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0:00 · Just have a look at these hieroglyphs.
0:02 · They're pretty aren't they?
0:04 · But they're also gibberish, right?
0:07 · Well, by the end of this video, I promise you that they won't be.
0:12 · You're going to understand exactly what this means and why
0:16 · and you're going to understand what a load of other hieroglyphs mean too.
0:20 · Let's get started with another RobWords.
0:24 · This is the Egyptian Museum inside Berlin's Neues Museum. They've been
0:28 · kind enough to let me loose among all of these astounding ancient artefacts.
0:32 · Did you know that ancient Egypt was already ancient before it was over?
0:37 · Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the Ninja air fryer
0:40 · than to the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza.
0:43 · Amazing.
0:44 · Anyway, many of the sarcophagi – or sarcophaguses, take your pick –
0:48 · that you see surrounding me are adorned with these curious signs.
0:53 · Writings from ancient times.
0:56 · Writings that we call hieroglyphics.
1:00 · Or do we?
1:01 · I would say hieroglyphs.
1:02 · That's Ilona Regulski, curator here, and a world authority on Ancient Egypt.
1:08 · So I just got it wrong.
1:09 · What's the difference between hieroglyphs and hieroglyphics?
1:12 · It's not written in stone, no pun intended.
1:15 · Not intended, are you sure? Yeah.
1:17 · Hieroglyphs is the noun.
1:20 · Hieroglyphic is the adjective.
1:23 · So you refer to hieroglyphic writing,
1:26 · but they are hieroglyphs.
1:28 · Hieroglyph literally means "sacred carving" and Ilona's going to help us get to grips
1:33 · with the basics of learning how to read them
1:36 · using the real life Egyptian artefacts here at the museum,
1:39 · beginning with this monumental – quite literally – inscription from
1:43 · the tomb of a district governor called Metjen.
1:47 · This is his name, Metjen.
1:50 · I'm going to show you how to read that, but first:
1:53 · What's the overall message of what we're looking at here?
1:57 · Yeah. This is part of a biography.
1:59 · It's actually the oldest biography we have from ancient Egypt and maybe in the entire world.
2:05 · Wow
2:05 · I don't know of any other biographical text that consists of long sentences
2:10 · that we have anywhere, really, from 2600 BC.
2:15 · So this is more than 4,000 years old.
2:17 · Unbelievable. So this is perhaps the oldest, detailed life story in the world.
2:22 · So how on earth do we understand it?
2:24 · Well, if you ever find yourself presented with some hieroglyphs for whatever reason,
2:29 · your first thought might be, "Where do I start?"
2:33 · And that is a very appropriate question,
2:36 · because the first thing you need to work out before you can start reading
2:39 · is where the thing begins and in which direction you should read it.
2:44 · Well, Ancient Egyptian texts are read from top to bottom, like we're used to,
2:49 · but they can be read either from left to right, like we read,
2:53 · or from right to left.
2:58 · Confusing.
2:59 · However, there is a very clever way to immediately know which direction you're dealing with.
3:04 · If you look at the entire text, if you zoom out a little bit,
3:08 · we know that we start reading on the right-hand side.
3:12 · How do we know this?
3:14 · Because we have certain signs that have clear fronts and backs,
3:18 · like a bird or human being, or here this decapitated animal.
3:24 · They all look…
3:25 · It's meant to have no head?
3:26 · Yes, it's meant to be like this.
3:28 · They look at the beginning of the text.
3:30 · So we know in this case that we have to start reading here.
3:33 · There are a few exceptions to that with religious text,
3:36 · but in general, this is the rule.
3:38 · So look for the people and animals,
3:39 · and they will always be looking at the beginning,
3:42 · staring into your face as you approach them.
3:45 · Now, you may already know that the Rosetta Stone –
3:47 · the ancient tablet containing the same message in Greek, Demotic and Hieroglyphic script –
3:53 · was of course key to deciphering hieroglyphics.
3:56 · So I am delighted to say that this video is sponsored by
3:59 · [most of the ad text redacted]
4:37 · One of the fascinating things I learnt from Babbel is something
4:40 · that Swedish has in common with Ancient Egyptian.
