Chapter 1

From Sign to Symbol in Roman Egypt

On the twenty-fourth of August in the year 394 C.E., a man stood before the north wall of the Gate of Hadrian on the island of Philae and carved three columns of rather crude hieroglyphic signs to the right of a now-mutilated relief depicting the Nubian god Mandulis (Figure 2). This ancient graffiti writer identified himself in his hieroglyphic text as Smet, son of Smet, the Second Prophet of Isis. In an accompanying Demotic inscription, he further described himself as “the scribe of the House of Writings (?) of Isis,” and he claimed to have carved his graffiti to honor Mandulis because that god had been favorable (“fair of face”) toward him. As a priest and scribe, Smet would have been uniquely capable of producing texts in both the ancient hieroglyphic and the more recent Demotic scripts. In fact, by the late fourth century he was likely one of only a handful of individuals in all of Egypt who possessed that ability.¹

This priestly scribe, chiseling his brief inscriptions into the stone of Hadrian’s Gate, stood unwittingly at a critical juncture in the history of Egypt’s already-ancient writing system; the three short columns of hieroglyphs he carved on that August day are considered by scholars to be the last known hieroglyphic inscription ever produced in Egypt.² Smet and his graffiti are thus a logical starting point from which to begin a discussion of hieroglyphs and their reception in late antique Egypt, for they raise two very critical questions. First, how did the knowledge of Egypt’s hieroglyphic writing system, in use for some three thousand years by the fourth century C.E., come to reside solely in the hands of Smet and his priestly brethren? And second, how and why did that knowledge finally die out? It is only in view of the obsolescence of the hieroglyphic script that we can begin to make sense of late antique attempts to “read” or otherwise interpret it. First, however, it is necessary to say a few words about the origins and nature of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and about the contexts in which they were used and studied. The following does not pretend to be a comprehensive account of Egyptian writing from the Predynastic period through to late antiquity; rather, it is intended to provide an overview of some of the key features of the hieroglyphic script, the practicalities of its use, and the circumstances leading to its eventual abandonment.

Figure 2. Hieroglyphic inscription of Smet, son of Smet (I.Philae.Dem. 436), from the Gate of Hadrian, Philae. Photo courtesy of Peter Dorman.

Origins of the Hieroglyphic Writing System

The term “hieroglyphic” is not a native designation for the Egyptian writing system but rather a term applied to that system by Greek visitors to Egypt.³ The Egyptians themselves referred to hieroglyphs as mdw nṯr, “god’s words,” a term that refers not to the sacral use of the script, but that rather reflects the long-standing belief that writing was the creation and gift of the god Thoth.⁴ Although hieroglyphs are often taken as the paradigmatic form of all ancient Egyptian writing, the hieroglyphic script was in fact just one of several scripts used at different times and in different contexts to record the spoken Egyptian language.

The development of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing took place in the late Predynastic and Early Dynastic periods (ca. 3250–2700 B.C.E.), a time of increasing social complexity when many of the defining characteristics and institutions of Egyptian culture first came into being. It has been suggested that the abundant rock art found along routes in the Eastern and Western Deserts may represent an early stage in the development of written communication in Egypt, as may the pictorial motifs and incised pot marks found on some types of Predynastic ceramics, but it remains unclear what specific meaning these various images held for their creators and viewers.⁵ Rock art, pot marks, and other types of figural representations may well have had some sort of communicative purpose, and some of the motifs employed therein resemble signs that later appear in the corpus of standardized hieroglyphic signs, but they cannot be considered to represent “writing” in the accepted modern sense of “visible speech.”⁶

The earliest artifacts that clearly mark the origins of Egyptian writing derive from the Predynastic cemetery of Umm el-Qa’ab at Abydos, in Upper Egypt. Abydos was one of three major centers of power in the Predynastic period, alongside the cities of Hierakonpolis and Naqada, and the elite burials at the site attest to the developing social hierarchy and institutionalization of power that characterized the Predynastic. One of these elite tombs, designated U-j by its excavators, is distinguished by its size, its architecture, and the extensive assemblage of valuable grave goods it once contained. All these factors have led archaeologists to speculate that the tomb owner was an individual of some importance, perhaps a proto-king who presided over the growing regional influence of Abydos during the Naqada III period.⁷ Three classes of artifacts found in Tomb U-j seem to reflect early efforts at administrative record keeping: sherds of ceramic vessels bearing markings in ink, sealings (impressions left in clay by cylinder seals), and ivory tags or labels with incised symbols. Some of the signs on the tags seem to represent numerals, and others have been interpreted as indicating the place of origin of the material to which the label was originally affixed. Later labels from Abydos are explicitly royal in character, and close connections between the development of writing and the origins of the centralized, monarchical Egyptian state are commonly assumed.⁸

