The Emergence of Writing in Egypt

Author(s): John D. Ray

Source: World Archaeology , Feb., 1986, Vol. 17, No. 3, Early Writing Systems (Feb.,
1986), pp. 307-316
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/124697

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 The emergence of writing in Egypt

John D. Ray

Egyptology and Assyriology can be seen as complementary sciences, celestial twins or

ugly sisters, depending on the standpoint of the describer. Egyptology is the slightly
older sister - if we take the date of the respective decipherments to represent the
moments of their birth as disciplines - and both have a similar history of development,
liberating themselves slowly from Biblical and classical studies, and gradually finding
their own places. Egyptology is also the more romantic and popular of the two, and
perhaps the more extrovert; Assyriology compensates for this in the range of material,
especially texts, at its disposal, and the growing challenges that it presents to its admirers.
Comparisons between the two disciplines go hand-in-hand with attempts to characterise
the two civilisations which gave rise to them, and the best-known example is probably the
one which occupies most of Before Philosophy, otherwise known as The Intellectual
Adventure of Ancient Man (Frankfort). Such comparisons are designed to stimulate as
much as to illuminate, and it is in the same spirit that we can suggest another, superficial
and light-hearted though it has to be: the political, and to some extent the cultural,
history of Egypt has several points in common with that of modern France, whereas if we
look for a parallel with that of Mesopotamia, we can see things which remind us of
modern Germany. The situation of Egypt in the ancient world was relatively secure: her
borders were easily defended, except for the vulnerable section in the north-east, and
this relative isolation was reinforced by a favourable climate and the ability to support a
comparatively large population. Within the country political unity, although by no means
constantly achieved in Egyptian history, was fairly easy to maintain and tended to centre
upon a royal court with far-reaching powers. Local regionalism existed, and could
assume a strong form, but in general the monarchy was able to overcome this, either by
force or by inducement. With the rise of this centralised state - the first in history - went
a pattern of culture which was essentially imposed from above by the courtly circles; and
the strong visual sense, and all-pervading sense of style, as in France, is one of the most
noticeable and appealing aspects of ancient Egypt. Egypt, like France, was also an
absorber of immigrants, who rapidly adopted Egyptian culture and rose to positions of
prominence in the state by virtue of doing so. The price that has to be paid for these
advantages is a certain cultural complacency and even a 'superiority complex', which can
hamper original perceptions. Egypt's role was that of a perfecter of ideas, rather than an
inventor; most of the innovations in the ancient Near East come from outside Egypt, but

World Archaeology Volume 17 No. 3 Early writing systems

? R.K.P. 1986 0043-8243/86/1703/307 $2/1

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308 John D. Ray

Egypt, once it adopts a new idea, produces a form of it which is often more effective than
it was in its original home. Mesopotamia, on the other hand, does have more in common
- to attempt a generalisation - with the experience of Germany: open frontiers leading to
frequent invasion and disruption, a less favourable environment for the growth of
political unity, and a restiveness which leads to unity being imposed by a more militaristic
culture (Assyria). The results are a creativity, caused in part by competition between its
constituent areas, and a restless profundity in intellectual life which contrasts with the
general performance in the visual arts, which is not on the whole the equivalent of
Egypt's. This is no doubt an oversimplified view of the two civilisations, but it does hold
true for quite a few areas of activity, and the emergence of writing is arguably one of
them.

