History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 1 — 25 - Vol. 01, Ch. 03: The Legendary History of Egypt, pt. 9

It was Thot who had taught men arithmetic; Thot had revealed to them the mysteries of geometry and mensuration; Thot had constructed instruments and promulgated the laws of music; Thot had instituted the art of drawing, and had codified its unchanging rules.

He had been the inventor or patron of all that was useful or beautiful in the Nile valley, and the climax of his beneficence was reached by his invention of the principles of writing, without which humanity would have been liable to forget his teaching, and to lose the advantage of his discoveries.

It has been sometimes questioned whether writing, instead of having been a benefit to the Egyptians, did not rather injure them.

An old legend relates that when the god unfolded his discovery to King Thamos, whose minister he was, the monarch immediately raised an objection to it.

[Illustration: 315. jpg TH0T RECORDS THE YEARS OF THE LIFE OF RAMSES.

1] 1 Bas-relief of the temple of Seti I. at Abydos, drawn by Boudier; from a photograph by Beato.

The god is marking with his reed-pen upon the notches of a long frond of palm, the duration in millions of years of the reign of Pharaoh upon this earth, in accordance with the decree of the gods.

Children and young people, who had hitherto been forced to apply themselves diligently to learn and retain whatever was taught them, now that they possessed a means of storing up knowledge without trouble, would cease to apply themselves, and would neglect to exercise their memories.

Whether Thamos was right or not, the criticism came too late: "the ingenious art of painting words and of speaking to the eyes" had once for all been acquired by the Egyptians, and through them by the greater part of mankind.

It was a very complex system, in which were united most of the methods fitted for giving expression to thought, namely: those which were limited to the presentment of the idea, and those which were intended to suggest sounds.

[Illustration: 316. jpg PAGE IMAGE] At the outset the use was confined to signs intended to awaken the idea of the object in the mind of the reader by the more or less faithful picture of the object itself; for example, they depicted the sun by a centred disc, the moon by a crescent, a lion by a lion in the act of walking, a man by a small figure in a squatting attitude.

As by this method it was possible to convey only a very restricted number of entirely materialistic concepts, it became necessary to have recourse to various artifices in order to make up for the shortcomings of the ideograms properly so-called.

The part was put for the whole, the pupil in place of the whole eye, the head of the ox instead of the complete ox.

The Egyptians substituted cause for effect and effect for cause, the instrument for the work accomplished, and the disc of the sun signified the day; a smoking brazier the fire: the brush, inkpot, and palette of the scribe denoted writing or written documents.

They conceived the idea of employing some object which presented an actual or supposed resemblance to the notion to be conveyed; thus, the foreparts of a lion denoted priority, supremacy, command; the wasp symbolized royalty, and a tadpole stood for hundreds of thousands.

They ventured finally to use conventionalisms, as for instance when they drew the axe for a god, or the ostrich-feather for justice; the sign in these cases had only a conventional connection with the concept assigned to it.

At times two or three of these symbols were associated in order to express conjointly an idea which would have been inadequately rendered by one of them alone: a five-pointed star placed under an inverted crescent moon denoted a month, a calf running before the sign for water indicated thirst.

[Illustration: 317. jpg PAGE IMAGE] All these artifices combined furnished, however, but a very incomplete means of seizing and transmitting thought.

When the writer had written out twenty or thirty of these signs and the ideas which they were supposed to embody, he had before him only the skeleton of a sentence, from which the flesh and sinews had disappeared; the tone and rhythm of the words were wanting, as were also the indications of gender, number, person, and inflection, which distinguish the different parts of speech and determine the varying relations between them.

Besides this, in order to understand for himself and to guess the meaning of the author, the reader was obliged to translate the symbols which he deciphered, by means of words which represented in the spoken language the pronunciation of each symbol.

Whenever he looked at them, they suggested to him both the idea and the word for the idea, and consequently a sound or group of sounds; when each of them had thus acquired three or four invariable associations of sound, he forgot their purely ideographic value and accustomed himself to consider them merely as notations of sound.