4:43 · It has no word for "the".
4:46 · [the rest of the ad text redacted]
5:20 · So we already discussed the direction in which you read an overall text,
5:23 · but you'll notice that in hieroglyphs, words, like our pal Metjen's name,
5:28 · which can be written like this, or like this, which it is in this case,
5:32 · are written in their own little blocks with some signs next to one another,
5:37 · and others one on top of the other.
5:39 · So again, we need to know in which order to read them.
5:44 · And, once again, there are simple rules.
5:47 · Just read into the front of the faces again
5:50 · and read the top signs before the bottom ones..
5:53 · So our dead fella's name should be read in this order.
5:56 · Or if the text were linear: like this.
5:59 · Now, as with any good linguistic rule, there are exceptions.
6:03 · If a sign makes mention of a god, for example,
6:05 · it'll often get boosted to the start of the word.
6:08 · Quite right too.
6:09 · For example, the titles of a lot of kings end with a declaration "son of Re"
6:14 · all kings being direct descendents of the Sun god, Re or Ra,
6:18 · represented by the sign of the sundisc.
6:20 · Despite this "Re" being at the end of their names, the sundisc usually goes at the start,
6:26 · out of Re-spect.
6:30 · Before we can draw out Metjen's name from these hieroglyphs,
6:33 · we need to understand what each of them means.
6:36 · Now, sometimes, one of these little pictures represents the thing it's a drawing of.
6:40 · Don't overthink it.
6:41 · Sometimes an arm just means arm, or a face just means face.
6:45 · Usually these are accompanied by a line to show you that you should take them literally,
6:50 · but that's what they mean.
6:51 · Or a pair of legs can just mean "legs".
6:55 · But far more often than not, you can't take the signs on face value.
7:01 · Not even the face.
7:02 · They can signify a few different things.
7:05 · Some signs are letters.
7:08 · Some signs represent one letter.
7:10 · For example, this wavy line here is the letter N.
7:14 · Ah. That's the same sign as we've got here.
7:17 · So that means an N, does it?
7:19 · People could say this is an alphabetic letter because it's one sign for one letter.
7:24 · But I prefer not to use this term because it's confusing because
7:27 · we also have two-letter signs and we have three-letter signs.
7:31 · Right, so these are the hieroglyphs that we,
7:33 · as folk who are used to using an alphabet,
7:35 · can most easily get our heads around.
7:37 · Signs representing specific sounds.
7:40 · Put these sounds in the right order and you get a word.
7:44 · And it really does work like that.
7:46 · This picture of a mouth on its own represents an R sound like rr.
7:51 · A leg on its own is a b sound, and this cute little sign
7:55 · called the loaf represents a t sound.
7:59 · Line them up and you get a hieroglyphic rendering of my name,
8:04 · R-b-t
8:05 · Robert.
8:06 · You should try doing this with your own name.
8:08 · Pop it in the comments as well.
8:09 · Here are some more of the single letter hieroglyphs.
8:12 · This horned viper represents a fuh sound, an F.
8:15 · This little rectangle, sometimes called the stool or mat, represents a puh, a P sound.
8:21 · This adorable little quail chick is usually transliterated as a w,
8:25 · although it can make an oo sound.
8:27 · The reed is gentle yuh sound, transliterated with an i,
8:32 · the tethering rope makes a tuh or tjuh sound,
8:36 · and this owly guy is a muh.
8:40 · Now, I mention specifically those last two because lookie here,
8:45 · they feature in our dead fella's name.
8:47 · And remember what order we said we had to read them?
8:50 · So say it with me: m-tj-n.
8:55 · It's our guy's name, Metjen.
8:57 · But what of this left-over character?
9:00 · Well, do you remember how Ilona just mentioned that there are
9:02 · also hieroglyphs that represent two letters…
9:05 · We also have two-letter signs.
9:07 · [In booming slo-mo] Two letter signs.
9:09 · Well that's what this is.
9:10 · It's known as the throw stick and it represents a T and an N together, pronounced tjen.
9:17 · That's right, it makes the same sound as these two signs together,
9:21 · the end of the name Metjen.
