NSLS A STUDY OF WRITING THE FOUNDATIONS OF GRAMMATOLOGY By I. J. GELB ROUTLEDGE AND KEGAN PAUL, LTD. Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane LondonWORD-SYLLABICG SYSTEMS important in Mesopotamian. Thus, the Mesopotamian syllabic writing is the result of the amalgamation of two processes both aiming at the effective expression of the language by means of the smallest possible number of signs. This is the principle of economy, which may be observed in many other syllabic systems, such as Egyptian, which indicates the consonant correctly but not the vowel, or Hittite, Cypriote, and older Japanese, none of which indicates the distinction between voiced, voiceless, emphatic, or aspirate consonants. If we try now to reconstruct the two Mesopotamian methods of creating syllabic signs in accordance with the principle of economy we can draw the following picture:— Method I Method IT One sign expresses ga or ka or ga | One sign expresses wa or wi or we or wu One sign expresses gi or i or gi} One sign expresses ja or ij or je or ju One sign expresses ge or ke or ge | One sign expresses alt or if or fe or uh One sign expresses gu or ku or qu| One sign expresses har or fir or her or hur FIG, 32.-THE TWO MESOPOTAMIAN METHODS OF CREATING SYLLABIG SIGNS EGYPTIAN SYSTEM The name of the hieroglyphic writing of the Egyptians is derived from the Greek iepoyAugiK& ypdypora and owes its origin to the belief that this kind of writing was used chiefly by the Egyptians for sacred purposes and on stone (ispés5 means ‘sacred’ and yAvgewv ‘to incise’, namely, on stone). By 1822 the hieroglyphic writing was successfully deciphered by the French- man Frangois Champollion chiefly on the basis of comparison with the Greek inscription on the famous Rosetta stone. The origins of the Egyptian writing are not as clear as those of Sumerian. At the beginning of the history of Egyptian writing we have a number of slate palettes from Hieraconpolis, situated about fifty miles south of the ancient town of Thebes 72 EGYPTIAN SYSTEM FIG, 33.—THE NARMER PALETTE From J. E. Quibell, in Zeitschrift tr dgyptisohe Sprache, xxxvi (1898), pls. xii £ in Upper Egypt. The best of these for the purpose of our discussion is the ‘Narmer palette’ (Fig. 33), so named because of the belief that the two central symbols in the uppermost register on both the obverse and reverse represent signs which in later Egyptian could be read something like ‘Narmer’. As the 73WORD-SYLLABIC SYSTEMS name ‘Narmer’ is otherwise unknown in later Egyptian history, the syllabic reading of the symbols as well as the proposed identity of Narmer with Menes, the founder of the First Dynasty of Egypt, are purely hypothetical. Let us now glance at the reverse side of our palette. The central scene shows an Egyptian king in the process of smiting an enemy to his knees. The scene to the right depicts a falcon, probably symbolizing the king as the god Horus, leading on a string a man from the Delta Land, symbolized by the head of a man plus six papyrus reeds. The whole is supposed to record a conquest of the Lower Land (Delta) by Menes, the founder of the Upper Egyptian kingdom, an event which presumably took place around 3000 B.c. In addition, we find symbols scattered throughout the palette, as in the uppermost register between the two heads of Hathor and near the heads of the subjugated enemy, all of which, no matter what their reading or interpretation, can hardly stand for anything else but proper names or titles. The whole structure of the record, different as it is from what we have seen in the earliest stages of Sumerian writing, finds striking parallelism in comparable examples of the Aztec writing (Fig. 25 and p. 54). In both cases the record is achieved by means of the descriptive-representational device by depicting an event and, as in art, by disregarding entirely the main object of full writing, which is to reproduce language in its normal word order. The proper names on the Narmer palette, as also on several other examples from Hieraconpolis, are evidently written in the rebus-form device which we have found in use among the Amerindians (see pp. 39 ff.) and perhaps also among the early Sumerians (see pp. 66 ff). Soon after Menes a full phonetic system of writing developed in Egypt, perhaps under the Sumerian stimulus (see p. 214 f.). After a short transitory period in which the phonetically written inscriptions still offer great difficulties of interpretation, a fully developed system appeared which in principle remained unchanged to the very end of the history of Egyptian writing. Throughout all of its history Egyptian was a word-syllabic writing. The hieroglyphic form of writing, used chiefly for public display purposes, was not the writing of everyday practical life. For such purposes the Egyptians developed two forms of cursive 74 EGYPTIAN SYSTEM writing, first the hieratic and then the demotic (Fig. 34). The development of the forms of some of the signs in hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic is shown in Figure 35. St EEA atarzef Diy Z Oy Zager og Ab Letan Lai Dri IA ACAH EMS H od eam hoe eek oe? ee SCAR eh Cnet « = ne BEA horS eo Lit PFOfovZpavFF LITERARY HIERATIC OF THE TWELFTH DYNASTY (Pr. 4,244), WITH TRANSCRIPTION ah ala Sanyysrst fpotitlrkess hai slinnshes ater dasabalnbaceiezal bs cede ca Rts Sad aragn wnt tea a MoM iE obit “ BRT Sn tid Men PHERN 62S obs POMEE RA ARR NIA Yh ALES CMa LAU IRR be SERA LAST Maco AK MLM S ARM OFFICIAL HIERATIC OF THE TWENTIETH DYNASTY (4ibot 511-3), WITH TRANSCRIPTION Eni i cease BW esleplooly ely F eran lao MPL YW wade Wflyaca 2 ay, Say fZ PMS IF Frenne, FONE Nt LOB Jo aoe, pu kins Chita BF ans "Mie ey 1Sdevaeh deco sSyhMtar MaRS oo ZW DEMFRAOMN DBL YM NAY SAC A Te a RG leks diner Sih Rraen NAN MRD A Ahan NTR Y NBT MRED AMR ED) Prac ‘LIBRARY DEMGTIC OF THE THIRD CENTURY BO. (Dem. Chron. 6, 1-3) ‘WITH TRANSCRIPTION FIG. 34.—SPECIMENS OF HIERATIC AND DEMOTIG WRITING WITH HIEROGLYPHIC TRANSLITERATIONS IN A MODERN EGYPTOLOGICAL “HAND From A. H. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar (and ed.; Oxford, 1950), pl. ii The Egyptian syllabary consists of about twenty-four signs, each with an initial consonant plus any vowel, such as the sign m® with the value m*, mi, m*, m", and m(*) (Fig. 36), and of about eighty signs, each with two consonants plus any vowel(s), 75