by Michael Fassbender

Created on: June 26, 2008

Recent discoveries at the site of Abydos have demonstrated that Egyptian hieroglyphs date back at least to the 32nd century BC. Notably older than earlier estimates, these discoveries give Egypt pride of place for the oldest known system of writing. They have also forced a revision of some assumptions about the development of Egyptian hieroglyphs. The existence of ideograms alongside phonetic symbols led linguists to the conclusion that hieroglyphs began as a rudimentary series of ideographic characters, where one sign meant one thing, independently of the spoken word; and that the system gradually developed a phonetic component as greater sophistication was needed. The discoveries at Abydos seem to contradict this model.

At issue are small tags, perforated with a hole in one corner, bearing one or more primitive carvings similar to classic hieroglyphs. Some of these carvings are more obviously similar to known hieroglyphs than others, and the archaeologists dealing with them found that if these carvings were read like standard Egyptian writing, they not only made sense in a generic fashion, but they actually clarified the nature of the discovery: they were tied to goods that were brought to the tomb then under excavation, and identified the nature of those goods. Thus, Egyptian writing was already phonetic at that early date, and its primary function would seem to be the service of an already bureaucratic state.

If these conclusions are borne out by future work, the emergence of hieroglyphics might resemble more the invention of shorthand than the development of the modern Latin alphabet. A group of people who maintained records for their livelihood agreed upon a series of symbols to rapidly and interchangeably record the spoken word for future use. In the case of Egyptian hieroglyphs, this system remained in use for 3,500 years, with the number of symbols growing according to need, but never being replaced or significantly altered.

Early hieroglyphs appear in small groups in discoveries from the Archaic period and the early phases of the Old Kingdom, but never in volume. Kings are identified, presumably by name, on late Predynastic palettes and maceheads, and more certainly on Early Dynastic monuments, in which the king's Horus name is presented inside of a stylized palace image known as a serekh; but lengthy works are absent. This need not suggest that writing was not yet used for lengthier compositions, but only that such compositions have not been discovered.

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