It is worth qualifying this picture slightly, by reminding ourselves of the limitations of

archaeology, especially in the Nile valley. Here excavation, until quite recently, has
concentrated on remains which are well-preserved and likely to produce objects of art or
major texts - which in effect meant that the main emphasis in Egyptian archaeology
was on tombs and similar monuments. Town sites have been relatively unrewarding and
unattractive: close mud-brick work, combined with constant infiltration by sub-soil
water, often in the midst of a modern urban area, could hardly compete with leisurely
epigraphy amid the sands of the desert, especially if a sensational discovery was likely to
be had. Egyptology, therefore, has less chance of producing economic and social
information than Mesopotamian archaeology, where clay tablets are easily preserved in
large numbers. The situation is now changing, but it will be quite some time, if ever,
before we can be sure that our conclusions about Egyptian society, especially early
Egyptian society, are true and not merely dictated by what the inhabitants of that society
chose to take into the next world with them. This familiar fact still has to be borne in
mind. It may also be true that our notions of what ancient Egypt was like are distorted b
the accident that most of our evidence comes from the south; an Egyptologist, if he could
be transported magically into the eastern Delta at most periods of Pharaonic rule, might
well decide that he was in a country quite foreign to the land of his imagination.
Prehistoric Egypt is best seen in the recent study by Hoffman (1980). Whatever the
situation may have been in the Palaeolithic, Egypt of the fourth millennium does seem to
exhibit many of the characteristics of later Egypt: a strong cultural unity (except that the
Delta and Upper Egypt are still markedly different), artistic creations of a high standard,
and, at least to judge from tomb structures and furnishing, an increasedly stratified
society, with a leisured or wealthy class creating a demand for luxuries which involves a
considerable section of the population. The tone, at least in Upper Egypt, seems to be
aristocratic and agricultural, rather than mercantile. Towards the end of the period,
however, in the phase known as Nagada II or Gerzean, change seems to occur at an
accelerated pace. The main feature of this transformation, other than general changes in
the styles and ranges of artefacts, is the adoption of foreign motifs, in particular
Mesopotamian, or in some cases Proto-Elamite. These motifs - the cylinder-seal, artistic
devices comprising animals with intertwined necks, fashions in clothing, and even
architectural designs such as the 'palace fagade' - are undeniable, even if the explanation
is hard to find. Mere trade seems an inadequate reason, and some Egyptologists have
fallen back on the concept of a full-scale invasion, either by way of Syria-Palestine, or by

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 The emergence of writing in Egypt 309

sea around the coasts of Arabia. Inadequate pathology was often used to bolster up this
theory, and the 'dynastic race' was created as a convenient model. But if we bear in mind
the cultural generalisations suggested above, and if we adopt more recent explanations of
how primitive societies can 'take off' into a more sophisticated level of culture, we can
probably see that Egypt, on the eve of its emergence as a historical state, was adopting
foreign influences in order to assist its own development. Mesopotamian and Elamite
motifs were chosen, not because of political events, but because they were the only
models which fitted her stage of development: and these models, once adapted, were
almost entirely discarded as soon as Egypt had found its self-confidence and identity. The
young civilisation needed a prop with which to learn to walk; then it could throw away
the prop.
Writing was the most important of these adoptions, and the only one which was not to
be thrown aside. At the moment it does look as if writing, or rather the idea of writing,
was extraneous to Egypt. In Mesopotamia, we can see the gradual emergence of picture-
writing as a form of accounting or similar record-keeping, at a date earlier by a couple of
centuries than its appearance, Athena-like, from the head of the Egyptian hierarchy.
This at least is the accepted wisdom, and it is likely to be right, although Arnett (1982)
has produced an interesting alternative. Arnett has made a study of the motifs and
decorative signs found quite frequently on predynastic pottery and other artefacts from
Egypt, and concludes that a rudimentary writing-system was in use several centuries
before the unification of Egypt into a historical state. This is certainly an original idea,
although Petrie (1912) experimented with a parallel notion when trying to trace the
origin of the alphabet to potters' marks found on predynastic vessels; but the weakness of
this sort of argument is that it is merely an extrapolation from later usages. The later
hieroglyph for 'foreign land', for example, does occur on predynastic pottery, but since it
is merely a schematised drawing of desert hills, it is impossible to say that the sign means
what it is used to mean later. It may, in its early stage, be merely an element of design,
and some of the other 'hieroglyphs' detected by Arnett are very difficult to explain in the
light of their historical values. The more likely conclusion seems to be at the moment
that, throughout the predynastic period, characteristically Egyptian ways of portraying
the natural world were slowly developed, and that it was from this 'reserve', or artistic
repertoire, that the first hieroglyphs were chosen. The same would apply to symbols for
gods, or shrines, or even spiritual concepts such as the ka, represented by arms stretched
upwards, which are likely to have existed in Egyptian thinking long before the need to
create a formal system of writing (Arnett, Plate 16). There is no reason to believe that
the Egyptians took their individual hieroglyphs from any foreign source.
What then did the Egyptians adapt from Mesopotamia, when it came to creating a
writing system? The simplest answer is probably the best: they took the idea of writing.
There presumably came a point in the development of the Egyptian state when some
agency responsible for economic and political matters decided on the need for recording
its activities. This agency, given what we know about dynastic, and what we can
reasonably extrapolate about predynastic, Egypt was almost certainly a royal court, or
possibly the sole royal court if there was a 'Pharaoh' in Gerzean or late-Gerzean Egypt.
The inscriptions surviving from the first dynasty, even when allowance is made for the
one-sided archaeological record, are almost exclusively concerned with royal administra-

