This volume explores ancient Egyptian writing systems – one of the richest and most enduring image-writing systems in history – from the perspective of its visual aesthetics, rather than from a linguistic or philological perspective.
Marking two hundred years since the decipherment of hieroglyphics, it stands as a unique work celebrating this milestone through a renewed focus on the visual dimensions of ancient Egyptian writing. Traditional scholarly approaches in Egyptology often prioritise the linguistic and philological analysis of ancient Egyptian writings over their visual aspects. This volume ushers in a new wave of scholarship focused on rediscovering the visual aesthetics of ancient Egyptian writing, with examples drawn from across the ancient history of Egypt highlighting the visual, artistic, and stylistic elements employed in the creation and presentation of hieroglyphs and their cursive forms such as the hieratic script. These visual aspects encompass diverse essential elements contributing to the overall beauty, harmony, and expressive qualities of written texts in ancient Egypt.
Visual Aesthetics of Ancient Egyptian Writing is suitable for students and scholars of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian art and visual culture, and ancient writing systems more broadly. It is also of interest to those working on comparative aesthetics, and comparative poetics, as well as to those working in comparative philosophy, and textual hermeneutics.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: Rethinking the visual culture of ancient Egyptian scripts - Stephen Quirke, Hany Rashwan and Rita Lucarelli; 2. Preface: iconicity in ancient Egyptian Writing - Antonio Loprieno; 3. Wonderful signs: aspects of visuality of ancient Egyptian (hand)writing - Ursula Verhoeven; 4. "The signs revealed their forms. He called to them and they answered to him", The anthropomorphized hieroglyphs as (inter)active image-text compositions in Ancient Egypt - Ghada Mohamed; 5. Writing and creation: hieroglyphs in Egyptian discourse - Katherine Davis; 6. Visual Poetics in ancient Egyptian and Chinese writings: a comparative study - Tian Tian; 7. Writing ms in the Religious Hymns of the New Kingdom (c. 1539-1077 BCE) - between visual aspects and semantic implications (or: The Importance of Being B3) - Guilherme Borges Pires; 8. Determinatives of the verb Hmsi ‘to sit’ in context, or can sitting be kneeling? - Edyta Kopp; 9. The visuality of cursive storywriting in ancient Egypt - Nikolaos Lazaridis and Tara Prakash; 10. Calling out the name: embodiment in ancient Egyptian personal names from the late Old Kingdom - Julia Clare Francis Hamilton; 11. Curse like an Egyptian: scribal choice of štm and šnꜥ determinatives - Ahmed Osman; 12. Hidden images of ritual power: a new look at Crypt South 3 in the temple of Hathor at Dendera - Barbara A. Richter; 13. The names of Menhyt and Nebtu in the litanies of Esna; or, the use of figurative writing in the definition of one goddess - Federica Pancin; 14. The (Other) World in words: determinatives as ‘telltale’ icons encoding the Egyptian Duat - Silvia Zago; 15. Crucible shape in Old Kingdom metalworking scenes: from visual to technical interpretations - Ahmed Mansour; 16. Graphic worlds in the Book of Two Ways - Jordan Miller; 17. Dances with kings: movement and dance-related lexemes in the Pyramid Texts - Angelo Colonna and Francesca Iannarilli; 18. ‘To make them see Your Majesty’: the visual program of the ‘Poetical Stela’ of Thutmosis III - Scott B. Noegel; 19. How to think in hieroglyphs? Logical strategies of aesthetic representation in the Egyptian hieroglyphic script - Amr El Hawary; 20. Hieroglyph perception through embodied cognition and pictorial realism: toward an ontology of active imagination in ancient Egypt - Andrea Pasqui, Todd Shimoda and Stefano Natrella.
About the Author :
Stephen Quirke is Edwards Professor of Egyptian Archaeology at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. In his role as curator in the British Museum and then at the UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology, he took a lead role in digitisation projects to deliver Egyptian Archaeology collections online.
Rita Lucarelli is Associate Professor of Egyptology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also holds the Class of 1939 Chair in Undergraduate Education and serves as Faculty Curator of Egyptology at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and as Fellow in Digital Humanities.
Hany Rashwan is Associate Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the United Arab Emirates University. His research focuses on Arabic and comparative poetics, with particular emphasis on premodern literary theory and non-Eurocentric approaches to literary criticism.
