From twisted flax to one-legged ibises, Egyptian hieroglyphs offer a window into the heart of ancient Egypt. But how did this script really work?In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes speaks with Egyptologist Hugo Cook to decode the symbols that adorned temples, tombs, and papyrus scrolls found up and down the Nile. Together they uncover how hieroglyphs recorded everything from poetry to peace treaties, the meanings behind their intricate designs, and why the ancient Egyptians believed they held power beyond words.Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here:https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK
Chapter 1: What are hieroglyphs and why are they important?
It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today we're exploring the story of arguably the most captivating script from antiquity, the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. When you visit Egypt today or see Egyptian archaeology in museums, hieroglyphs are usually never far away. These pictorial symbols are adorned to the walls of temples, tombs and towering obelisks.
They were written down on papyrus and were used to record everything from transactions to poetry to official peace treaties. So how did hieroglyphs actually work? What did each symbol mean and how many were there? Did the Egyptians believe these symbols had magical properties? And for how long was this script useful?
Well, to answer all of this and much more, I was delighted to interview the Egyptologist Hugo Cook. Hugo teaches a course on hieroglyphs at the British Museum, he is an expert in ancient Egyptian texts, and his passion for the subject, well, it's undeniable. It was great to interview Hugo all about hieroglyphs and how these symbols have become one of the greatest gateways into ancient Egypt.
Hugo, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today.
Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.
You are welcome. You contacted me about this and your expertise in the subject of hieroglyphs. When you mentioned the word hieroglyphs, I was just like, okay, yeah, definitely, because we've never done an episode on it before. Hieroglyphs, like the pyramids, like Tutankhamen, it feels like another of those central things that has become the definitive symbol of ancient Egypt for all of us today.
Yeah, absolutely.
There's so much allure about it. And I think it's an almost universal experience going into a museum and seeing these amazing things, these little pieces of art, and wondering about them and having some sense of wonder about them. But yet, despite them being so iconic as an idea and as a literal symbol of ancient Egypt,
There's very little that's widely known about them, about how they were and why they're important and why they should matter to all of us today.
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Chapter 2: How did hieroglyphs originate?
And this is how the majority of hieroglyphic words are constructed. They're built up of these things. So for example, if you see an owl in a text, it may have nothing to do with an owl, but it's because earlier on, the word for owl had an M sound in it. And so they used it as the letter M in lots of words that just need an M.
So this is one of the, it is the main type of the, what I should say, three types of hieroglyphs, are just these sound signs that work a little bit like how we might think of an alphabet today, but much bigger because it doesn't just include the simple alphabet we have, but it also includes whole syllables.
So while there's one sign for the letter M, there's another sign for the sound men, you know, common sounds in Egyptian so that they could build up longer words with fewer hieroglyphs. So that's the main thing we've got going on, these sound signs.
We've also got some fossils from that evolutionary period of hieroglyphs, when it's first appearing and they're just drawing a duck on a label to show what's in something. We have a few words which can be written just by drawing that word. So for example, if you want to say the word sun, as in the big burning ball in the sky,
you can just draw a sun and that will make it clear to the reader what you're doing. These are, they appear with common words, but there aren't many of them. And then the final type of hieroglyphs. Oh, I love this. This is why this is the best language I've ever studied. Hands down. I'm not biased. I'm right. And the third type is what we in Egyptology call determinatives.
Now, usually when you're looking at a language and those of you who've, you know, learned other languages, ancient languages, modern languages, you might have encountered something somewhat tricky where a language often has to choose. Is it going to be a very strict language?
Language with very clear rules, which makes it easy to understand, but doesn't always allow much room for poetry and artistic flair. Whereas other languages might be a bit more lax in their rules, which gives a writer a bit more flair and room for it, but creates the complexities of not having a very fixed system.
hieroglyphs and egyptian using hieroglyphs says why not both let's have the best language ever and be able to do whatever we want so their language is nice and structured and rigid and clear we get all those advantages but one of the places i think they have this really unique way of adding flair and where you really get to see that the thoughts and psychology of a writer behind a text
Even if this writer is just copying something down, we get to see a bit of who they are. Are these signs often appearing at the end of a word called a determinative? Now, these are silent symbols. They are completely unpronounced. And these are where the Egyptians really harkened back to the artistic roots of hieroglyphs. Because what these symbols do is they categorize a word. So, for example...