9:23 · So we have a doubling up here, don't we?
9:26 · And that's because these two signs are technically what are called complements.
9:31 · What they're doing here is telling you what that stick means,
9:35 · because that stick has lots of different meanings in different contexts.
9:39 · It can mean "throw" or even "foreigner", depending on where it is.
9:44 · But no. In this case it's there because of the sound it makes,
9:47 · and these two other signs are confirming that.
9:50 · You might be thinking, "Hold on, that stick is the wrong side of the bird."
9:55 · And technically, yes it is,
9:57 · and I'm very impressed that you noticed.
9:59 · Ilona told me it was probably just an artistic choice by whoever inscribed this.
10:03 · Although, I have noticed some scribes like to put sticks next to the front of birds
10:07 · to make it look a bit like they're sitting on it.
10:09 · I don't know if that could be it.
10:11 · Maybe.
10:12 · But I digress.
10:14 · I now need to speak about something you'll no doubt have noticed
10:17 · and that's that r-b-t and m-tj-n, seem incomplete.
10:22 · We've missed off a load of the letters from the word, haven't we?. Why?
10:26 · Well, that is because hieroglyphic writing is a vowel free zone.
10:31 · Hieroglyphs generally only cover the consonants.
10:34 · Again, there are exceptions like the "ee" sound at the end of a name like Senbi,
10:39 · or the oo sound in Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid at Giza.
10:43 · But otherwise, they honestly aren't there.
10:47 · Like they aren't there in Metjen.
10:49 · So how do we know what these words sounded like then? Well…
10:55 · we don't.
10:56 · Not based on the hieroglyphs anyway.
10:58 · It's possible to get clues from later versions of the language, like Coptic.
11:01 · Or for the names of Kings, we can look at what people speaking other languages called them,
11:06 · but otherwise Egyptologists don't know for certain
11:08 · what the vowel sounds between the consonants actually were.
11:12 · Therefore, to enable them to make sense of the words before them,
11:14 · Egyptologists instead insert their own, I suppose, placeholder vowels.
11:19 · This usually involves just putting in an E or an eh sound in between the consonants.
11:23 · This is not meant to sound like ancient Egyptian,
11:26 · it's just supposed to help with the reading.
11:29 · But it means that a lot of our modern attempts at ancient Egyptian words have eh sounds in them
11:35 · where originally they potentially didn't.
11:37 · Take Metjen. His name might have been Metjen.
11:40 · But it might have been Matjin, Mutjan or Metjun.
11:45 · Nobody really knows.
11:46 · If somehow I managed to travel back in time to ancient Egypt, install myself as King
11:50 · perhaps by showing off my fancy CASIO watch
11:53 · And I died a regal death, the scribes might have written this above my tomb.
11:58 · And modern day Egyptologists would be calling me "Rebet".
12:03 · Rebet the First.
12:05 · By the way, how do you like my cartouche?
12:06 · The cartouche is the ring around my name.
12:10 · Having one is an honour reserved only for royal names.
12:13 · It was the realisation that the signs written within these easy-to-spot rings
12:17 · were the names of Pharaohs that was key to deciphering hieroglyphs.
12:21 · For example, on the Rosetta Stone researchers were able
12:23 · to cross-reference the signs in the cartouches
12:26 · with the names written in the Greek and Demotic versions.
12:30 · Pretty smart.
12:31 · Ilona actually spent a good period of her career with the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum.
12:36 · So let's get her help with understanding some more of the types of hieroglyphs
12:40 · other than the literal ones and the ones that represent sounds, as we've discussed.
12:45 · What others are there?
12:46 · We have signs that can represent an entire word
12:50 · or we have signs that we call classifiers,
12:54 · which means that it enhances the meaning of the group of hieroglyphs that precedes it.
13:00 · Now classifiers are really interesting.
13:03 · They're sometimes called determinatives too,
13:05 · but don't let the academic names put you off,
13:08 · they're one of my favourite aspects of hieroglyphic writing.
13:10 · What they do is give you a little hint as to what the word they're attached to means.
13:15 · This is way more useful than it sounds.
