven, ma-na, literally, “what is it?”). The word death is spelled with the owl and a loaf of the rounded peasant bread of the Egyptian countryside, the letter t. The word is spelled out, mut, the Arabic word for death; as in checkmate, from the Arabic for “the king [sheikh] is dead [mat].” In hieroglyphs there is often a visual dimension to the written word. Here for example one might note the relationship between the owl and the bread. There is a belief in rural Egypt that owls bring death, and that you ward it away by putting bread, the name of which is aesh, “life,” on the roof of a house (thus Lilith is the long-winged nightbird that sucks the life out of the infant’s mouth). After the word is spelled out there is often, though not always, a picture that has no phonic value but visually reinforces the sense of the word: here, a man with a stick raised to kill something.

The following word is a composite of a picture as a letter and a picture as a picture. It is made up of the owl—here, not as an owl but simply the letter m as the preposition in, and the face as the face itself. The meaning is literally “in your face,” “right in front of you.” The hieroglyphic face becomes a metaphor for what a face is, the preposition upon or above—the metaphor and the thing itself are blurred, only the context tells you which is which. In hieroglyphs the context, the progression of the phrase as verb subject object, will usually make it clear what a word is meant to do, as in the case of the columns here.

The vowels, which pattern clusters of hard consonants into nouns and adjectives and verbs, are left out, leaving the consonants to stand for the word. Yet grammar resides in the vowels. Why are the vowels not written down?

Who has seen the wind?

The grammatical element that brings the words to life is the tiny chick beside the reed near the top of the column on the right, the hieroglyphic particle iw. This particle, tiny and subtle, like a tiny chick whose hidden movement gently moves the reeds, is not a word in itself. Its presence indicates the construction of a nominal sentence, a standard sentence construction in hieroglyphs as in Arabic, where it is often preceded by the conjunction w. The particle signals two nouns, or a noun and a phrase, placed together in apposition. There is no verb, but an affinity between two things arises simply in placing them together. This is not a common construction in English, except in poetry (the sky, a haze; sound, the sea), and the easiest way to translate the iw, generally, is as “is.”

The bird in the word for “myrrh” is one of the most common carrion birds in Africa, the ashen-gray kite seen everywhere circling over cities and garbage heaps. The shrill sound it makes, tiu, is the sound of the letter that is a picture of this bird. Myrrh, myrrh sweet bleeding in the bitter wound, is the Arabic word for “bitter.” In hieroglyphs the word is spelled out, antiu, but the meaning is signaled with an echoic effect: the letters themselves contain both the image of the bird and its sound. One is on familiar ground, the ground of the physical world. The sight and sound of the kite, now, as five thousand years ago, signals sadness, the gloom of mourning. The words are after what any true artist or poet is after: to capture, to conjure the living thing—to capture the sense of a thing as it relates to the living world.

Hieroglyphs are fluid, associations are signaled in inconsistent ways, yet the vocabulary of images that signal the qualities of words is universal. It belongs to the timeless realm of the sense field, of things that are known by heart: the disc is light, the sail is wind; hst, the stark landscape of desert hills and valleys, is a word that means both “desert” and “mountain,” the desert hills, the out there, the desolate land.

The poem is so accurate in its tactile sense of the exhaustion of illness, the exhaustion near death, that it does not belong to any place or time.

Osiris

Words, are they alive or dead?

Osiris, is he alive or dead?

What is Osiris?

Osiris is anyone

As a rotting corpse.

Osiris is the life in all things,

Plant and animal.

Osiris as a word is the seat of the eye.

The dead thing is life.

What is the eye?

This is the territory of the mental magic trick that alone is strong enough to hold the truth: paradox. Plutarch wrote that Egypt hid truth in the vehicle of paradox: the riddle, the enigma. Osiris, he wrote, conquered the world with words, with the vehicle of enigma: poetry. The people who initially figured out hieroglyphs in the West were brilliant visionaries who understood what Plutarch meant, like the man whose pioneering work preceded Champollion: Thomas Young, the early nineteenth-century physician and polymath who discovered the prismatic nature of the eye, and the wave nature of light. Young understood instinctively that hieroglyphs were both pictures and words at once, that, like the eye itself, hieroglyphs are not flat artifacts but multifaceted, prismatic, with layers or angles of perception, and within them the power to carry the life of something that has died.