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Chapter 3: What are the different types of hieroglyphs?
They're obsessed with it, that idea, isn't it?
They loved it. But we know they hated it because in outside tombs where, again, slightly contrary to modern expectations of how a grave works, tombs would often be somewhat semi-public. You'd want people to come in and make offerings and remember your name, things like that.
And so a lot of them had what we might think of as adverts and billboards outside trying to encourage you, a passerby in the necropolis, to come into that particular one and give some nice... Egyptian beer. And one of the most, and you know, today in marketing campaigns, they'll try and speak to everyone, but act as if they're speaking to you as an individual.
Well, they do a similar thing in ancient Egypt, where they will address you with, rather than just saying people, you know, they'll try and think of something that might describe you, but that could describe anyone. And one of the most common ones we get on these adverts, I say in adverticals, is to those who love life and despise death.
So, you know, we know at the end of the day, they saw it as an innate human value, or at least an innate Egyptian value to despise death. And so all this seeming love for death was actually preparation for something they weren't too fond about the idea of. So we get this huge breadth of that. And while I mentioned philosophy on this tangent, the impact of this on wider things is huge.
I mean, famously, a lot of Greek philosophers went and studied in Egypt. And it's been suggested that this sort of dialogue approach and things like the ones I mentioned might have some influence on Plato. And beyond works of philosophy, you get epic words of fiction and literature, wonderful tales, poetic and prosaic.
But in terms of mythology, so earlier on, we don't actually find many mythologies in the sense we might think of them, a story about the gods. A lot of what we can tell early on about mythology, we have to infer because the Egyptians already knew it, and they refer to it in things like spells and religious texts.
They might refer to an episode, but they don't always write it down, especially earlier. There's certainly an element of secrecy around religion in ancient Egypt. For example, earlier on, you'll get certain... To bring in the hieroglyphs quickly,
You'll get certain religious texts and spells written in what we call retrograde hieroglyphs, which are where they are written in mirror writing to sort of encode them and make them harder to read, to give it this air of exclusivity. And I should say that mirror writing is...
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Chapter 4: How do the Egyptians use determinatives in hieroglyphs?
It looks like we've got a falcon standing behind young child Ramses. This is a fairly standard looking image. Horus, the god who's the guardian of kingship, often associated with falcons, is regularly shown standing behind a king, protecting them as this god of kingship. But there's an interesting thing here.
The little boy who's shown by touching his finger to his mouth, which is the ancient Egyptian sort of equivalent of sucking your thumb, is also carrying this little sedge plant. And when we look at that sedge plant, it frames the whole thing differently.
Because if we imagine that the falcon isn't Horus, as is usually supposed in these contexts, but is meant to be read as Ra, the other famous falcon god and the sun god, We've got ra, and then the child of Ramesses, child in ancient Egyptian, the word for child is mes. And then the sedge plant was pronounced, the word for sedge was su.
So together, this bird, this child, and this plant spell out Ramessesu. So they say the name of the king through this, using what looks like one thing. You look at it and think, ah, it's Horus with the king. But then you think, ah, it's actually spelling out his name.
And he does this with a couple of statues, these kind of 3D hieroglyphs, which don't just have to be written in the traditional way on a wall, but they can really play with it like this.
Hugo, it's absolutely extraordinary. And I'll bring up very quickly that Karnak Temple complex and the amazing hieroglyphs that you can see on the walls, carved into the walls, some of them very much. I talk about Ramesses II as well, don't they? So absolutely extraordinary. And it does feel that that New Kingdom Egypt, there is a real kind of zenith in hieroglyph art.
What I also remember from going to Karnak was actually you see some of those pillars. I mean, they're completely coloured. Well, they are coloured and they were coloured and they're restoring them now. So it's also, I guess, to think about hieroglyphs with an association with colour, but also slightly different, but we'll kind of merge these questions together with magic too.
This idea of these animals being etched into stone or on papyrus. And I guess that belief, I mean, Can these animals come to life, especially if they're colourful animals too? So reflecting the actual colours of an animal you'll see in your day-to-day life.
Yeah, absolutely. And I can think of a couple of great examples there that bring both those points. With colour, one thing we see is rich, beautiful colour use on hieroglyphs and a lot can be said there. A common thing you see on papyrus particularly is the use of the colour red. Egyptian scribes, their toolkit of their trade was a sort of a wooden palette with a black inkwell and a red inkwell.
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