The earliest symbols depicted on the ivory labels from Tomb U-j do not yet represent a mature system for rendering continuous speech, and it has been suggested that they should be understood rather as “a marking system with a highly restricted scope of applications,” which “displayed formal features typical of later writing and emergent representation of language” and was oriented primarily toward expressing the names of persons and places.⁹

The Egyptian writing system continued to evolve over the next several centuries, expanding in both its functionality and in the range of sign forms it employed. By the late Second Dynasty (ca. 2690 B.C.E.), the hieroglyphic writing system was capable of expressing complete clauses with subject and predicate, and lengthier continuous texts began to appear in the Third and Fourth Dynasties. Most signs achieved their canonical form during the Early Dynastic period, and the corpus of hieroglyphs remained quite stable until the Ptolemaic period, when there was extensive experimentation with sign forms and many new signs were introduced.¹⁰

Types of Hieroglyphic Signs

In its classical Middle Kingdom form, the hieroglyphic script comprised some seven hundred distinct signs, conventionally divided by scholars into three categories: logograms or ideograms (signs that represent entire words), phonograms (signs that represent sounds), and determinatives or semagrams (signs that mark word breaks and provide metalinguistic information about the classification of the words to which they are attached). These categories are not absolutely fixed—the interpretation of a sign as an ideogram, phonogram, or determinative rests on its context—but these different types of signs combine to form syntactic units within the Egyptian writing system.¹¹

Ideograms are signs that represent whole words or concepts; so, for example, the Egyptian word for “house,” pr, can be written using the ideogram depicting the schematic floor plan of a house. A single stroke is written after or beneath the sign to indicate that it is meant to be read as an ideogram. Contrary to the views of late antique Neoplatonists like Plotinus, whose theories on hieroglyphic writing are discussed in Chapter 3, ideograms do not refer directly to reality, but to reality as mediated by language. That is, the ideogram for “house” refers not to the physical reality of a particular house or to some Platonic ideal of “house,” but to the specific Egyptian word for house, pr.¹² Being tied to the spoken Egyptian language gives individual hieroglyphs phonetic value, and the phonetic value of individual signs enabled the Egyptians to use the rebus principle to write words that were difficult to depict graphically, but that sounded like words that could be represented. So, for example, the house hieroglyph, with its phonetic value of pr, could also be used to write the homonymous verb of motion prı̉, “to go out” (Table 1).

Phonograms are signs that represent sounds, rather than entire words. As noted above, some signs can act as both ideograms and phonograms; so, in the first example in Table 1, the house sign serves as an ideogram, connoting the word pr, or “house,” while in the second example, the same sign acts as a phonogram with the phonetic value p + r. As the examples in Table 2 illustrate, phonograms may be “alphabetic” or monoconsonantal (representing a single consonant sound), biliteral (representing two consonants) or triliteral (representing three consonants). In theory, the corpus of monoconsonantal signs could have been used to spell out any word in the Egyptian language, and those signs were in fact commonly used to transliterate foreign names. The fact that purely “alphabetic” writing of this sort never became the norm in Egypt, however, suggests that the high value placed on the hieroglyphic script in Egyptian culture went beyond the script’s immediate communicative function.¹³

Determinatives make up the third major category of hieroglyphic signs. They do not convey phonetic information but stand at the end of a word to mark the word break. They also serve as classifiers, providing metalinguistic information about the semantic category to which the word belongs. So, for example, the walking legs sign is used to determine verbs of motion such as “walk” and “run,” while the house sign is used to determine words for types of buildings. Recent studies have drawn on insights from the field of semiotics to emphasize the range of culturally specific information that can be conveyed by determinatives and, conversely, the insight that determinatives can give us into the Egyptians’ conceptual universe. For example, Orly Goldwasser has noted that the use of a depiction of a man lying on a bed to determine the word sdr, “to lie down, spend the night,” suggests that the writing of that word was codified in elite circles, as beds would have been status items unavailable to the majority of the Egyptian population.¹⁴ Determinatives can also illuminate unexpected conceptual categories very specific to the Egyptian thought world. A good example of this is the image of a female breast, which is used to determine words as seemingly unrelated as “sky,” “cow,” and “flood”—terms that a recent study has shown to be conceptually linked by the notion of nourishment.¹⁵

The Egyptian language is classified as Hamito-Semitic, related to both the family of languages spoken in northern and eastern Africa and to Semitic languages such as Akkadian, Hebrew, and Arabic. One of the features that Egyptian shares with the Semitic languages is a consonantal root system, in which groups of related words are constructed based on a root of (typically) three consonants in a fixed order. Grammatical inflection and variations in meaning can be indicated by changing the vowels that separate the consonants or by adding prefixes and suffixes to the root. Vowels were not normally written in Egyptian until the advent of Coptic (see below), but the correct vocalization of a given word would have been determined by the native Egyptian speaker from contextual clues. Table 3 demonstrates how the different types of hieroglyphs combine to form syntactic units and how the triconsonantal root system can be used to derive word groups.

