Hiero JS Names

The databases

There are two main databases in the nedj-nedj series: a catalogue of signs, and the examples. The second looks up the first, and saves endlessly repeating the same glyphs.

Hiero JS names

The reference database, the list of signs, does not pretend to be a list of all hieroglyphs. It contains only those that appear or are needed in the companion ‘examples’ database.

Currently there are over 1400 glyphs in the reference database, and the number grows as more are encountered that appear to be needed.

It contains: 

Standard information

Gardiner number

Gardiner category

official transliteration

the actual glyph, pictorially

Information special to this database

name of glyph

respelling of the official transliteration

hiero type

category

category additional info

comments

Here is a single-line view of a small portion the database: 9 lines out of over 1400:

The central column, headed ‘JSesh’, shows the glyphs copied from the JSesh application available freely on the internet. The images could have been taken from anywhere providing elegant artwork. The database is not linked to the JSesh application in any way.

To the right is the column showing the glyph names. Why create names, when there is an official number, shown in the gold column on the far left? Because who can remember hundreds of numbers? But if a glyph looks like, say, a club, why not call it ‘club’, if that is what springs to mind; for ‘U36’ is hardly likely to. The need to identify the glyphs occurs in the companion database of examples, as will be shown.

The next column, bright blue, called ‘hiero type’, is a very rough categorisation of the glyphs into ‘tall’, ‘wide’, ‘diagonal’, ‘line’, thin’ and a few other classes.

The next two columns in tones of green are further categories into which the glyphs can be classed, somewhat akin to Gardiner’s categories.

In the yellow column in the centre left are the official transliterations of the glyphs, and in the fawn column to its right are the respellings. So official ‘dr’ becomes respelt ‘djer’, for example.

Are the glyphs in the central pink column too small? Yes, but you can review them quickly when you are familiar with most of them. But they can be looked at separately, with the touch of a button:

This is a page view of the fourth item in the list above. To return to the first view, hit the yellow 'SLIMMER' button.

Most of these columns were devised to help identify particular glyphs, and so enable the user to find the actual one to be identified. For what purpose? Well,imagine you wanted to read and understand an obelisk. Here is an example of the challenge, from the obelisk in Istanbul:

Detail from the Thuthmosis III obelisk in the Hippodrome in Istanbul

What do the glyphs here mean? How to begin working it out?

Perhaps great scholars of hieroglyphs just know this sort of thing, but how does an ordinary person have a go? Well, the nedj-nedj databases offer help. 

First you have to know the names of the glyphs you are looking at, and some are easy. Let us identify the ones we see here, and then see what we can make of them.

We know this collection is to be read from the right, as the snake (an animate object with a face) is looking to the right, and things with faces always look to the start of the text. So numbering from top to bottom  and right to left we have:

1. basin
2. eye
3. bun
4. DON’T KNOW
5. pool
6. cross-X
7. arrowhead
8. viper
9. mouth
10. horns
11. bun
12. stroke

Some of these names are more obvious (eye, horns) than others, some take a little learning but a great deal less than memorising official Gardiner numbers. And the DON’T KNOW is a challenge, for which the columns in HIERO JS NAMES might be helpful. And in fact using various clues in the columns, we identified this glyph as ‘sagbag’: like a brown-paper bag in a state of collapse in the drawing, if not so clearly thus as chiselled on the obelisk.

The first two glyphs (basin eye) probably mean ‘lord (of) work. Let us ignore them for the present.

Typing the next six glyph names into the pink bar of the examples database produces the following result:

Up pop the pictures immediately, in sequence. These pictures can be matched with those on the actual obelisk illustrated above. Under each glyph picture appears its official number, and below that in the yellow panel can be seen the official transliteration for each: sometimes with choices.

Of those appearing here, one soon learns that 3 = /a/, and š is commonly read in English as ‘sh’. So the first three glyphs suggest the word ‘tash'. The next two glyphs (cross-X, arrowhead) can be ignored, being determinatives, intended to give other scribes an idea of what the word is about — but not how it is to be read aloud. The final ‘viper’, having the sound (e)f, is a bound pronoun meaning ‘his’, or ‘its’. The word is then tash, or more fully including the pronoun, tashef.

On typing ‘tash’ into a search box in the examples database, up pops the following:

You can see 'tash' in the fawn column, and its meaning in the grey column, with a standardised meaning given in the yellow column.

The three ‘tash’ words therefore meaning ‘boundary’ or its equivalent ‘border’. The first of these is shown (in the source columns on the left in each of the lines) as coming from Sir Alan Gardiner’s great Egyptian Grammar, page 599 column 1, item 6. And here it is, in the database, pretty similar to the obelisk, and its analysis above:

Scribes did not always ‘spell’ in exactly the same way, but the components still make up ‘tash’, ignoring the two determinatives at the end.

This process to identify meanings in texts can be continued, to make sense of much of the obelisk in Istanbul;  or of inscriptions generally.

Introduction and onomatopoeia

Introducing the nedj-nedj blog

Those new to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs will not know anything about the design (picture, hieroglyphs) above, while those familiar with ancient Egyptian writing will know a great deal. But let us assume you are beginner.

Meaning
First, this is a word, and it means 'converse', or 'speak with another person'. It is pronounced like the name of the blog, 'nedj-nedj', although no-one knows today what the vowel sound really was. By and large, vowels were not included in hieroglyphic writing — and are not there in this word. So it could have been 'nudj-nudj','nodj-nodj', but possibly not 'nidj-nidj', as it would probably have been written differently. So too and for the same reason, 'not 'nadj-nadj'. In the absence of any vowel sound indication, I and probably most others just use the 'e' sound. Hence nedj-nedj.