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310 John D. Ray

tion: major cult activities in which the king almost inevitably played a major part, events
in palace ceremonial or in symbolic public works, such as cutting large canals, which
would have been used to enhance the position of the sovereign and his entourage. The
milieu, therefore, is reasonably clear, but the date and the mechanism of the creation of
hieroglyphs are much harder to determine.
An obvious point for the date would be the beginning of the first dynasty. Here,
according to Egyptian tradition, Menes of This in Upper Egypt conquered the Delta,
unified the country, founded Memphis as his capital, and introduced many of the traits of
classical Pharaonic culture; although, interestingly, he is not credited with the invention
of hieroglyphs. A minimalist modern interpretation of what happened at the beginning
of Egyptian history would be that there was no Menes, the search for him among the
historical records is therefore meaningless, and that there was probably no unification
either; all that happened was that the Egyptians invented writing and began to record
their history systematically. The date for this can be obtained by a combination of
astronomical data and dead reckoning from later king-lists such as the Turin canon: 3089
+ x B.C., where x is the length of the obscure 'first intermediate period'. Considerable
attempts have been made by historians to reduce this figure, but it is rather supported by
some of the most recent Carbon-14 calibrations (see most cautiously Shaw 1984). A date
of 3100 would not be far wrong, therefore, in which case there is a suitable time-lag
behind the Mesopotamian introduction of writing.
The problem, however, is complicated by the known existence of Egyptian kings
before Menes. The Palermo Stone, essentially a fifth-dynasty composition (although
almost certainly a much later copy), clearly shows, on a separate fragment, the existence
of kings wearing the crown of united Egypt well before 'Menes' and the supposed
unification. Names of nine kings of Lower Egypt are also preserved, and outlandish they
are, at least by later standards; this may be explicable by their Lower Egyptian origin, or
more likely some form of oral tradition has been at work, but the very existence of these
names must make us cautious (Sethe 1903). More disturbing are the contemporary
monuments of kings, principally from the royal cemetery at Abydos but also from
elsewhere, with names such as the increasingly attested Ro or Iry, the obscure Ka or
Sekhen, and the better-known Scorpion (reading uncertain), who seems to be almost a
prototype of Menes in his achievements (Barta 1982). The embarrassment caused by the
existence of these kings is reflected in the term 'Dynasty O' which is frequently applied to
them. Names of these kings appear clearly on contemporary monuments such as jars,
and even the Scorpion macehead, and this leaves us in no doubt that writing existed in
Egypt before the first king of Dynasty I. Our date of 3100 must therefore be raised to
3150 or even slightly earlier, and it is always possible that archaeological discovery will
upset this picture even more. 'Menes', therefore, was not the inventor of hieroglyphs.
Can,we talk about an invention of writing in Egypt at all? Since, as argued above, the
only element necessary to set off a chain reaction within protodynastic Egypt was the
knowledge that ways to do the things the Egyptians wished to do existed elsewhere, the
realisation that in Sumer pictures of material objects were being used in a punning way to
express ideas, or other objects which were impossible to draw explicitly, was the only
catalyst required; and this was in fact the only element which was borrowed. Kaplony
(1966b, 1972a) speaks blithely of an 'inventor' of Egyptian hieroglyphs who did precisely

