ANCR-401 Lessons

Introduction
We covered a substantial amount of symbols last week, but I am sure you found the determinatives helpful. This week, we will look at a way of reading hieroglyphs that many of you will be familiar with from Second Year, back when we studied the Elder Futhark. Today, we will look at how hieroglyphs may be used as pictograms and logograms.

In the second part of the lesson, we will also have a brief foray into the world of Egyptian numbers. After all, one of the main functions of their writings was to keep records, and that means numbers.

Hieroglyphics As Pictures
I certainly hope many of you will remember that when written records first started, many symbols were originally meant to be read as meaning exactly what they depicted. Thus, a mouth meant “mouth,” an eye meant “eye,” and so on. We call these kinds of symbols pictograms.

Over time, with written records being used to convey more complicated meanings, the symbols acquired  new, additional meanings. These meanings usually still retained a connection to the pictographic meaning of a symbol. Thus the mouth could now also mean “to speak” and a staff could mean “to rule,” if you remember our examples from the beginning of this course. This kind of meaning of symbols is called “ideographic” and the symbols are known as ideograms. We encountered many of these when we studied the Elder Futhark. This form of symbols is usually closely tied to their magical use, as the concentration of a whole concept or idea into a single symbol can be used to focus and concentrate its power.

Logograms are the next step on from ideograms. The term literally means “word writing,” and is used for symbols that represent a full word, and have already been disconnected from the original pictographic symbol to such a degree that the connection to the sounds of the spoken word are closer than the visual connection. The development from the phase of ideograms to logograms can still be seen with some hieroglyphics, although Bill Manley argues that the earlier phase is more a matter of chance and practical concern on the part of the artists rather than a true ideographic or pictographic use of the hieroglyphs.

Hieroglyphs that are interpreted by some as being ideograms or pictograms are usually accompanied by the symbol of a stroke, which is taken to mean that this symbol is to be taken as its pictorial meaning. A good example of this is the hieroglyph meaning “mouth” (a mouth, obviously), which is usually used in this way. However, some scholarly camps argue that this happens too infrequently and is therefore often misleading. Instead, it is suggested that the stroke accompanying a hieroglyph in this way should be taken to mean that the hieroglyph is meant as a full word instead of being read as part of the sounds of a longer word. In other words, the stroke signifies that a symbol is a logogram, rather than an ideogram. It is a form of determinative helping you to read the hieroglyphs as they were intended.

Whatever the case may be (and we may never be sure), we can know that a stroke next to the symbol called “mouth,” as pictured below, indicates that the symbol should not be read phonetically, but instead requires a deeper meaning.

Another class of symbols which are often seen as ideograms by scholars are the symbols showing anthropomorphic Egyptian gods. However, Manley argues that these are more appropriately considered as abbreviations of the name of the god, as the symbols are also part of these names, and as such can stand for the whole name (something called ‘pars pro toto’). An example for this would be the hieroglyph showing the god Anubis, which does indeed refer to the god, but can also be used as part of the full name of the god.

or

Complicated? Perhaps. But it seems to have worked well enough for the Egyptians, and in practice it is not a distinction that will have a great effect on your translations. It is just something to keep at the back of your mind.

To make matters even more confusing, the single stroke was used not just as a determinative to signify that a hieroglyph is meant to be interpreted non-phonetically. No, it was also used as a number symbol, which brings us to the second part of our lesson today.

Egyptian Numbers
Those of you who paid attention at the start of this year will remember that writing in ancient Egypt was used particularly for the task of record keeping and administration of the kingdom. As such, it was used for such tasks as recording the harvest, calculating and administering taxation, as well as recording dates.

To do this, it was obviously necessary to have a system to record numbers, and the Egyptians developed a fairly basic decimal numbering system. Decimal means that the system is working on a base of ten, much like our own.

However, while we have different symbols for the units zero to nine, and signify their actual numeric value by their position within the total group of numbers (so that the symbol furthest to the left represents values or numbers between zero and nine, the next symbol to the left represents 10-90, the next 100 to 900 and so on), the Egyptians instead had individual symbols for the different units (1s, 10s, 100s, etc.). The following table shows the symbols used by Egyptians:

To show multiples of each unit, the symbols would simply be repeated. Thus the number 26 would be shown by using the cattle hobble twice and the stroke six times.

or indeed

A picture showing the size of an army may include the lotus plant three times to show that there were 3,000 men in the force.

And to show that something happened in a particular year of the reign of a pharaoh (the usual way of dating in ancient Egypt), a scribe would put the number symbols alongside a phrase meaning “regnal year under the person of” and the name of the pharaoh. See if you can find the date in the following image:

If you said it’s the 13th year of this pharaoh’s reign, then well done.

Closing
And so we come to the end of another lesson. Your assignments today will consist of a slightly longer transcription exercise covering both the hieroglyphs we have studied so far (including determinatives and logograms) as well as the numerals, and a short quiz covering the theoretical information learned today. Before you leave, be sure you have a copy of the handout from last week. Next week, we will take a closer look at how the Egyptians used the hieroglyphs in their magic, which I am sure many of you have been eager to learn about.

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Vocabulary
Ideogram: A symbol which represents an idea or concept and not a group of letters, while also not being a direct pictorial representation of that idea of object. An example is the circle with a line through it that represents “no” or “not allowed” as part of a “No Kneazles Allowed!” sign that has no words.
Logogram: A symbol that represents a single word while not being visually related to the word it is representing. An example of this is a Chinese character.
Pictogram: A symbol which represents what it means. An example would be a picture of a Kneazle in a “No Kneazles Allowed!” sign.
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Original lesson written by Professor Mathilda Stevens