Direction
Second, the word is read from the left. But it could equally have been written:

when it would have been read in the other, equally valid, direction. How do you know which way to read it? You read 'into the faces'. The faces, where they occur, always look towards the start of the word. Usually somewhere in an ancient Egyptian word or piece of text there is a human or animal with a face, and this informs you of the direction to read in.

Order of reading
Third, you read from top to bottom in any sign or 'glyph' group. So the snake is read first, then the wavy line. (But also see the 'apparent contradiction' section below.)

Glyph names — in this blog and officially
I, your blogger (and my name is Jeremy Steele — or Jeremy Macdonald Steele if you want to know the whole truth), have given each of these glyphs separate names, for my own purposes. They are names that will, I hope, spring to mind when I look at the signs. I have given them names so I can fairly easily refer to them, for purposes that will in all probability become clear if I persist with this blog. (And this blog continuation is not certain, as hieroglyphs for me is a hobby interest in retirement. I do not have any connection with Egypt really at all.) But back to the glyph names. The word above, for me, is:

cobra-J water cobra-J water  cross squattermouth

Real hieroglyph experts, and notably Sir Alan Gardiner,
Gardiner, Sir Alan Henderson. 1957 (2007). Egyptian Grammar: being an introduction to the study of hieroglyphs. 3rd ed., rev. ed. Oxford: Griffith Institute, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, by Oxford University Press.
have looked at all the glyphs, worked out what they represented, classified them into groups, and given them all individual numbers. And this was wonderful work, and everybody follows this system. And I do too, except for the names I have given them. The names I have used are what come to mind when I look at the glyphs. For many of the glyphs apparently represent things that do not exist in our modern world, or if they do they require a leap of imagination to make the connection. And should you, dear blog reader, come up with a better name than I have done, and tell me, then I might change it. But the new name would have to be obvious, and preferably short. Thus you might improve upon 'squattermouth' because it is long.

Cobra-J

However, to return to the theme, and by way of explanation, there are quite a few different 'cobra' glyphs, and the one that looks like the one used here is pronounced /j/, which I always transcribe as /dj/. (I do this to contrast it with another glyph which we normally think of as being pronounced 'ch' (as in 'chop'), which I respell as /tj/. So 'j', 'ch' — /dj/, /tj/ — you can see and hear the difference.

Water

The wavy line is 'water', for that is what it really was intended to represent. It is pronounced /n/

Cross

The glyph 'cross' looks like a cross. But there are other different 'cross' glyphs, and they have slightly different names, for me.

Squattermouth

The man is squatting, and he has his hand to his mouth. (There is a similar and very common glyph without the hand to the mouth, and this is of course simply 'squatter'.)

Determinatives

Perhaps it was because this word could have been pronounced 'nudj-nudj','nodj-nodj' or 'nedj-nedj' that the ancient scribes decided to give the reader some help. The help comes in the two clues at the end, cross and squattermouth. The second of these is obvious even across the millennia, and tells the reader the word has something to do with the mouth: as indeed 'conversing' does.

As to the first, the cross, well, that is partly what makes much of this fascinating, though it does not really matter. Gardiner says of the cross, which he placed in a small group of 'doubtful' signs with the indicator 'Aa', and numbered Aa27: "The view that the sign depicts a winder for thread ... is not supported by the earlier forms. It has also been thought to represent a porridge-stirrer ..."

Alphabetic signs

So the word 'nedj-nedj' (meaning 'converse') consists of two alphabetic signs, repeated. It is reminiscent of our 'yak-yak'. The Macquarie Dictionary says of 'yak': "to talk or chatter, esp. pointlessly and continuously. [imitative]".

The signs used in the word that give it its sound are n and dj, the latter actually being 'j'. These are two of 24 'alphabetic' signs.

But there are other glyphs we may come to, a large number, representing 2 consonants together, or a group of 3 consonants.

Apparent contradiction in arrangement: pleasing the eye of the beholder

If the signs in:

are read left to right, and top to bottom, then how can the reading be 'nedj' and not 'djen-djen'? Well, the answer lies in the practical matter of producing a pleasing visual result.  Here is the sign sequence in a straight line:

Because the scribes were dealing with signs that were sometimes tall (as the cross), or wide (as water) or other shape (as the cobra-J), it was more visually pleasing to group the signs aesthetically in rectangular segments or areas, and this was done in the case of the word 'nedj-nedj', by sliding the water sign into the space below the cobra-J sign, with the visually pleasing if not strictly correctly spelt result.

And these signs were not rendered by the ancient Egyptian scribes on paper, but often carved in granite, or made out of precious stones, painted on walls, or written on papyrus. This was 'sacred-writing', and was made by the scribes to look good. Much of the writing was done to please the pharaohs.

Onomatopaeic words
The word for 'ram' is:

officially written b3 and pronounced 'ba'.

Likewise the word for 'cat' is:

officially written mỉw and pronounced 'mew'.

From this it can be seen that the names of these animals is actually what they themselves 'say', 'baa' and 'mew'. The same idea occurs in our time in the bird 'cuckoo, and in Australian birds 'mopoke', and 'currawong', From the ancient Egyptian names of the ram and cat, these animals apparently have not altered the sounds they make over the great interval of time, and over the many generations.