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 The emergence of writing in Egypt 311

this, and while this is probably an over-simplification, there are certainly indications
within the hieroglyphic system that conscious planning has been applied to the script
from the very beginning of its employment. It is distinctly possible, therefore, that one
mind may have formulated the basic principles. The Egyptians themselves both confirm
this, and beg the question, when they ascribe the creation of writing to the god Thoth
(compare the anecdote in Plato, Phaedrus, 274c-275b, where the king of Egypt is
presented with the new-fangled system by the god but accepts reluctantly, fearing that his
subjects would cease to rely on their memories). When considering the question of
invention, it is also worth looking at one of the distinctions frequently made between the
Mesopotamian writing-system and the Egyptian. It is sometimes argued that, because of
the largely mercantile character of Sumerian civilisation and the fact that writing in
southern Mesopotamia seems to be linked to accounting techniques and economic
purposes, writing in Sumer was primarily a form of 'book-keeping', a convenient tool.
On the other hand, runs the argument, Egyptian writing was essentially a royal
accomplishment, used to commemorate the achievements of the palace and the status of
courtiers and the king's relatives; as such it was ceremonial, designed only to record
features which were already well-enough known to the ruling elite. Hieroglyphs, on this
view of things, would merely be boasting made permanent. There is really no reason,
apart from a spurious neatness, for such a clear-cut distinction. Writing is writing, and
once the basic principles are established - which could take little more than a few months
- the uses to which it may be put are already complex, while the flexibility of the
Egyptian writing system, and the way that it fits the language for which it was intended, is
such that it could be applied immediately to any useful purpose; the difference, after all,
between writing 'the royal tutor Mehy' and 'the royal tutor, two sacks of corn' is not very
daunting. A similar point has also been made by Kaplony (1966b, 67 n. 36).
A compromise might be suggested here. Since the Egyptians ascribed the invention of
their writing system, not to a king, but to a god, and since they consistently maintained
this view later, it may be that Egyptian writing was essentially a temple creation, perhaps
even, to pursue the idea, an invention by the priests of Thoth at Ashmunein (Hermopolis
in middle Egypt), or one of his other cult-centres. This is tempting, since priests are
likely to have had both the leisure and the training for abstract speculation, but it leads us
into a difficulty. Temples, at most periods of Egyptian history, were essentially
government departments, and the 'Church and State' theory of Egyptian society receives
very little support from the surviving documents. Temple officials in the archaic period,
and therefore probably in the century or so preceding, seem to have been essentially
royal appointees, even princes or royal relatives, and the involvement of the royal court
is once again seen to be almost inevitable.
Leaving aside this rather inconclusive line, it is also possible, and more promising, to
see the influence of an inventor, or group of inventors, in the way in which the Egyptian
writing system is applied so successfully to the Egyptian language. This language, at least
in its latest phase, that of Coptic, is comparatively well known, and our knowledge of
Coptic, combined with intuitive argument and comparisons with related languages, is the
basis for our understanding of the earlier phases, especially Late Egyptian, the
vernacular from at least 1500 B.C. and a written form of the language from slightly later.
Middle Egyptian, the 'classical' form of the language, has many of the characteristics of