Review :
"The ancient Egyptian script was first deciphered during the colonial period, when Egypt was under the occupation of Western powers. The European world has long admired, yet often misunderstood, ancient Egyptian culture, partly due to its distinctiveness in spite of its linguistic proximity to other Semitic and African languages. The complexity of the script made it difficult for scholars of the time to fully grasp the visual and phonetic dimensions of this pictorial writing, as well as the vast expressive possibilities it offered to those who were proficient in using it. Remedying this gap, this new volume elegantly explains and highlights the visual potential of Egyptian scripts. Its twenty-three articles shed light on the creativity, innovation, and freedom exercised by ancient Egyptian writers and scribes, revealing how intimately each text is connected to its creator and how it reflects their individual perception of the text’s meaning, both visually and semantically. This book is a must-read for Egyptologists and for anyone interested in the visual culture of ancient Egyptian scripts and texts." - Fayza Haikal, The American University in Cairo.
“The footprint a civilization leaves behind is its culture. The crown jewel of Ancient Egypt is its sacred writing system, the hieroglyphs, the key to its monumental culture. This book is a milestone, offering a new angle of research in Egyptology by incorporating Aesthetics, in a rigorous way, in the methodology. Hieroglyphs were not just superbly engineered, they were an art form bridging the sacred and the profane. They were the precious liquid that espoused the vessel’s form, be it the human mind, or the minds of the gods.” - Yves A. Champollion, Wordfast LLC, Paris.
“As the modern decipherer of hieroglyphs and founding father of Egyptology, Jean-François Champollion, already underlined in his seminal Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens Égyptiens in 1824, “the art of writing in ancient Egypt was fundamentally linked to the art of painting.” To be more precise and quote the late Jan Assmann, one of the most influential Egyptologists of these last decades, “Hieroglyphics were a matter of art, not of normal writing.” Indeed, by their very figurative nature, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs are one of the most artistic writing systems ever invented in human history. This suggests that the real experts in hieroglyphs in ancient Egypt were artists, or literate artists, rather than scribes, or simple and mere scribes. The artistic nature and implications of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs have often been underestimated and hence underinvestigated but anyone interested in this fundamental aspect of ancient Egyptian writing systems will find new avenues of research, new questions and new answers in Visual Aesthetics of Ancient Egyptian Writing. In a very stimulating way, this book gathers various contributions on the subject from well-known and established experts, as well as from younger scholars who more recently embarked on this fascinating and fruitful research trail.” - Dimitri Laboury, University of Liège, Belgium.
“The present volume offers a much-needed precis of current research into the fascinating intersection of ancient Egyptian art and writing. The selection of papers covers a wide range of topics that offer new insights into old questions, with particular emphasis on the visual and performative aspects of phonetic signs and determinatives (classifiers) as polysemic icons, which invite the reader/viewer to engage the texts on multiple levels. In a similar vein, the various papers also challenge scholars to move beyond the foundations of traditional philology, with its focus on surface grammar and translation, in order to grapple with a deeper and more nuanced grammar of culture. This volume constitutes an essential addition to the library of anyone interested in the aesthetics ancient Egyptian writing systems and will provide invaluable comparative material for similar work in the other logo-syllabic scripts of antiquity.” - Joshua Aaron Roberson, University of Memphis, USA.
“Hieroglyphs were deciphered just over two hundred years ago. But that was just the start! There is so much to this complex, pictorial script, much of it taking us well beyond the nature of our own alphabetic script(s). This volume comprises a wide-ranging, innovative set of contributions investigating the aesthetic, cognitive and socio-cultural dimensions of the script within and beyond its linguistic usage. It provides a platform for a new wave of inter-disciplinary research ranging from the art historical to the semiotic and beyond.” - Mark Collier, University of Liverpool, UK.
“Common graphic ideologies view writing primarily as a secondary code fulfilling its function in the ideally transparent representation of language: writing working best when effacing itself. This volume challenges such ideologies and demonstrates how ancient Egyptian writing is part of a broader aesthetic culture and there to be seen and experienced in its full presence. Much cultural knowledge is embedded in ancient Egyptian writing, making this a major heuristic to cultural and material representations that are not easily accessed otherwise. A written text can be crafted in ways that vastly transcend the words it represents: with a visual rhetoric of its own and to express additional layers of meaning, to create spaces, and, not least, to elicit pleasure with a strong impact on the senses of the beholder. Beyond the limited explicit metadiscourse on ancient Egyptian writing, a rich implicit metadiscourse is given in regular and extended practices of writing themselves. The difficult question can thus be asked: what did the visual aspects of writing mean to the ancient actors themselves? In addressing ancient practices that clearly challenge alphabetistic ideologies of writing, the volume also invites reconsidering whether such graphic ideologies are a good fit for the alphabet itself.” - Andréas Stauder, École Pratique des Hautes Études - PSL, Paris.