In the first example in Table 3, the house sign is used as an ideogram, to write the word pr, “house.” In the second example, the same sign is used as a phonogram, representing the biconsonantal phoneme p + r. This is followed by an alphabetic sign, the open-mouth hieroglyph that stands for the consonantal value r. This sign acts as what is known as a “phonetic complement,” repeating the second consonant of the preceding biliteral sign and emphasizing that the previous sign is meant to be read as a phonogram rather than as an ideogram. The walking-legs determinative follows, indicating that the word in question is the verb of motion prı̉, “to go out.” Examples three and four are homonyms with identical consonantal structure (p + r + t); in spoken Egyptian they would presumably have been differentiated by interpolated vowel sounds, but the hieroglyphic script differentiates them graphically by means of determinatives. Pr.t, the season of “winter,” receives the sun disk determinative indicating that the word represents a unit of time, while pr.t, the noun “fruit, seed,” is determined by a plough and three seeds. Both phonetic complements and determinatives serve the purpose of disambiguation, specifying precisely how individual signs and sign groups are meant to be read. In the absence of punctuation and word spacing, neither of which was commonly used in Egyptian, determinatives also signal to the reader that the end of a word has been reached.

From the perspective of modern Egyptology, most of the classical and late antique interpretations of hieroglyphs that will be discussed in the following chapters are quite simply incorrect. Many of these later misinterpretations derive from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and function of the three types of hieroglyphic signs outlined above. Prior to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the nineteenth-century decipherment of the hieroglyphic script, the phonetic value of hieroglyphic signs was not recognized by most scholars, and it was widely believed that hieroglyphs functioned on a purely symbolic level.¹⁶ That is, rather than representing the spoken Egyptian language made visible, hieroglyphs were thought to transcend linguistic differences and to participate in a universal language of symbols, the meaning of which was accessible only to those initiates who possessed the proper hermeneutic tools. The signal contribution of scholars like Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion was the recognition of hieroglyphs’ phonetic value, which liberated the script from purely symbological interpretations and permitted subsequent generations of philologists to begin reconstructing the underlying grammatical structures of the Egyptian language.¹⁷

Scripts and Their Uses

The aesthetic value of the hieroglyphic script, which made it so beautifully suited for use on monumental temples, tombs, and stelae, also made it cumbersome to use in more mundane contexts. A scribe who had to painstakingly detail all the feathers of his bird hieroglyphs—a practice seen in many monumental inscriptions—would soon find his bookkeeping in arrears and clients demanding to know why their letters had not yet been sent. Early on in the development of the Egyptian writing system, therefore, a cursive script known as hieratic was developed for use in nonmonumental contexts, typically written in ink on papyrus or ostraca.¹⁸ “Hieratic” was, like “hieroglyphic,” a Greek term applied to the Egyptian writing system. Although the literal meaning of the word, “priestly,” implies that texts written in hieratic necessarily have religious content, the script in fact had a very wide range of possible uses, from personal letters to legal records, as well as literary and religious texts, and the hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts were used in parallel throughout much of Egyptian history.¹⁹ In hieratic, the hieroglyphic prototypes of many of the signs can still be recognized, but the signs themselves have been somewhat stylized so as to render them quicker and easier to write; some hieroglyphic signs are reduced to little more than strokes or squiggles in the hieratic script. As John Baines notes, the early development and widespread use of hieratic was likely critical in allowing the hieroglyphic script to retain its representational character and its preeminence as what he calls the “vehicle of public writing, and more generally of written display.”²⁰

Toward the middle of the seventh century B.C.E., a third and even more cursive script developed out of hieratic. Called “demotic” or “common” by the Greeks, it was initially used for mainly administrative purposes (hence its Egyptian designation, sẖ n š^ϲ.t, or “document writing”), although its usage later expanded to include religious and literary texts as well. In Demotic, unlike in hieratic, the hieroglyphic prototypes of individual signs are often unrecognizable, and there is a strong tendency for signs to be combined or “ligatured” together.²¹ Demotic eventually supplanted hieratic as the principal script used in administration and daily transactions and pushed hieroglyphs even further out of the realm of common knowledge.²² The Demotic script remained in use for roughly eight hundred years; the last known inscriptions written in Demotic are graffiti from the temple of Isis at Philae dated to the year 452 C.E., approximately fifty years after Smet son of Smet composed his own graffiti, in both hieroglyphs and Demotic, at the same site.²³

