Fruhagyptisches Worterbuch.

• Author: Depuydt, Leo
• Position: Book review

Fruhagyptisches Worterbuch: Fascicle 3, h-h. By JOCHEM KAHL, with the assistance of Markus Bretschneider and Barbara Kneissler. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2004. Pp. 281-376. [euro] 42 (paper).

History by definition begins when writing first emerges. What precedes is prehistory. The matter would seem simple enough. Yet, pinpointing the start of ancient Egyptian history is not. The problem is the nature of earliest hieroglyphic writings. The question is whether they count as history. It is now widely agreed that the earliest manifestations of the hieroglyphic script date back to as early as roughly 3300 B.C.E. Tomb U-j at Umm el-Qaab near Abydos, which is being excavated by the German Archaeological Institute, has been a treasure trove of earliest writing (see G. Dreyer, Umm el-Qaab, I: Das pradynastische Konigsgrab U-j und seine fruhen Schriftzeugnisse [Mainz, 1998]). This earliest evidence has come to light only fairly recently. Its emergence has caused something of a stir. It appears to make Egypt's history into the earliest of all, antedating Mesopotamia's. The matter remains sub iudice. But can these earliest hieroglyphs be defined as history?

For several centuries, until roughly 2600/2500 B.C.E., the hieroglyphic script did not serve to write what may properly be called texts. Little in these first seven to eight centuries of hieroglyphic writing looks like verb forms or sentences. Very often, one cannot even recognize distinct words. Much has remained indecipherable to the present day. Then, all at once, full-fledged texts appear at the start of the Fourth Dynasty. The period 3300-2600/2500 B.C.E. is not quite prehistory, but nor is it quite history. It is a kind of twilight zone. Perhaps one might call it Egypt's protohistory. "Proto-" conveniently evokes the notion that the written evidence is not sufficiently comprehensible to be called historical in the full sense. Kahl describes the evidence as Fruhagyptisch, "Early Egyptian." The search was for a term denoting a stage of Egyptian that precedes so-called Old Egyptian. The reasonable assumption is that the language differed in those early centuries. But hardly anything of this difference seems recognizable.

Protohistoric hieroglyphic writing is something of an enigma. There is no reason to doubt that Egyptians spoke in fully formed sentences at that time. Then why not also write them? Was Egypt waiting several hundred years for an anonymous genius to perfect writing so that it...