THE TRANSLATION OF HYEROGLYPHICS

THE TRANSLATION OF HYEROGLYPHICS

Translation of the hieroglyphs still presents difficulties. In Champollion himself did not believe that he had revealed all that the hieroglyphs conceal. But death prevented him from following up his presentiments and subsequent scholars have not done so either, contenting themselves with refinements upon his original work. This failure has resulted in translations that miss the spirit and sense of the texts. But because Egyptologists have not found the metaphysical basis of the whole of Egyptian civilisation, they attribute the inco herence of the texts to primitive and 'unevolved' Egyptian thinking rather than to fundamental shortcomings of their own.

As is so often the case with solved mysteries, once the solu tion is provided it is difficult to see how it should not have been discovered long ago . But though simple enough to explain and illustrate , the symbolic key to the hieroglyphs requires a kind of thinking that is diametrically opposed to the analytic spirit of modern thought . The analytic mind rebels and refuses to countenance a symbol that contains within a single sign a complete hierarchy of meaning from the literal to the most abstract. But this is what the hieroglyphs do . Curiously enough , if Egyptologists stuck rigidly to an absolutely literal translation of the texts, the underlying symbolic meaning would almost force itself upon them; but by approaching the texts cerebrally, by trying to turn them into an equivalent of our 'literature' , they effectively covered over this inner meaning .

Thus , the sign for 'bird' shows a bird. But the constant use of this symbol in sacred texts suggests that the literal meaning does not tell the whole story. And the ubiquitous symbol for the 'soul' (the ba, a bird with a human head) provides the clue to the symbolic meaning of 'bird' . The sign refers not only to the physical bird, but also to all the functions and properties that are contained within the 'idea' of bird: the ability to fly, to escape from the earth , and hence the principle of volatility which ultimately implies 'spirit' . When, in religious texts, the Egyptians carefully drew scenes of men drawing closed a net ful of wild birds, they were not merely reminding the hovering disembodied dead of the pastimes of earth, but performing a magic rite reminding him of the exigencies of the spirit; of the need to capture , to 'draw the net' around the volatile aspects of the spiritual self. The failure to understand both the purpose of myth and its underlying verity contributes to the current unsatisfactory picture of ancient Egypt.