Ancient Egyptian and Emoji Chain Letters
EDIT: This article has been lightly edited and moved to my new substack! Please visit maximumeffort.substack.com!
I’m pretty certain that most people think Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs are pictograms. As in, if I want to write “dog” in hieroglyphs, I would draw a picture of a dog. This isn’t really correct.
Actually, the Egyptian writing system is a fascinating combination of both pictographic and alphabetic writing systems, and is far easier to read than most people imagine. To really appreciate Ancient Egyptian, we have to understand how the Ancient Egyptians wrote their language, and to do that, let’s look at some dirty chain letters.
A friend of mine recently sent me an emoji-filled holiday chain letter. This is an entire genre of spam texts, and in case you haven’t been exposed to these wonderful messages, here are some examples:
Generally, these emoji-filled exhortations are text messages, usually wishing you a happy holiday, promising you sex if you forward it to another person, and cursing you with a lack of sex if it isn’t forwarded. These messages are usually littered with ham-fisted sex puns.
Emoji chain texts also happen to be the most perfect modern analogy for the writing system of Ancient Egypt that I’ve ever encountered.
Lesson 1: The Rebus Principle
Let’s consider an example. From the first chain text:
Consider the function of the “4” emoji. This is nominally a pictorial representation of the number “four,” using the Arabic numeral system. However, in American English, the pronunciation of “four” coincides with the pronunciation of the preposition “for.” Hence, the pictogram “4” can be used to mean “for.” This is an example of the rebus principle, in which words are represented by pictograms that sound the same. Here’s another example of the rebus principle, from the Egypt Exploration Society’s webpage:
A picture of a bee followed by a picture of a leaf, would be pronounced “bee-leaf,” homophonic to the word “belief.” Thus the bee and the leaf symbols, together, represent the totally unrelated concept “belief.”
The Ancient Egyptian writing system is based on the rebus principle. Originally, the “mouth” hieroglyph,
represented the concept of “mouth,” and was pronounced something like r. Not long after the invention of Egyptian writing, the mouth glyph was assigned the phonetic value of r. A set of these signs were standardized, creating the hieroglyphic alphabet. Here’s the (Middle) Egyptian alphabet:
These signs are used to spell out the sounds of Egyptian, in the same way that the Roman alphabet is used to spell the sounds of English. Well, except for the minor detail that in Egyptian, like a lot of Semitic languages, vowels tend not to be explicitly written out. Only the consonants were written down, along with pseudo-vowels like i, sometimes called a “weak consonant.” This is a common feature of Semitic languages, like Hebrew and Arabic. Incidentally, this relative lack of vowels in writing leads to a lot of homophones in Egyptian, words that sound (or, at least, are written) the same but have a different meaning.
Lesson 2: Semantic Determinatives
Let’s now consider a second example, from the second chain text:
It begins “Happy Earth Day,” followed by an emoji of a plant and three of the earth. The compound noun “Earth Day” is composed of two words, written in the Roman alphabet, and the individual characters (a, p, y, etc.) tell the reader how the words are pronounced. This is the hallmark of an alphabetic system; an individual character d represents the sound of single consonant, and multiple characters representing distinct sounds, like d a y, are placed in sequence to form a word with lexical meaning, “day.” The characters tell you how the word is pronounced, and collectively form a written representation of both the concept “day” and the sound “day.”
The sound-signs forming the word “Earth Day” are followed by a picture of a plant, and three pictures of the planet Earth, indicating that “Earth Day” is a concept associated with living, growing things and the planet Earth. In other words, the pictograms following the alphabetic characters add shades of meaning to the phrase “Earth Day,” clarifying the category of concept to which this word belongs. This is precisely how Egyptian words are formed.
Paraphrasing from James Hoch’s Middle Egyptian Grammar, Egyptian words are commonly spelled out alphabetically, but also followed by an additional sense-sign, called a determinative, that adds context and meaning to the sound-signs.
For example, the word ra is written as:
It consists of two alphabetic signs, the mouth hieroglyph, pronounced r, and the arm hieroglyph a, pronounced something like the Arabic ayin. It’s followed by this circular determinative, which indicates the meaning of the word ra.
