HIEROGLYPHIC WRITING

a system that employs characters in the form of pictures. These individual signs, called hieroglyphs, may be read either as pictures, as symbols for pictures, or as symbols for sounds. The name hieroglyphic (from the Greek word for "sacred carving") is first encountered in the writings of Diodorus Siculus (1st century BC). Earlier, other Greeks had spoken of sacred signs when referring to Egyptian writing. Among the Egyptian scripts, the Greeks labeled as hieroglyphic the script that they found on temple walls and public monuments, in which the characters were pictures sculpted in stone. The Greeks distinguished this script from two other forms of Egyptian writing that were written with ink on papyrus or on other smooth surfaces. These were known as the hieratic, which was still employed during the time of the ancient Greeks for religious texts, and the demotic, the cursive script used for ordinary documents. Hieroglyphic, in the strict meaning of the word, designates only the writing on Egyptian monuments. The word has, however, been applied for about 100 years to the writing of other peoples, insofar as it consists of picture signs used as writing characters. The name hieroglyphics is, for example, always used to designate the scripts of the Indus civilization and of the Hittites, who also possessed other scripts, in addition to the Mayan, the Incan, and Easter Island writing forms, and also the signs on the Phaistos Disk on Crete. Colloquially, the word hieroglyphics has been extended to mean any sort of illegible or barely legible writing. Because of their pictorial form, hieroglyphs were difficult to write and were used only for monument inscriptions. They were usually supplemented in the writing of a people by other, more convenient scripts. Among living writing systems, hieroglyphic scripts are no longer used. This article is concerned only with Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. Additional reading Books in English on hieroglyphic writing include Alan H. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar, 3rd ed., rev. (1957, reprinted 1978), with a list of hieroglyphs from the Middle Kingdom; F.Ll. Griffith, A Collection of Hieroglyphs: A Contribution to the History of Egyptian Writing (1898); and Nina M. Davies, Picture Writing in Ancient Egypt (1958), a collection of artistically valuable hieroglyphs.