The first experiment in phonetics was a species of rebus, where each of the signs, divorced from its original sense, served to represent several words, similar in sound, but differing in meaning in the spoken language.

The same group of articulations, _Naûfir, Nofir_, conveyed in Egyptian the concrete idea of a lute and the abstract idea of beauty;

the sign expressed at once the lute and beauty.

[Illustration: 318. jpg PAGE IMAGE] The beetle was called Khopirru, and the verb "to be" was pronounced _khopirû_: the figure of the beetle & consequently signified both the insect and the verb, and by further combining with it other signs, the articulation of each corresponding syllable was given in detail.

The sieve _Miaû_, the mat _pu, pi_, the mouth _ra, rû_, gave the formula _khaû-pi-rû_, which was equivalent to the sound of _khopirû_, the verb "to be:" grouped together, they denoted in writing the concept of "to be" by means of a triple rebus.

In this system, each syllable of a word could be represented by one of several signs, all sounding alike.

One-half of these "syllables" stood for open, the other half for closed syllables, and the use of the former soon brought about the formation of a true alphabet.

The final vowel in them became detached, and left only the remaining consonant--for example, _r in rû, h in ha, n in ni, b in bû_--so that rû, ha, bû, eventually stood for r, h, n, and b only.

This process in the course of time having been applied to a certain number of syllables, furnished a fairly large alphabet, in which several letters represented each of the twenty-two chief articulations, which the scribes considered sufficient for their purposes.

The signs corresponding to one and the same letter were homophones or "equivalents in sound"--[ ] are homophones, just as [ ] and [ ], because each of them, in the group to which it belongs, may be indifferently used to translate to the eye the articulations m or n. One would have thought that when the Egyptians had arrived thus far, they would have been led, as a matter of course, to reject the various characters which they had used each in its turn, in order to retain an alphabet only.

[Illustration: 319. jpg PAGE IMAGE] But the true spirit of invention, of which they had given proof, abandoned them here as elsewhere: if the merit of a discovery was often their due, they were rarely able to bring their invention to perfection.

They kept the ideographic and syllabic signs which they had used at the outset, and, with the residue of their successive notations, made for themselves a most complicated system, in which syllables and ideograms were mingled with letters properly so called.

There is a little of everything in an Egyptian phrase, sometimes even in a word; as, for instance, in [ ] maszirû, the ear, or [ ] kherôû, the voice; there are the syllables [ ] kher, the ordinary letters [ ], which complete the phonetic pronunciation, and finally the ideograms, namely, [ ], which gives the picture of the ear by the side of the written word for it, and [ ] which proves that the letters represent a term designating an action of the mouth.

This medley had its advantages; it enabled the Egyptians to make clear, by the picture of the object, the sense of words which letters alone might sometimes insufficiently explain.

The system demanded a serious effort of memory and long years of study; indeed, many people never completely mastered it.

The picturesque appearance of the sentences, in which we see representations of men, animals, furniture, weapons, and tools grouped together in successive little pictures, rendered hieroglyphic writing specially suitable for the decoration of the temples of the gods or the palaces of kings.

Mingled with scenes of worship, sacrifice, battle, or private life, the inscriptions frame or separate groups of personages, and occupy the vacant spaces which the sculptor or painter was at a loss to fill;

hieroglyphic writing is pre-eminently a monumental script.

For the ordinary purposes of life it was traced in black or red ink on fragments of limestone or pottery, or on wooden tablets covered with stucco, and specially on the fibres of papyrus.

The exigencies of haste and the unskilfulness of scribes soon changed both its appearance and its elements; the characters when contracted, superimposed and united to one another with connecting strokes, preserved only the most distant resemblance to the persons or things which they had originally represented.

This cursive writing, which was somewhat incorrectly termed hieratic, was used only for public or private documents, for administrative correspondence, or for the propagation of literary, scientific, and religious works.