The abandonment of the Demotic script did not mean the death of the Egyptian language, however. Already in the Ptolemaic period, scribes had begun experimenting with the possibility of rendering the Egyptian language phonetically using Greek letters. This experimentation intensified in the early Roman period, particularly in the context of the production of ritual texts. Because the Greek alphabet, unlike the Egyptian scripts, indicates vowel sounds, this system of notation was used to gloss obscure words and magical names, the pronunciation of which was seen as being of the utmost importance for effective ritual performance.²⁴ By the third or fourth century C.E., this experimental system had been codified into an alphabet consisting of the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet plus a handful of additional signs (six or seven depending on the dialect) derived from Demotic and used to represent sounds that do not occur in Greek. This distinctive script and latest phase of the Egyptian language, known as Coptic (the term is derived via Arabic from the Greek Ἀιγύπτιος, or “Egyptian”), was adopted early on by Egypt’s nascent Christian communities and was used, among other purposes, for translating the New Testament from Greek into Egyptian.²⁵ By the time of the Arab conquest in the mid-seventh century, the use of Coptic was widespread for both religious and secular purposes, and under the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs Coptic was commonly used for administrative and legal documents. Arabic supplanted Coptic as the principal language of administration and day-to-day life only in the eleventh century C.E., and Coptic survives to this day in a fossilized form as the liturgical language of the Egyptian Christian church.²⁶

Multilingualism

In addition to the Egyptian language and the multiplicity of scripts employed at any given time to render that language in writing, numerous other languages and scripts were used in Egypt at different times. Some, such as Akkadian and Aramaic, were relatively restricted in their scope and influence, employed for a specific purpose (diplomatic correspondence, in the case of Akkadian) or by members of a particular ethnic group (Jewish mercenaries, in the case of Aramaic). Others, such as Greek and, later, Arabic, would spread widely and serve many different purposes. Throughout the pharaonic period, Egyptian remained the language of business, administration, religion, and daily life for the vast majority of the population. By the Byzantine period, however, following the Macedonian and Roman conquests, Egypt had become a profoundly bilingual society, one in which both Egyptian and Greek were widely spoken and written. In the centuries following the Arab conquest the spread of Arabic would complicate the country’s linguistic situation even further.

Greek speakers, mainly Ionians and Carians, first began to arrive in Egypt during the seventh century B.C.E. as merchants and as mercenaries in service to the Egyptian pharaohs. The royal policy of bestowing land grants on soldiers upon their retirement from military service resulted in the first wave of Greek settlement in the area of Pelusium on the Mediterranean coast, and the establishment of the city of Naucratis as the main locus of commerce between Greeks and Egyptians in the late seventh century B.C.E. led many Greek merchants to settle in that area as well, further expanding the Greek population base in Egypt. However, it was not until the conquest of Alexander the Great in 332 B.C.E., and the subsequent establishment of the Greek-speaking Ptolemaic dynasty (305–30 B.C.E.), that the use of Greek became widespread outside of ethnic Greek enclaves. The Ptolemaic rulers, themselves of Macedonian descent, made Greek the official administrative language of the country, and according to Plutarch (Vita Antonii §27) only Cleopatra VII, last of her dynasty, made any attempt to learn Egyptian. In practical terms, Greek became the status language of Ptolemaic Egypt, and Egyptians who wished to participate in the political system were effectively required to learn that language, whatever level of literacy they might have already attained in Demotic. (Evidence for Greeks learning Demotic also exists, but this practice seems to have been considerably less common.) As Greeks and Egyptians intermarried and as Egyptians of the upper classes learned Greek in order to seek a greater voice in the country’s economy and administration, a bilingual elite came into being, conversant in both Greek and Egyptian and able to adapt their language use to particular circumstances and situations.²⁷

