THE LANGUAGE OF ANCIENT EGYPT

THE LANGUAGE OF ANCIENT EGYPT

In the temple of the goddess Isis on the island of Philae, a few miles to the south of the city of Aswan, one wall bears a brief hieroglyphic inscription. Its signiﬁcance is not in its content or meaning but purely its date – it was written on 24 August ad 394, and as far as we know it was the last time that the hieroglyphic script was used. The language of ancient Egypt survived considerably longer (Philae temple also contains the last grafﬁti in the more cursive ‘demotic’ script, dating to 2 December ad 452), and in a sense it still exists in fossilized form in the liturgical texts of the modern Coptic church. Nevertheless, it was around the end of the 4th century ad that the knowledge and use of hieroglyphs effectively vanished, and until the decipherment of hieroglyphs by Jean-François Champollion in 1822, the written world of the Egyptians was unknown, and scholars were almost entirely reliant on the accounts left by Greek and Roman authors, or the sections of the Bible story in which Egypt features. Classical and biblical images of Egypt therefore dominated the emerging subject of Egyptology until almost the end of the 19th century.

More than 180 years after Champollion’s breakthrough, the study of ancient Egypt has inﬂuenced and permeated a vast number of contemporary issues, from linguistics and ‘Afrocentrism’, to religious cults and bizarre theories involving extraterrestrials. This book combines discussion of the archaeological and historical study of ancient Egypt with appraisal of the impact of Egypt – and its many icons – on past and present Western society and thought. It is intended both to give the reader a sense of some of the crucial issues that dominate the modern study of ancient Egypt, and also to attempt to discuss some of the reasons why the culture of the Egyptians is still so appealing and fascinating to us.

In 1898 the British Egyptologists James Quibell and Frederick Green uncovered a slab of greenish-grey slate-like stone in the ruins of an early temple at the Upper Egyptian site of Hierakonpolis. This was not a ﬁnd which, like Tutankhamun’s tomb 24 years later, would bring the world’s journalists racing to the scene, but its discoverers were almost immediately aware of its importance. Like the Rosetta Stone, this carved slab – the Narmer Palette – would have powerful repercussions for the study of ancient Egypt, spreading far beyond its immediate signiﬁcance at Hierakonpolis. For the next century or so, this object would be variously interpreted by Egyptologists attempting to solve numerous different problems, from the political origins of the Egyptian state to the nature of Egyptian art and writing. No single object can necessarily typify an entire culture, but the Narmer Palette is one of a few surviving artefacts from the Nile Valley that are so iconic and so rich in information that they can act as microcosms of certain aspects of ancient Egyptian culture as a whole.