13:19 · If two "words" are otherwise identical, the classifier is going to help you tell them apart.
13:24 · So, imagine if we had two ways of writing "present".
13:28 · One where we put a little picture of a gift after it
13:31 · and another where we put a clock.
13:34 · You'd never be in any doubt as to which of the two meanings of present was meant by the word.
13:40 · Or a better example: say if we wrote one version of "bow" with a picture of a weapon,
13:45 · another with a picture of some clothing,
13:48 · and another with a picture of a person.
13:49 · You'd be able to tell apart a bow and arrow,
13:52 · a bow on a baby's booties,
13:53 · and a "bow", an action.
13:56 · And if we had another with a picture of a ship,
13:59 · you'd know we meant the bow of a boat.
14:02 · This is how classifiers work.
14:04 · Here's how they play out with hieroglyphs.
14:06 · The word for a scribe, somebody who writes,
14:10 · or the verb to write, or the noun, a book,
14:14 · uses the same core of letters, so it's the same stem of the word.
14:17 · The classifier will tell you what it is, which one of it.
14:21 · So the scribe will have a seated man.
14:24 · The verb will have the same stem.
14:27 · The book will have the classifier of the papyrus roll.
14:30 · So, if you start learning, if you start reading, you "sesh"
14:33 · Okay, it can be this, this, this, this.
14:35 · And then the classifier will tell you which one of those you have to choose.
14:39 · And it's particularly elegant that the classifier does give you a genuine hint.
14:43 · Even if you don't understand hieroglyphs, the idea that movement is expressed by two
14:47 · walking legs is a very easy one to relate to, isn't it?
14:50 · Yeah.
14:51 · Here are some more classifiers.
14:52 · This guy attached to a word tells you it relates to a god or a king.
14:57 · It often appears in Gods' names.
14:59 · And this tiny sparrow fella tells you that you're dealing with something small
15:05 · Or in fact, by extension, something bad,
15:09 · which seems harsh on sparrows.
15:11 · I like them
15:12 · So those are classifiers. They're kind of cool.
15:14 · Not that cool.
15:15 · That cool.
15:17 · Now where next? Well, there are a few things left to discuss.
15:20 · In fact "things" is an example of one of them.
15:24 · Let's talk about plurals.
15:25 · Now, we turn one into the many by sticking an -s or -es at the end of it, usually.
15:31 · But that is not how the ancient Egyptians did it.
15:35 · You see the round hieroglyph there?
15:36 · Yeah.
15:37 · Three times, the same hieroglyph usually means a plural.
15:41 · And the hieroglyph itself depicts a city.
15:44 · That's a city?
15:46 · Yes. So well, in the very simplified form that-
15:49 · It's abstract.
15:50 · It's very abstract. It's actually the main crossroads of a city,
15:53 · and cities were probably around.
15:55 · So tripling the sign is one way to make a plural.
15:58 · Another is more similar to our method of adding an S.
16:01 · You can be created by adding this guy, the quail chick.
16:07 · So, this is bird. The singular bird, despite the word itself already having two birds in it.
16:15 · To make that the plural birds, we can add the tiny quail.
16:19 · It's then also convention to add three little dashes to reinforce the plurality.
16:24 · And all together that's "birds".
16:28 · Sometimes the scribe won't bother with the quail and just do the three dashes,
16:31 · which makes sense to me.
16:33 · Ilona showed me an example.
16:35 · Here the plural is written with three vertical strokes rather than repeating the sign.
16:40 · It's quite a complicated sign, the scribal palette.
16:43 · So they were efficient by just indicating the plural with three strokes.
16:48 · So he was the head of the scribes of the temple to ḥw.t-nṯr n Imn.
16:52 · What Ilona's showing us there are cursive hieroglyphs. Handwritten ones.
16:56 · They're beautiful.
16:57 · This is an amazing papyrus.
17:00 · It's actually a religious text that helps the deceased live in the afterlife.
17:06 · And to have a long papyrus like this, the person must have been of very high status,
17:11 · must have been able to afford a text like this.
17:14 · But this is a very common scene where the heart of the deceased
17:17 · is weighed against the feather of Ma'at.