In 30 B.C.E., Egypt came under Roman control following the defeat of Cleopatra and Mark Antony at the battle of Actium and their subsequent suicides. Administered as the “private estate” of Octavian and the emperors who followed him, Egypt followed a slightly different path than many other Roman provinces, although many of these administrative differences vanished following the reforms of Diocletian in the late third century.²⁸ As in the other eastern provinces, Roman administration in Egypt was carried out largely in Greek, and the country’s Greco-Egyptian bilingualism became even more deeply entrenched during the first centuries of Roman rule. In contrast, the use of Latin in Roman Egypt was quite restricted, and the language had little impact outside of military circles.²⁹ By the time of the Arab conquest in 642 C.E., Coptic had long since supplanted the Demotic script as the principal vehicle for writing the Egyptian language, and the conquerors inherited a strong tradition of Greco-Egyptian bilingualism. It took more than three centuries for Arabic to overtake Greek and Coptic to become the country’s dominant language, and even into the nineteenth century it was rumored that there existed villages in remote parts of the country where Coptic was still spoken on a day-to-day basis, the last surviving vestige of the ancient Egyptian language.³⁰

Literacy, Status, and the Priesthood

“See, there is no office free from supervisors, except the scribe’s. He is the supervisor!” This claim, one of many set forth in the Middle Kingdom text now known as The Satire on the Trades or The Instruction of Dua-Khety, was intended as an exhortation to a trainee scribe, who is encouraged to complete his education because every other trade is deemed inferior to that of the scribe.³¹ The privileged position of scribes within the Egyptian social hierarchy was recognized already in the Old Kingdom, and the genre of didactic or “Instruction” texts that developed in that period has plausibly been linked to an apprenticeship model of scribal training. Sources from the Middle and New Kingdoms point to the existence of scribal schools associated with both the royal palace (as in the introduction to The Satire on the Trades, where Dua-Khety is said to have “sailed southwards to the Residence to place him [his son] in the school of writings among the children of the magistrates, the most eminent men of the Residence”) and with certain of the major temples, such as those of Amun and Mut at Karnak. Beginning in the Old Kingdom, scribal training was seen a necessary prerequisite for advancement in the county’s burgeoning administration, a fact that would hold true in subsequent periods of Egyptian history as well.³²

The process of learning to read and write in Egyptian during the pharaonic period can be reconstructed to some extent based on surviving didactic literature and school texts, which are abundantly preserved in certain contexts, especially from the New Kingdom.³³ From this material, it appears that students would begin their studies not, as one might suppose, by learning individual hieroglyphic signs, but rather by memorizing entire words and phrases in the hieratic script, learning to break them down into their component signs only later in the educational process. Given that hieratic was the script most commonly used for bureaucratic purposes and that many apprentice scribes were undoubtedly training for a position in the central administration, it is hardly surprising that the curriculum would have privileged hieratic over the more formal hieroglyphic script. Indeed, individuals who attained literacy in hieratic were not necessarily literate in hieroglyphs as well. Instruction in the hieroglyphic script, if it were undertaken at all, would have taken place during a student’s secondary education, after he had already achieved a certain level of proficiency in hieratic and had studied the classics of the Middle Egyptian literary canon.³⁴

For the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, education in Greek (and later, Coptic) has received extensive discussion on the basis of papyrological documentation, but somewhat less is known about instruction in the Egyptian language during the same periods. Based on surviving documents tentatively identified as school texts, it has been suggested that instruction in Demotic focused primarily on the acquisition of the vocabulary and formulae needed to compose administrative texts, but this remains a matter of some debate.³⁵ Less still is known about education in the hieroglyphic script in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, but it seems likely that it took place within the context of the Egyptian temples and, more specifically, in the institution known as the House of Life (on which see below).³⁶

Given the centrality of the written word both within the Egyptian administration and in Egyptian culture more broadly, an important question to consider is the extent to which Egypt’s population was literate at any given time. Inscriptions covered the walls of the country’s temples, stelae and funerary papyri were commissioned for placement in the tombs of those who could afford them, and contracts and deeds were written in ink on papyrus rolls and ostraca. But how likely was it that any given Egyptian was capable of engaging with the textual material that crossed his or her line of sight on a daily basis? Studies on literacy in the ancient world emphasize that literacy must be seen as a “highly variable package of skills in using texts”; the ability to read does not necessarily imply the ability to write, and writers might only be able to produce texts in a single genre.³⁷ This is indeed the picture that emerges from the Egyptian sources of the New Kingdom and Late Period. Although precise statistics are still a matter of considerable debate, the estimate of 1 percent literacy proposed by John Baines and Christopher Eyre in the early 1980s is still widely accepted, although it has been argued that the rate of literacy rose to perhaps as high as 10 percent of the population during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods with the increased use of Greek in Egypt. Baines and Eyre insist on the fact that “literacy” in this context does not necessarily imply that a literate individual was fully conversant with the several scripts and phases of the Egyptian language; their discussion of witnessing and signing documents, in particular, emphasizes the highly variable skill set encompassed by the term “literate.”³⁸

