Hieroglyphs: A Very Short Introduction

"I love all of the books in the Oxford Very Short Introduction series . In about 100 pages they really give you everything you need to ground yourself in a subject. And that’s certainly the case with Wilson’s tiny volume on hieroglyphs. She packs a lot into the book. She gives an overview of the nature, history and function of Egyptian hieroglyphs. She covers all the basics, everything you need to know about them if you’re starting from scratch. If you were to visit the British Museum and take a close look at the Rosetta Stone , or you were going to take a walk through the Egyptian gallery at the Louvre , it’s a book you might read before visiting, so that you could know a little bit more about what you were looking at before you got there, and be able to make more sense of what you see. “According to Susan Brind Morrow…hieroglyphs are actually easy to learn” I do have a favourite chapter in Hieroglyphs: A Very Short Introduction , which is about the status of names in the hieroglyphic script, their role in ancient Egyptian culture and its writing. Names had real power in ancient Egypt. And if you look closely at the Rosetta Stone, one of the things that’s noticeable right away is that there are a lot of names on it. And this is true of a lot of inscriptions, there are a lot of names and they’re mostly names of gods and rulers. Wilson says this is because names were thought to contain the essence of a person. To have your name carved in hieroglyphics on a temple completed your identity in a way that nothing else could. It conferred power in that way. The removal of a name from a temple was a serious erasure. There are even inscriptions where a pharaoh will issue warnings like, ‘if you scratch my name out of this, it won’t be lost, there’s divine power in the name that is sufficient to reinscribe it, even if you try and take it away.’ These amazing kinds of inscriptions that are intended to really preserve the power of an inscribed name. This is one of the things I find so interesting about hieroglyphs, that they do more than just record. For the ancient Egyptians, they confer other kinds of power, not just memory. I wouldn’t go that far, although maybe I should. I think they attest to a real and persistent need for some kind of mirroring, to have an outward consolidation of one’s sense of oneself. To have an outline in the world. That, I think, is something that hieroglyphics did for ancient Egyptians, or at least for those wealthy and powerful enough to have such inscriptions made. Exactly. So, if you were to take a slow walk through a museum and really start paying attention to the dates of the inscriptions that you were looking at, you might be able to see the kinds of developments that she mentions."