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312 John D. Ray

an artificial, or at least highly literary idiom, and may never have been spoken in the
form in which we have it. Our grasp of this phase is correspondingly less, but even this is
markedly greater than our knowledge of archaic Egyptian, such as appears in the
Pyramid Texts, the earliest connected body of writing in Egyptian, even though surviving
only in copies from the fifth and sixth dynasties (see now Allen 1984). But even in this
rather unsatisfactory state of affairs, we do know enough to be able to characterise the
Egyptian language and try to place it in its context (see in general Kees 1973, Sethe
1935).
Ancient Egyptian is one of the language-family, widespread in North Africa and the
Near East, which is traditionally known as Hamito-Semitic, but now increasingly
referred to as Afro-asiatic (Hodge 1971). Within this rather diffuse collection, the best
known, and the easiest to define, are the Semitic languages. These are a coherent group
which range over the Near East and Ethiopia, and include modern Hebrew and Arabic
as well as ancient Babylonian (Akkadian) and the almost extinct Aramaic. The relations
between these languages are close, as close, mutatis mutandis, as those between the
various Romance languages of Europe, and they are characterised by roots, normally
composed of three radical consonants, in which the changes of meaning corresponding to
our verbs, nouns or participles are normally expressed by varying the vowels according to
fixed rules (there are hardly any 'irregularities' in the sense that most European
languages exhibit). There are some prefixes, and a series of terminations corresponding
to number, gender, and case endings (frequently obsolescent). The existence of some
features common to both the Semitic and the Indo-European families of languages is
worth some thought: case-endings, the existence of a dual number alongside singular and
plural, certain resemblances in numerals and prepositions, aspects in the verb, and above
all grammatical gender, which is absent from the remainder of the world's languages.
However, if these two groups are related, it must be at a stage so far distant in time that it
is now impossible to chart. The other languages of the Afro-asiatic family are confined to
Africa, and are sometimes termed 'Hamitic', although the differences between these are
so much greater than is the case with the Semitic languages that the whole group is really
questionable. Egyptian, however, does have some links with several Berber languages,
but these are distinctly elusive. The links with the Semitic languages, on the other hand,
are clear enough, and have even led some authorities to believe that Egyptian is a
Semitic language, with some unusual sound-changes. This is rather far-fetched as it
stands. Egyptian has a unique series of palatalised consonants on the one hand, and
while it does have one tense, the Stative or misleadingly named 'Old Perfective', its
verbal system is largely based on nominal roots, which Callender (1975) has interestingly
seen as the various case-endings of a verbal noun with appropriate suffixes. It is a pity
that no trace of case-endings survives in Egyptian from any period, since Callender's
theory is extremely tempting, and rather informative. But the exact status of Egyptian
within the Afro-asiatic family is almost impossible to define. An earlier theory, that
Egyptian was a mixed language, rather like modern English, with the Semitic-speaking
'dynastic race' filling the role of the Normans, is grammatically extremely unlikely and
historically unnecessary. It may be that Egyptian was merely one of a whole series of
languages, or dialects, spoken in the areas of the Sahara and 'Arabian' deserts, which
disappeared, or coalesced, with the increasing desiccation of these regions after the last

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 The emergence of writing in Egypt 313