Can you guess what ra means from the determinative sign? You almost can, ra means “sun” and the determinative is a picture of the sun. The image of the sun clarifies the meaning of the sound-glyphs r and a.
Lesson 3: Disambiguation
Let’s consider a third illustrative example. From the third chain text:
The compound noun “Hot Dog” is followed by a peach and eggplant emoji, commonly used to mean “butt,” and “penis,” respectively. Here, the eggplant and peach emojis serve an important semantic function — they clarify the ambiguity in the sentence “I Want To Eat Your Hot Dog” by explicitly informing the reader, using the eggplant determinative, that “Hot Dog” is a euphemism for “penis.” Thus, instead of the sentence indicating a desire to eat a delicious, all-beef frankfurter, it indicates a desire to perform oral sex.
Ancient Egyptian uses determinatives in exactly the same way as the chain text uses the peach and the eggplant. Returning to our example of ra, consider these two examples of Egyptian words, both spelled ra:
The first word is followed by the “sun” determinative, and thus refers to the concept of the sun, i.e. the ball of fire in the sky. The second is followed by the seated god determinative, and instead of referring to the sun itself, it refers to the sun god Ra. The determinative serves to clarify which concept, both spelled ra, is being referred to in the text.
The determinative is extremely important to understanding written Egyptian, due to the number of homophones in the written language.
Lesson 4: Illustrative Examples
We also notice that in these emoji chain texts, the short, common words without really concrete meanings (like “is” or “to”) are not followed by emoji determinatives, whereas nouns like “Patriotic Daddies” and “COCKtober”
are followed by one or two determinatives indicating their meaning or associations in the context of the sentence. Egyptian follows the same pattern. Short, common words, like m, meaning “in” or “with,” are composed of alphabetic signs alone, without determinatives.
However, nouns and verbs usually consist of a series of alphabetic signs that indicate the pronunciation of the word, followed by a semantic determinative that indicates its sense, category, or associations.
Let’s consider the example of the Egyptian verb “beget,” meaning “to bring into existence”:
This word consists of five signs: three sound-signs and two determinatives. The first three signs are the coiled rope, pronounced w, followed by two loaf-of-bread signs, pronounced t. Thus, the word is transliterated wtt, and pronounced something like “wetet.”
The two next signs are determinatives, and give the sense of the word. The first determinative is a hieroglyph that’s easily recognizable in any era.
The penis glyph’s function in indicating the semantic meaning of “beget” is obvious. This sign is actually used in many Egyptian words, such as:
Yes, the penis hieroglyph can mean “thick” in Ancient Egyptian. I guess the priests who came up with this writing system wanted everyone to know a little something about their assets.
The second determinative in “beget” is the rolled scroll.
The scroll is often used for abstract concepts. This is because abstract concepts are often not easily represented by pictograms, but can be written down on, for example, a scroll.
Putting it all together, the combination of glyphs rope, bread, bread, penis, scroll produce a verb pronounced something like “wetet,” and meaning “to beget.”
Convergent Evolution
Here’s another fun fact about hieroglyphs. By pure chance, many modern emojis look nearly identical to their ancient counterparts. This article https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/arts/design/emojis-hieroglyphs-israel-museum.html has some wonderful examples of convergent glyph evolution, reproduced here for convenience.
And so, the next time one of your friends sends you a message like this:
I hope that you can appreciate it (syntactically, if nothing else) as a modern reinvention of an ancient form of writing.
Post Script
For further reading, I recommend the fantastic book by Collier and Manley “How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs,” which is a concise and fun-to-read introduction to the language of Ancient Egypt using real tomb inscriptions. For more advanced study, I recommend James E. Hoch’s Middle Egyptian Grammar. If you are self-studying, take your time and do all the exercises.
Disclaimer: I am not a linguist nor a trained scholar of Middle Egyptian, just a graduate student who’s always loved Ancient Egypt. I don’t think I’ve made any errors here, but if you spot any let me know!