Although royal officials and members of the administration would have been required by the demands of their profession to attain a certain level of competence in hieratic (or Demotic, beginning in the Late Period), the need for proficiency in hieroglyphs would have been significantly more restricted, and literacy in that script consequently lower overall. As noted above, from fairly early on the use of hieroglyphs was largely limited to the realms of monumental display and the study, transmission, and production of sacred texts. As a result, instruction in the hieroglyphic script would likely have taken place as a type of vocational training required of young men seeking to attain high standing within the priesthood.³⁹ Literacy was not an absolute necessity for priestly service prior to the professionalization of the priesthood in the Late Period, and the level of literacy among the low-ranking priests who served in monthly rotations and then returned to their ordinary lives outside the temple must have depended heavily on the exigencies of their nonsacerdotal professions.⁴⁰ That said, however, the office of the “lector-priest” (ẖrj-ḥb) is attested as early as the Old Kingdom, and the temples were important loci for the production and consumption of written material. Lector-priests, members of the temple personnel responsible for the recitation or reading aloud of ritual texts, came to be closely associated with magical practice and the production of magical texts, both within the context of the temple itself and for private clients.⁴¹ It is likely to these ritual specialists that we owe not only the extensive corpus of religious literature dating to the later periods of Egyptian history but also much of the linguistic and graphic experimentation that characterizes texts of the Late Period and the Greco-Roman era.⁴²

By the Roman period, literacy in the Egyptian language had become one of the fundamental requirements for priestly hopefuls, together with circumcision and documented descent from a priestly family. The requirement of literacy is attested by a judicial report on papyrus from Tebtunis, dated to 162 C.E., in which it is remarked that a priestly candidate by the name of Marisouchos has been admitted to the ranks of the priesthood, “having given proof of a knowledge of [hie]ratic [and] Egyptian writ[ing] ([ἱε]ρατικὰ [καὶ] Αἰγύπτια γράμ[ματ]α) from a hieratic book (βίβλου ἱερατικῆς) produced by the sacred scribes (οἱ ἱερογραμματεῖς)” (P.Tebt. II 291, fragment B 2, lines 41–43).⁴³ The document demonstrates the necessity for priests to be familiar with the hieratic script, which accords well with the widespread use of hieratic for religious literature from the late New Kingdom onward.⁴⁴ The phrase “hieratic [and] Egyptian writing” may refer to the candidate’s proficiency in both the hieratic and Demotic scripts; Αἰγύπτια γράμματα was sometimes used in documentary texts to refer to the latter (cf. P.Vind.Tand. 26, line 20), and Demotic would have been commonly used by Egyptian priests of the Roman period. It is less clear whether priests were also expected to show proficiency in hieroglyphic writing at this time. With the shift to composing ritual texts in hieratic and then in Demotic, knowledge of hieroglyphs would have become increasingly recherché even among the educated priestly elite, and education in hieroglyphs, if it took place at all, would probably have begun only after a candidate’s admission to the priesthood.

An institution known as the House of Life (pr-^ϲnḫ) is of critical importance for our understanding of Egyptian scribal traditions, particularly in the later periods that concern us here. The term is attested as early as the Old Kingdom, but references are most numerous from the middle of the New Kingdom to the Roman period. In the surviving documentation, the House of Life appears to be the place of production of a wide range of religious and ritual texts, including hymns, spell books, and medical texts. Although the scope of activities carried out in the House of Life has been much debated—some have argued for seeing this institution as a type of early university, while others have taken a more conservative view and understood it as primarily a workshop for the production of religious documents—there is widespread agreement that the House of Life was a center of Egyptian scribal culture and a vital force in the preservation and promulgation of ritual knowledge.⁴⁵ Archaeological evidence for Houses of Life is limited, but several are attested in textual references, and it is believed that many of the major Egyptian temples would have had such an institution associated with them.⁴⁶ As the text of the Canopus Decree (238 B.C.E.) makes clear, the “Scribes of the House of Life” who are attested in numerous texts were priests in their own right, so a close link between temple and House of Life is hardly surprising.⁴⁷ In his study Religion in Roman Egypt, David Frankfurter allocates a central role to the House of Life in not only the preservation of Egypt’s scribal traditions, but also in the presentation of those traditions to Greek and Roman visitors to Egypt, a fact that undoubtedly affected the impression such visitors received of the hieroglyphic writing system.⁴⁸ The linkage between the hieroglyphic tradition and the House of Life was so strong, in fact, that the Coptic term for “hieroglyphic characters,” ϩⲉⲛⲥϩⲁⲛ̅ⲥⲁϩⲡⲣⲁⲛϣ̅, literally “letters of a scribe of the House of Life,” makes explicit reference to that institution.⁴⁹