pluvial phase. These may have survived as Beduin languages or dialects well into the
historical period, but nothing at all is known of them. Nevertheless, their disappearance
was responsible for the apparent isolation of Egyptian which is otherwise so puzzling.
(Among the unidentified scripts which have been found in Egypt, one from 'Ain Amur
between Kharga and Dakhla is certainly interesting (Fakhry 1940, 764 and P1. 96b. It
resembles Egyptian demotic, but is not readable as such. A similar oddity appears on the
Colossus of Memnon (Bernand 1960, 213 and P1. 54), but these scripts are too late to be
of much help for the present purpose.)
Whatever the exact position of Egyptian as a language, the writing system which came
into being with such relative speed was ideally suited to it. The characteristics of the
hieroglyphic system have been well described by Sethe (1935) and, more recently,
Fischer. In Sumerian, pictures were applied to other concepts, less easy to portray
literally, which sounded identical, or perhaps similar (the language as preserved to us
shows a remarkable number of homophones). Sumerian is not a Semitic language, and
indeed has no known cognates, but Egyptian shared the triconsonantal root system of the
Afro-asiatic family. One such root, for example, whose consonants are h-t-r, has been
well studied by Ste Fare Garnot. Words involving these three consonants are known
from later Egyptian, with meanings such as 'twin', 'tax, imposition', 'necessity' and
'horse'; this is puzzling, and the words may be put down as mere coincidences, until the
underlying meaning ('yoke') is realised. Similarly another root, n-f-r, means both 'good'
and 'final', which are extended meanings from the same idea, much as 'perfect' comes
from Latin perfectus 'finished'. In general, there is a clear tendency for all words from a
single root to be written with one pictorial sign, or ideogram, apparently chosen from the
range of words available from this root. The vowels are apparently ignored for this
purpose. Whether the roots were systematically recognised by the Egyptians or not is
debatable, but a tendency to group such words together in the mind must have been
almost inevitable. This classification in terms of roots, conscious or unconscious, is
probably the real meaning of the so-called 'vowellessness' of the Egyptian script. This is
completely different from the Sumerian pattern, where true puns are the basis of the
signs chosen, and it seems to involve a much greater abstraction, surprising perhaps at
such an early date. The absence of vowels is more striking when applied to a language
where changes of vowels indicate major shifts in meaning. It is true that the later Semitic
alphabets, such as Hebrew and Arabic, also omit vowels, but these alphabets are
probably essentially derived - via the so-called proto-Sinaitic script - from the Egyptian
writing system anyway, and the principle may have been kept because it made for a
convenient semi-shorthand. One explanation sometimes put forward for the Egyptians'
ignoring of vowels is particularly unconvincing: dialects may have existed which used
differing vowel patterns, as in later Coptic, but it is difficult to imagine that the vowels
were ignored in order to avoid confusion or embarrassment. It is simpler to believe that
the very structure of the root-system in Egyptian imposed vowellessness when a picture-
system was evolved; in most cases there might be only one possible object portrayable
for the whole 'family' of words. Vowels were simply irrelevant, rather than ignored. It is
probable that cuneiform would also have been vowelless if Semitic-speaking Mesopota-
mians had invented it.
In addition to triradical ideograms, there are also a fair number of biradical signs,

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314 John D. Ray

which appear alongside the triradicals. Some so-called biliterals are probably triliterals in
disguise; for example, the words, hmt 'wife' and hmt 'maidservant', which look identical
in our transliteration, are written with different ideograms. The reason for this is
probably not desire for clarity, as Fischer (1977, 1190) supposes, but the fact that Coptic
shows that the word for 'wife', hiome, was formed from a triradical root, hym. (For the
reconstruction of such forms see among others Fecht, 1960.)
This system is obviously a clear step towards writing, but it still lacks precision; how is
a picture being used in any particular context? The definition is supplied by the other
feature of the Egyptian script, the existence of uniconsonantal signs. This is something
not found in Mesopotamian writing, and again has the hallmark of being a deliberate
invention. A naive view might be to decide that uniconsonantal signs are a later stage of
the script's development, derived either from worn-down biliterals or from increasing
abstraction and sophistication. But uniconsonantals are present from the beginning, and
are used either to 'anchor' the ideograms to specific values and meanings, or to add
grammatical or other elements which by definition cannot be present in the ideograms
themselves. The origin of these uniconsonantals, or 'alphabetic' signs, is far from clear.
The obvious explanation is acrophony - the 'A is for apple' principle, a system which
seems to lie behind the proto-Sinaitic script. This is far from convincing, however. More
likely is Kaplony's explanation (1966, 1973a) that uniconsonantal signs were derived
from, and on occasions could even stand for, words in which the key consonant was the
most characteristic, and where the other consonants were weak (semi-vowels or the
feminine ending -t, which was regarded as extraneous and which may have ceased to be
pronounced at an extremely early date). Thus the hieroglyph 'high ground' (kyt,
pronounced something like *kayat) became k, that for 'cobra' (possibly w3dyt or
*wadjdyat) became dj, and so on. Unfortunately not all uniconsonantal signs can be
pinned down in this way, but the idea is certainly suggestive.
The uniconsonantal signs are not merely a remarkable abstraction, but they are also
convenient in the extreme. With them the complexity of a pictographic script is cut down
to manageable proportions (while 2500 signs exist in the corpus, the beginner can make
considerable progress if he knows 250). Since the signs are pictorial, they are much easier
to memorise than Mesopotamian signs, which rapidly developed into abstract patterns.
The reason why hieroglyphs did not become the standard script of the Near East, rather
than the more difficult cuneiform, must be cultural rather than a question of
convenience. The 'alphabetic' signs are genuinely such; the attempt by Gelb (1963) to
see in them a sort of 'vowelless syllabary' runs contrary to most of what we know about
their use.