It was thus that tradition was pleased to ascribe to the gods, and among them to Thot--the doubly great--the invention of all the arts and sciences which gave to Egypt its glory and prosperity.

It was clear, not only to the vulgar, but to the wisest of the nation, that, had their ancestors been left merely to their own resources, they would never have succeeded in raising themselves much above the level of the brutes.

The idea that a discovery of importance to the country could have risen in a human brain, and, once made known, could have been spread and developed by the efforts of successive generations, appeared to them impossible to accept.

They believed that every art, every trade, had remained unaltered from the outset, and if some novelty in its aspect tended to show them their error, they preferred to imagine a divine intervention, rather than be undeceived.

The mystic writing, inserted as chapter sixty-four in the _Book of the Dead_, and which subsequently was supposed to be of decisive moment to the future life of man, was, as they knew, posterior in date to the other formulas of which this book was composed; they did not, however, regard it any the less as being of divine origin.

It had been found one day, without any one knowing whence it came, traced in blue characters on a plaque of alabaster, at the foot of the statue of Thot, in the sanctuary of Hermopolis.

A prince, Hardiduf, had discovered it in his travels, and regarding it as a miraculous object, had brought it to his sovereign.

This king, according to some, was Hûsaphaîti of the first dynasty, but by others was believed to be the pious Mykerinos.

In the same way, the book on medicine, dealing with the diseases of women, was held not to be the work of a practitioner; it had revealed itself to a priest watching at night before the Holy of Holies in the temple of Isis at Coptos.

"Although the earth was plunged into darkness, the moon shone upon it and enveloped it with light.

It was sent as a great wonder to the holiness of King Kheops, the just of speech."

The gods had thus exercised a direct influence upon men until they became entirely civilized, and this work of culture was apportioned among the three divine dynasties according to the strength of each.

The first, which comprised the most vigorous divinities, had accomplished the more difficult task of establishing the world on a solid basis; the second had carried on the education of the Egyptians; and the third had regulated, in all its minutiae, the religious constitution of the country.

When there was nothing more demanding supernatural strength or intelligence to establish it, the gods returned to heaven, and were succeeded on the throne by mortal men.

One tradition maintained dogmatically that the first human king whose memory it preserved, followed immediately after the last of the gods, who, in quitting the palace, had made over the crown to man as his heir, and that the change of nature had not entailed any interruption in the line of sovereigns.

Another tradition would not allow that the contact between the human and divine series had been so close.

Between the Ennead and Menés, it intercalated one or more lines of Theban or Thinite kings; but these were of so formless, shadowy, and undefined an aspect, that they were called Manes, and there was attributed to them at most only a passive existence, as of persons who had always been in the condition of the dead, and had never been subjected to the trouble of passing through life.

Menés was the first in order of those who were actually living.

From his time, the Egyptians claimed to possess an uninterrupted list of the Pharaohs who had ruled over the Nile valley.

As far back as the XVIIIth dynasty this list was written upon papyrus, and furnished the number of years that each prince occupied the throne, or the length of his life.

[*] * The only one of these lists which we possess, the "Turin Royal Papyrus," was bought, nearly intact, at Thebes, by Drovetti, about 1818, but was accidentally injured by him in bringing home.

The fragments of it were acquired, together with the rest of the collection, by the Piedmontese Government in 1820, and placed in the Turin Museum, where Champollion saw and drew attention to them in 1824. Seyffarth carefully collected and arranged them in the order in which they now are; subsequently Lepsius gave a facsimile of them in 1840, in his _Auswahl der wichtigsten Urhunden_, pls.

i.

-vi.

, but this did not include the verso;

Champollion-Figeac edited in 1847, in the _Revue Archéologique_, 1st series, vol. vi.

, the tracings taken by the younger Champollion before Seyffarth's arrangement;

lastly, Wilkinson published the whole in detail in 1851. Since then, the document has been the subject of continuous investigation: E. de Rougé has reconstructed, in an almost conclusive manner, the pages containing the first six dynasties, and Lauth, with less certainty, those which deal with the eight following dynasties.