V200 years ago, on September 14, 1822, the French scholar Jean-François Champollion had the crucial idea for deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. Until then, for almost a millennium and a half, nobody knew what to do with the enigmatic signs – and in the last centuries before that only a few priests: When Herodotus around 450 B.C. When he visited the pyramids, he no longer recognized hieroglyphs as writing, as he later wrote that “animals carved” could be seen on the stones there.
In fact, of the 700 or so hieroglyphs of Classical Middle Egyptian—the stage in which most Pharaonic texts survive—122 depict zoologically more or less identifiable animals, not counting the 76 characters in the form of humans and non-animal gods are. By the way, most animal hieroglyphs depict birds.
In the kingdom of rush and papyrus
And where are the plants? There are those too. A total of 47 hieroglyphs are based on elements of vegetation, but only about half of them can be seen directly as a plant model. That sounds puny, but on the other hand, agriculture was already being practiced comparatively intensively in the Nile Valley at the turn of the third millennium BC, when the Egyptians began to write. One is tempted to speculate as to whether the botanical diversity of species was not that great back then.
“Scha” or the lotus pond
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Image: Gardiner Egyptian Grammar (1927)
“Scheschen” or the lotus flower
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Image: Gardiner Egyptian Grammar (1927)
In fact, only four botanical hieroglyphs are not inspired by a typical crop. They show the water lily Nymphaea cerulea, also known as the blue lotus. Sometimes it is the flower, sometimes the bud, then a leaf with a stem and finally a stylized pond with several flowers. This latter hieroglyph was quite important. And not only because its phonetic value “scha” was also the word for such an ornamental pond and thus for an indispensable element of elevated ancient Egyptian horticulture, but above all because it also referred to an entire season, namely the decisive one for the country in which the Nile burst its banks and spread its fertilizing mud over the fields.
The rush reads “su” and the papyrus stands for “ta mehu” or “land in the north”.
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Image: Gardiner Egyptian Grammar (1927)
One of the most commonly used hieroglyphs also has something to do with the Nile and its flora. It represents a reed leaf and has the phonetic value of a long “i”. In Middle Egyptian, this is not just any phoneme, but one with central grammatical functions, which also appears in important verbs, such as “come”, “bring” and – the pharaonic state was a bureaucracy – “count” and “control”. Two other hieroglyphic plants were also of almost state-supporting importance: the rush and the papyrus. The hieroglyph in the form of a rush existed in a simple and flowering form, also known by some Egyptologists as “sedge”, and symbolized Upper Egypt, i.e. the Nile valley between Aswan and modern-day Cairo. The papyrus, on the other hand, stood for Lower Egypt, i.e. the Nile Delta. Together these two regions were “taui”, “the two lands” and it was control over both that made an Egyptian ruler a real pharaoh. Historically, however, the unification of the empire was probably not a union at eye level, but a connection of the once wilder north to the south, which seemed more civilized, i.e. to the land of the bulrush. This is reflected in the word the ancient Egyptians themselves had for their king, writing using said hieroglyph: ‘nisut’, literally He who belongs to the rush.