Archaic hieroglyphs - for we are now in the first two dynasties - show almost all the
characteristics of the later system (see the convenient tabulation by de Cenival 1982,
61-2); the test of this is that they can, after a certain culture-shock, be read by a student
of classical Egyptian. As the system develops, determinatives (signs which are not read,
but indicate the class of object to which the word belongs) are introduced more
frequently, although they too are present in the system from its inception. This is equally
a feature of Mesopotamian writing (although some cuneiform determinatives begin the
word, all Egyptian ones end it, and act as a rudimentary form of word-divider). The
system of ideograms, displaced ideograms (determinatives), and phonetic signs may

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 The emergence of writing in Egypt 315

sound cumbersome, but it can be mastered fairly quickly and successfully. Certainly
when Egyptian is found written in an alphabetic script, as in Hellenistic and Roman texts
where the Greek alphabet is applied to the language, the result, perversely enough, is
extremely difficult to follow, and the advantages of the native script become clear. This
in itself, rather than cliches about Oriental conservatism, helps to explain why the
Egyptians never took their alphabetic scheme to what to us would seem to be the obvious
conclusion - writing with an alphabet. (The difficulties which even an alphabetic script
can entail are shown well by Levine (1964), who republishes an Aramaic ostracon in
which every important word has been re-translated; the text then becomes an account of
'a dream instead of a discussion about vegetables. This could not happen in hieroglyphs.)
The corpus of archaic inscriptions from Egypt, on cylinder seals, jar-labels, funerary
monuments and sherds, has been published by Kaplony (1963 and 1966a). Cursive
tendences are already apparent in ink inscriptions on stone vases, even from the so-called
'Dynasty 0'. In the tomb of Hemaka, a high functionary of the reign of king Den (c. 3000
B.C.) there was found a flattened roll of papyrus (Emery 1938, 41; Cerny 1952, 11).
Unfortunately it was blank; but papyrus did not remain unused for long, and the
civilisation of ancient Egypt was already set on its rare and beautiful course.

16.vii. 1985 University of Cambridge

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316 John D. Ray

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Abstract

Ray, J. D.
The emergence of writing in Egypt

The cultural history of ancient Egypt is markedly different from that of contemporary
Mesopotamia, and the adoption of the idea of writing by the Egyptians conforms to a general
pattern, which shows the tendency of Egypt to adopt and perfect inventions made elsewhere in the
Near East. Theories of a conquering 'dynastic race', which gave rise to Egyptian civilisation, are
unnecessary. Hieroglyphs show many of the signs of deliberate invention, probably in association
with the royal court, appearing suddenly, and developing rapidly. They are so well suited to the
underlying language, one of the Afroasiatic group, that their creation seems to be deliberate.
Uniconsonantal, or 'alphabetic', signs are a striking and unique feature of the system, which was
essentially complete by 3000 B.C.

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