Script Obsolescence

The city of Oxyrhynchus, a regional capital and thriving metropolis during the first several centuries of Roman rule, still counted five professional hieroglyph carvers on its tax rolls in the early second century C.E.; less than three hundred years later, by the time of Smet of Philae, the carving of monumental hieroglyphic inscriptions in public venues had been discontinued, and knowledge of hieroglyphs was restricted to the repetition of a few fossilized phrases by a member of the priestly elite.⁵⁰ How did this state of affairs come about? Studies of language and script use in late Roman Egypt have pointed to a number of causal factors, which must be examined in turn: the disconnect between hieroglyphs and the spoken vernacular, which, by the fourth century C.E., was profound; the existence of a higher-status language, Greek, that was potentially easier to learn and use; the changing functionality of hieroglyphs as markers of cultural identity; and finally, the impact on the native priesthood of diminishing imperial support for the temples, which ultimately bankrupted the very communities that had preserved the knowledge of the hieroglyphic script over the preceding two millennia.⁵¹

As noted above, already in the Old Kingdom there existed a functional divide between hieroglyphs, which were used principally in religious contexts and for display by the king and members of the elite, and hieratic, which was widely used for administrative purposes. Through the Middle Kingdom, however, these two different scripts were still writing what was, grammatically, the same language. This began to change in the New Kingdom, as the spoken language continued to evolve, while the grammatical forms of the Middle Kingdom, fossilized as the “classical” stage of the language, were still used for the composition of monumental inscriptions. Script and language continued along these divergent paths into the Late Period, when the development of the Demotic script, in which ligatured sign groups cannot always be traced back to a hieroglyphic original, drove a final wedge between hieroglyphs and the language of daily life. By the end of the Late Period, monumental hieroglyphic inscriptions were still being composed in a form of the language that had not been spoken in a thousand years, and the vigorous experimentation with the hieroglyphic script that took place in the Ptolemaic period, with its expansion of the corpus of signs, frequent wordplay, and esoteric theological references, only increased the distance between hieroglyphs and the Egyptian language as it was spoken in the streets. Ptolemaic hieroglyphs were beyond question the province of the priestly elite, inaccessible both to bureaucrats versed in Demotic and Greek and to lower-ranking priests who used Demotic and hieratic in reading and composing ritual texts, and this state of affairs continued through the Roman period into late antiquity. The effect of this divergence was to progressively reduce not only the number of people who could read hieroglyphs, but also the number of people who would have any reason for doing so. As we shall see, when hieroglyphs became inextricably tied to the priesthood, their fates became linked as well, and the story of the obsolescence of hieroglyphs is, in a very real sense, the story of the radical transformation of Egypt’s priestly tradition.⁵²

It has long been acknowledged that with the establishment of the Greek-speaking Ptolemaic dynasty in the late fourth century B.C.E., Egypt’s linguistic environment changed dramatically. As discussed above, emigration swelled the ranks of native speakers of Greek residing in Egypt, and the use of Greek as the main language of administration offered a powerful incentive for ambitious Egyptians to learn the language of the ruling elite. However, the impact of Greek on the hieroglyphic tradition is less clear-cut. Several studies have emphasized the limited influence Greek had on Demotic, even in administrative contexts where the Greek and Egyptian languages and scripts were used side by side. Hieroglyphs, employed primarily in the rarefied environment of temple scriptoria, seem to have been even less affected.⁵³ Additionally, it has been noted that although Greek can be considered a status language from the perspective of upwardly mobile members of the Egyptian elite, who needed to learn the language in order to participate in their country’s governance, hieroglyphic Egyptian retained its status as a conveyer of cultural meaning, particularly in the religious sphere.⁵⁴ Indeed, the graphic exuberance of Ptolemaic and Roman hieroglyphic inscriptions may be seen, on some level, as a celebration of that role.⁵⁵ That hieroglyphs continued to be privileged as a medium of religious expression into the Roman period is suggested by treatise 16 in the Corpus Hermeticum, which includes a meditation on the perceived impossibility of translating Egyptian religious concepts into the Greek language (further on this text, see Chapter 5 below).⁵⁶ Thus, it appears that, notwithstanding Greek’s privileged position as an administrative language and its close association with the ruling elites, the widespread adoption of that language in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt is not in itself sufficient to explain the eventual abandonment of hieroglyphs in late antiquity. We must look instead to other factors.

