When we think of the great inventions that shaped the course of human history, we are wont to look to technological developments: fire, the wheel, the internal combustion engine, the internet. But in terms of sheer impact, the greatest development in human history was certainly writing. Humans had been communicating with one another, either through verbal utterances or through pictures, since around 70,000 years ago. This evolutionary development emerged from the primal vocalisations of our primate cousins to more elaborate and sophisticated strings of phonemes to which humans, through a process as yet unknown, attributed meaning. The spoken word was sufficient for some 60,000 years. Human beings operated in small groups, largely based on kinship affiliation, and had little need to extend communication beyond that. When two groups of humans met, the options were to collaborate or fight. If the groups could come up with utterances that were meaningful to both, they often opted to collaborate. It was under these circumstances that the first farming communities and the first architecture emerged, around 9500 BC. But human co-operation on the basis of shared verbal language could only take us so far. In order to communicate complex ideas over greater distances and time, a more durable method of communication was needed. The answer came some time around 3400 BC, when the Sumerians invented the earliest form of writing, known as Sumerian Pictographs. Simultaneously with this development, or perhaps shortly afterwards, the Egyptians created their own semi-pictographic writing system: hieroglyphs.

It took until AD 1822 for the hieroglyphic language, extinct since the Roman Period, to be deciphered. The breakthrough was made by Jean-François Champollion, a precociously brilliant French linguist, who was the first to realise that hieroglyphs were far richer and more complex than centuries of Europeans had believed. Since hieroglyphs are pictographs – symbols which are figurative images of people, objects, and animals – the prevailing belief was that they were direct representations of what they depicted. This led to bizarre and fanciful interpretations of hieroglyphic monuments by European scholars, which provoke much baffled amusement among modern Egyptologists. Champollion’s extraordinary realisation came from the Rosetta Stone, a bilingual and tri-script relief in Egyptian and Greek now in the British Museum in London (). He noted that certain hieroglyphs were grouped together in representations of circles of rope; he took an educated guess that these were the names of the rulers mentioned in the script, which were known from the Greek section to be members of the conquering Macedonian Dynasty, the Ptolemies. He counted out numbers of signs within the hieroglyphs, and determined the shorter to be the name of King Ptolemy and the longer to be that of his sister-wife Cleopatra. Beginning with the shared letters, and based on the presumption that foreign names would need to be spelled phonetically, he determined certain letters of the Egyptian ‘alphabet’. From his knowledge of the Greek inscription and his extrapolation from modern Coptic, he created the first translations of sentences and words. He realised that the majority of signs fell into certain categories. Uniliteral, biliteral and triliteral signs represented one, two or three phonemes respectively. Determinatives used an image to denote what kind of action was taking place – a head with a hand brought up to the mouth could indicate ‘eating’, for example. Raw pictographs could additionally represent both a sound and a common thing; the sun-disc, for example, denotes both the syllable ra, and the actual sun itself (and indeed the god Ra who represents it) depending on context.

The hieroglyphic script, derived from the Greek words for ‘priestly letters’, was reserved exclusively for monumental, religious or funerary contexts. From the Third Millennium BC, everyday writing was produced in the hieratic script, a cursive derivative of hieroglyphs. The Egyptians believed that two deities were responsible for the creation and preservation of the Egyptian language: the first, Thoth, an ibis-headed god (sometimes represented as a baboon), apparently invented the script, while Seshat, his daughter, was also credited with inventing writing, and was identified as the goddess of the sciences, accounting, architecture, astronomy, astrology, mathematics, and surveying. Seshat, whose name literally means ‘female scribe’, was thus an essential deity of the bureaucracy which ran Egypt. The temples, which were the primary centres of the administration, were responsible for training new scribes, keeping records of the depth of the life-giving Nile flood, and surveying the land in order that peasants paid the correct amount of rent and grain-tax to their overlords (which were usually the temples themselves). Each temple maintained a ‘House of Life’ (per-ankh), in which records were kept and where boys learned to be scribes.

This remarkable relief, dating from either the end of the Middle Kingdom or the golden age of the New Kingdom, depicts Seshat at work. The goddess is seated on a traditional Egyptian style of block-throne with a low backrest more designed to prevent one slipping off backwards than to provide any real support, and holds up a board on which she writes with a reed pen. While in statues scribes are usually depicted seated cross-legged, with the papyrus resting on the stretched fabric of their kilts, relief sculpture presented a more difficult challenge for the artist, since resting papyrus on one’s kilt would be difficult to accurate depict in profile. She wears the shendyt-kilt, a usually male garment which was associated especially with government and temple officials, and there is no indication of the sheer dress high-class Egyptian women often wore over their undergarments. Around her neck is the wesekh, a broad collar or necklace worn by wealthy Egyptians of both genders and, especially, by deities. Her ensemble, which is otherwise thoroughly masculine, is completed by a shoulder-length wig, also an accoutrement of the Egyptian upper-classes, since many shaved their heads for hygiene’s sake. Her slender reed pen is held between her thumb and index finger as she daintily writes. Above the goddess is a carefully incised hieroglyphic inscription, which describes her as ḫnt pr-mḏȝt (‘foremost of the House of Books’, usually translated as ‘Mistress of the Library’).

In the register above, a man is depicted kneeling. Since kneeling is sometimes representative of submission in the highly symbolic world of Egyptian art, it might be suggested that this is a foreign captive. If so, we may have an explanation of what Seshat is doing in her scene: one of her roles is to record the number of captives taken in battle, alongside the number of dead. While this is possible, we must note the absence of another common feature of such scenes: a pile of hands. In a gruesome practice, the Egyptian army had a habit of cutting off the right hand of all deceased enemies. This had two functions: first, it was thought that to enter the Egyptian ideal of heaven, the ‘Field of Reeds’ (sḫt-jȝrw), the body needed to be complete (hence the practice of mummification). Secondly, it was a useful way of counting how many enemies had been killed in the battle, and thus quantifying the magnificence of Pharaoh’s military campaigns. However, there is another clue in support of our explanation. In the register in front of Seshat, there are determinative signs in the form of crouching males, their knees drawn up in front of them. The first has a fairly ordinary Egyptian-style wig, but the second bears an unusual cropped hairstyle with tufts. This suggests a foreigner, and one can go further and propose that this register, when completed, depicted the nine traditional enemies of the Egyptians – there is no definitive list, since the composition changed over time, but the nine enemies usually included the Nubians, Mittani, Syrians, and Keftiu (believed to be from Cyprus) – who were often invoked in military inscriptions.

Given our proposed reading of this text as being related to the enumeration of captive and killed enemies, we can further suggest something about its origins: this would almost certainly have been a temple relief, since Sheshat was so associated with the temples, and since announcements of Pharaohs’ successful campaigns were always made in giant propaganda inscriptions on temple walls. Which campaign this refers to is alas unknown. The nine traditional enemies of Egypt were invoked in almost every military inscription, as part of a magical process designed to keep the four borders of the Kingdom safe. The relatively small size of this carving further perhaps suggests that it was placed in one of the smaller temples at the borders, most usually the border with Nubia, where foreign visitors would have been offered a stark reminder of Egyptian power and sovereignty. However, the style, with slender arms and legs and a slim torso, is usually associated with the Theban area, so it is also possible that this remarkable relief was placed in the ante-chapel of one of the great state temples, perhaps at Karnak or Luxor.

Translation by Minkyung Park
Researcher, Barakat Seoul