17:19 · A feather, of course, is very light, so your heart has to be very light.
17:23 · So it's a judgement scene.
17:25 · And if it's more heavy than the feather,
17:27 · then this monster will eat you.
17:29 · Eek.
17:30 · I could watch Ilona reading hieroglyphs all day.
17:33 · But instead, let's talk about a few extra features of them.
17:37 · One of them is that they have no punctuation.
17:41 · There are no little marks to tell you when one thought ends and another begins,
17:45 · nothing to encourage a pause for breath, or to flag up speech.
17:48 · There's no punctuation, period.
17:52 · Full stop.
17:53 · So no punctuation is one less thing to worry about, isn't it?
17:56 · However, one thing that you do have to worry about,
17:59 · that English doesn't have, is grammatical gender.
18:03 · You see, nouns can be masculine or feminine, like they can in French or Spanish.
18:09 · And you can spot the feminine ones because they have this cute little sign with them.
18:15 · It's a loaf of bread.
18:16 · So, I think that's all you need to get started on hieroglyphs.
18:19 · Shall we put what we've learned to the test by bringing back this from the very start?
18:23 · Are we ready to read it? I reckon we might be.
18:25 · So the bird and the jackaly fella, they're pointing to the left.
18:29 · So that means we start on the left.
18:32 · Our first sign is the reed, right. Which, as I told you earlier,
18:36 · represents a kind of "yuh" sound but it's written down as an i.
18:40 · It is a consonant i, like you sometimes find in Latin.
18:44 · Don't overthink it.
18:45 · Which sign next? Well, it's the water isn't it? Because we work top to bottom.
18:51 · And just as it did in Metjen's name, here it represents a nuh, an N.
18:56 · Next we've got the box. Remember I told you it was a stool or a mat?
19:00 · And that it makes a P sound.
19:03 · Then we have the quail chick. Now,
19:06 · we discussed how this could be a classifier meaning small or bad,
19:10 · but if it were a classifier it would be at the end. And It isn't.
19:15 · So it's here to represent its sound, which we earlier discussed was oo, like in Khufu.
19:21 · So, so far we have inpu.
19:24 · Interesting.
19:26 · So what's this final sign?
19:28 · Well, literally, it is a jackal perched atop a shrine,
19:32 · but it is also the hieroglyph used to represent Anubis.
19:37 · That's right, the jackal-headed guide to the underworld.
19:41 · Did you know that Anubis – or "anyoobis", however you pronounce it –
19:44 · was not actually his name?
19:47 · Well, not his Egyptian one, anyway.
19:49 · We took the word Anubis from the Greeks.
19:53 · We did the same with others like Osiris.
19:56 · When you think of it, they sound Greek, don't they?
19:59 · So what was Anubis's ancient Egyptian name?
20:03 · Well, it was…
20:06 · Inpu.
20:07 · Or at least, that's our best guess at it based upon these signs,
20:11 · because taken in their entirety what we have here are the hieroglyphs used
20:16 · by the Ancient Egyptians to represent Anubis.
20:20 · And look we did it.
20:21 · And I hope through all this you've seen that
20:23 · Egyptian hieroglyphs aren't quite as mysterious as they first appear.
20:27 · You know, it hasn't really been that long that we modern folk have been able to understand them.
20:31 · The Rosetta Stone was deciphered in 1822,
20:33 · which given how long ago ancient Egypt was, is pretty darn recent.
20:38 · Since that, of course, 200 years have passed and we are still working every day
20:42 · to try to understand the parts that we don't understand so well.
20:47 · And we still cannot read everything fluently, perfectly.
20:51 · So don't feel bad for not understanding every hieroglyph you see.
20:55 · As yet, nobody can.
20:58 · Thank you so much for watching.
20:59 · Enormous thanks to Ilona Regulski for all of her help
21:02 · and the Neues Museum for letting me poke around in here.
21:05 · Thanks to Babbel for sponsoring this video too.
21:07 · And if you liked this one,
21:09 · I recommend signing up to my totally free newsletter at robwords.com/newsletter,
21:15 · and then watch this video next
21:18 · and I'll see you over there.
21:20 · Take care.