In their 2003 study of script obsolescence in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica, Houston, Baines, and Cooper note that the preservation or obsolescence of a script is strongly correlated to that script’s functionality; they go on to observe that in the case of Egypt, the functionality of hieroglyphic texts was not always—or even necessarily—dependent on their legibility.⁵⁷ In making this statement, the authors draw on the work of Heike Sternberg el-Hotabi, whose study of Ptolemaic and Roman Horus-cippi revealed the use of what the author termed “pseudo-hieroglyphic inscriptions,” in which hieroglyphic signs do not necessarily represent readable letters or graphemes, but rather serve to signal the presence of sacred text.⁵⁸ The existence of such pseudoinscriptions, which are also attested on a variety of Ptolemaic- and Roman-period funerary objects such as the shroud depicted in Figure 3, suggests that for the individuals who commissioned the objects on which these “texts” appear, the legibility of the inscriptions was of secondary importance to their mere presence on the object.⁵⁹ If this is in fact the case, it could suggest that the arduous process of attaining proficiency in the hieroglyphic script—already effectively useless in the administrative sphere—was being further disincentivized. If a pseudohieroglyphic inscription, or even an empty field on a coffin or shroud, could be functionally equivalent to a text composed according to the rules of Egyptian grammar and orthography, why bother to learn those rules in the first place? This point should not be pressed too far, particularly in light of the skillful composition of certain Roman-period hieroglyphic temple inscriptions, as David Klotz has observed, but it does raise the possibility that the functionality of hieroglyphs as a viable writing system, rather than simply a marker of sacrality, was being impinged even in the realm of religion, where hieroglyphs had long retained much of their ancient cultural cachet.⁶⁰

Figure 3. Funerary shroud of Tasheretwedjahor. Egyptian, Greco-Roman period, first or second century C.E. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of the Class of the Museum of Fine Arts, Mrs. Arthur L. Devens, Chairman, 54.993. Photo © 2019 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

In the scholarship of the early twentieth century, it was common to call on the “rise of Christianity” to explain various phenomena observed in the late antique period, including the eventual abandonment of the hieroglyphic script. The hostility of early Christians toward any vestige of “pagan” practice was taken as a given, and it was assumed that the ancient writing system, bound as it was to Egyptian religious concepts and to the milieu of the temples, was one more casualty of the shifting religious tide.⁶¹ As discussed above in the Introduction, however, the rise-of-Christianity model of historiography has come under a great deal of criticism in recent decades for its heavy reliance on tendentious early Christian sources, and historians have continued to seek deeper, systemic causes for the major religious changes that took place in late antique Egypt. Much of the recent scholarship on this topic has highlighted the crucial significance of economic factors leading to the closure of Egypt’s temples and the eventual abandonment of many of the practices supported by those temples and their priesthoods.⁶² The Ptolemies saw a clear political benefit to promoting the traditional Egyptian cults, and the major temples of Edfu, Esna, Dendera, and Philae stand as a testament to their financial support. The economic situation of the temples changed dramatically over the course of the Roman period, however, as Roman fiscal policy increasingly aimed at maximizing the tax base and shrinking the size of nontaxable landholdings. As we have already seen, admission to the priesthood (and thereby to tax-exempt status) became more restrictive, priests were forbidden to engage in business, and temple landholdings were diminished.⁶³ As David Klotz emphasizes in his study of Roman-period temple construction at Thebes, however, this must be seen as a very gradual process, and he notes that many of the first- and second-century emperors, including even the famously anti-Egyptian Tiberius, were responsible for carrying out a fairly extensive program of temple construction and decoration in the province.⁶⁴ Direct imperial support for the construction, embellishment, and maintenance of the temples did start to decrease after the reign of Antoninus Pius in the mid-second century C.E., however, and it had dried up almost completely by the crisis years of the mid-third century; the last known hieroglyphic attestation of an emperor’s name is a cartouche of Maximin Daia, dating to the early fourth century and preserved on blocks from a now-destroyed temple at Tahta, in Middle Egypt.⁶⁵

The closure of the Egyptian temples did not automatically mean the abandonment of all the rites and traditions supported by those temples, as David Frankfurter has shown. Certain observances might move from the public sphere to the domestic, ritual specialists might take to the road as itinerant holy men, and some Egyptian cultural forms might quietly reappear with minimal differences in a newly Christian context.⁶⁶ The hieroglyphic script, however, long restricted in its use to a small circle of priestly individuals and incomprehensible to the vast majority of the population, did not survive the loss of institutional support occasioned by the closure of the last temples. What did survive was a tradition, already more than half a millennium old by the fourth century C.E., of trying to interpret what had become, by that time, mysterious symbols of Egypt’s ancient past. It is to those interpretive efforts, in all their various forms, that we shall now turn.