We’re ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics more like a type font or handwriting?

by aibhalinshana

I have been watching a free online course from Harvard about the Giza plateau excavation and thought about something I had never considered. While I’m guessing hieroglyphic style changed over time, would hieroglyphics from the same period but different areas or person writing it have been exactly the same,more like fonts or would it be more like handwriting, where the basic shapes are similar but the style varies wildly based on the person making them? And in a related question-when we see hieroglyphics on things like tomb and temple walls, would it have been made by literate scribe/artisans with distinct styles or copied by workmen who wouldn’t have been able to understand what was being written? Edit: My phone hates me. I swear I know the difference between “Were” and “We’re” but I can’t edit the title that I can figure out.

Alkibiades415

Hello. This is not my field of expertise, but I can tell you that this topic is called Paloegraphy. In Greek and Roman epigraphy, there is a sort of "standard" way of forming letters that evolves over time, and is region-specific. These are called epichoric scripts. I imagine that something very similar is the case in Egypt, though, again, hieroglyphics are beyond me. In Greek or Latin inscriptions, even though the letters are more or less the same (usually) for a given time and place, paleographic study can still identify "hands" or "scribes" who have their own particular quirks. In some cases we can state with some confidence that this or that "hand" made a collection of inscriptions.

From what I understand, paleography as a discipline for Egyptian scripts has lagged a bit, but is making big gains now. There is a hot new book, just published April of 2020, which is a massive contribution to the field of ancient Egyptian paleography:

V. Davies and D. Laboury, The Oxford Handbook of Egyptian Epigraphy and Paleography (Oxford: 2020).

I am unable to get my hands on it right now but would very much like to. here is a link to the table of contents, but I'm not sure if that link will work for other folks.

XenophonTheAthenian

Written Egyptian consists of three languages, defined chronologically: Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, and Late Egyptian. The division is a little bit artificial, because the Egyptian language did not become extinct at the end of the Third Intermediate Period, but developed into the vernacular Demotic and then into Coptic. There is also Pre-Dynastic writing and various stages of proto-writing. The Classical form of Egyptian is Middle Egyptian, which was spoken as the vernacular of Egypt during the Middle Kingdom. It's the form of Egyptian for which we have by far the most texts, and it's the form for which the most grammars exist. I learned Middle Egyptian, not Old or Late Egyptian, and students taking Egyptian courses in an Egyptology or Near Eastern Studies department likewise typically learn Middle Egyptian rather than any other form (except maybe Coptic). It continued to be used as a sacral and official language through the New Kingdom down to the end of the Roman Period. During most of that period Middle Egyptian was no longer a spoken language, any more than Classical Latin was still a spoken language to the Latin scholars of the Middle Ages. Like the Latin scholars of the Middle Ages, scribes writing and reading Middle Egyptian after the Middle Kingdom recognized the language as an earlier form of whatever form of Egyptian they spoke, and while it would have been intelligible certainly to a speaker of Late Egyptian and probably Demotic it was nonetheless no longer a spoken language.

With regards to orthography and paleography I fear that you're not really understanding how the written Egyptian language works. You refer only to "hieroglyphics," which are indeed the best-known form of the written language to non-Egyptologists, but they are not necessarily the most important or prolific. In the Middle Kingdom a cursive form of hieroglyphics developed, as well as hieratic. "Cursive hieroglyphs" are a form of the epigraphic script adapted to writing on papyrus. It is recognizably the same script, but written just a bit simplified--it is "cursive" more or less only because the sign forms tend to have more continuous strokes. Hieratic is a "true" cursive, in that it contains ligatures and unique signs, and is really a separate script in its own right. Most undergraduate students of Middle Egyptian only learn hieroglyphics, and while they can read cursive hieroglyphs they cannot read hieratic, which is quite different. A further development from hieratic, the demotic script, was further divorced from Middle Egyptian hieroglyphics as well, and was rarely used to write anything earlier than Late Egyptian.

But you're really asking two questions. You're really asking whether paleographic "hands" existed in Egyptian sacral texts (they did) and whether stylistic distinctions existed within the same language and script. The first question has been adequately answered, the second is a bit of a problem because it's couched in rather uncertain terms, due to a lack of familiarity with the way Egyptian works. To begin with, different hands exist in all forms of Egyptian. At the very basic level this might be as simple as one scribe's decision to embellish a sign with a different color than another. Signs had more or less standardized forms, and scribes--who made up a minuscule portion of society--were rigorously trained in the formation of signs, but there were no standards for things like painting, and you'll find signs in inscriptions or papyri painted various colors. It could be distinctions in the size or slight differences in the shape of signs. Likewise, there was no standardization of "spelling." Middle Egyptian is characterized by an essentially phonetic spelling, but difficulties emerge in morphology, phonology, and syntax. Middle Egyptian, for example, employs "fronting" to a great degree, where nouns can sometimes jump forward from their normal syntactical position for emphasis. Likewise, certain words have implicit hierarchies, and are written in front of other words even if they do not belong there and are not read there. This is called honorific transposition, and it happens mostly in religious terms: e.g. ḥwt-nṯr, which means "house of the god" (i.e. temple) but is literally written "god-house" instead. Some of these patterns, like honorific transposition, continued to be used in later forms of Egyptian, but others disappeared over time. Old and Middle Egyptian both have duals, but the dual had dropped out of Late Egyptian. Other changes to the language occurred as well. Older forms of Egyptian have no article, but later forms did. Middle Egyptian texts written during later periods often include pꜣ, tꜣ, and nꜣ as articles. And so on--the short version is that the language changed over time, but the Classical form of Middle Egyptian continued to be used as a sacral script. Errors occur very frequently in texts from later periods, because the scribes do not necessarily understand why exactly some words take certain forms, or why some piece of syntax exists--in later forms of Egyptian the verbal syntax changed completely. Formulaic phrases were copied down, but not necessarily understood, and new syntax often inserted itself into a form of the language from an earlier period.

Then there's the problem of dialect and the spoken language. We know that Egyptian at various periods of its life had different dialects, but we don't fully understand what those dialects were like or how they worked. Dialect forms seem to worm their way into Egyptian texts quite frequently, but we can't always identify them with certainty. Likewise, Egyptian written syntax is quite ambiguous, probably too ambiguous for a spoken language (though modern Chinese and Japanese are similarly ambiguous, just not to the same degree). Much of that ambiguity was lost in later stages of the language (I've already mentioned the addition of the article) and it's likely that the spoken vernacular of Middle Egyptian took a very different form to its written counterpart even in the Middle Kingdom. Sometimes these vulgar idioms seem to intrude into written texts, although most sacral writing is highly formulaic. The result of all this is that, for example, Gardiner's sign list has for any individual word quite a lot of variations. For simple, common words there may be dozens of variations, some of them dialect versions, some of them alternate versions from later periods (when, for example, a particular sound had dropped out of the word and therefore scribes often omitted it when writing the earlier, Middle Egyptian, script), and some of them simply common errors, such as the transposition of two signs next to each other.