12.5: Alphabetic Versus Logographic Scripts
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In Chapter 6 of his Interpretation of Dreams , Sigmund Freud imagines dreams as languages containing both alphabetic scripts and pictographic ones. Discussing “the Dream-Work”, he writes:
The dream-thoughts and the dream-content are presented to us like two versions of the same subject-matter in two different languages. Or, more properly, the dream-content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression... The dream-thoughts are immediately comprehensible, as soon as we have learnt them. The dream-content, on the other hand, is expressed as it were in a pictographic script, the characters of which have to be transposed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts... (Freud 1954: 277).
Freud’s metaphor of two different dream-languages rides not on how the language of dreams is spoken, but how it is written: the same subject matter is being described first in an everyday script, second in a pictographic one. Ptolemaios’ bilingual letter is in some ways a bizarre realization of Freud’s dream-script: in order to describe his dream, Ptolemaios shifts from an alphabetic script (Greek), to another, non-alphabetic form of writing (Demotic Egyptian). Although Demotic is a not a pictographic script, it is derived from one (early hieroglyphs), and the way in which it was written was fundamentally different from Greek. In this section of this chapter, I will consider Ptolemaios’ language-shift vis-à-vis the actual movements of writing. After analyzing two words from the papyrus (one Greek, one Demotic), I will consider the alphabetic and logographic scripts in terms of the painting-versus-writing spectrum discussed above, only now in terms of picture-versus-script. If there is a sliding scale between word and picture (as some Egyptian trilingual decrees suggest), Greek and Demotic may have been perceived at different points on that scale.
Greek is an alphabetic script while Demotic was derived from earlier hieroglyphs and thus was something rather different. From original pictograms, hieroglyphs evolved into a much more complex script which was able to represent sounds as well as ideas. The script even developed an alphabet of sorts which could clarify the meaning of certain words and supplement the Egyptian vocabulary with loan words and foreign names. But one must be clear about this ‘alphabet’: Demotic’s alphabetic elements never formed an alphabet in the Greek sense, learned front-to- back at the beginning of school. It was never an alphabet which — like the Periodic Table — could break down any word of the known world into its natural elements. Indeed, an Egyptian person (before the invention of Coptic) could never have constructed a sublime alphabetic concept like ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’. Thus, although there was something of an alphabet in Demotic, it was used as more of an auxiliary tool than the fundamental basis of the written language. What makes Demotic interesting for this dream letter is its logographic aspect — so the distinction between alphabetic and logographic is worth outlining in closer detail here.
On the fragment of papyrus where the shift between Greek and Egyptian scripts can actually be seen ( Figure 1 ), the first three lines are written in Greek. To take an example from these lines is the Greek word ‘ kalên ’ which means ‘fine, beautiful’: in order to write ‘ kalên ’ Ptolemaios needed to write a kappa which he smoothly linked to an alpha , and then to a lambda ; after a new break with the eta , he finished with the nu . In ‘ kalên ’ each of the five letters is its own self-standing element — that is, when Ptolemaios finished the strokes required to write the kappa , he proceeded on to the alpha , and so forth (cf. Johnston, this volume). In Demotic it is quite different: to take an example from the letter one can see the word ‘~ remetch ’ which means ‘man’. In Demotic it is written as , The word is two syllables, but is all that needs to be written: it simply means ‘man’, and there are no smaller elements into which it can be divided. To write this logographic word in the Greek alphabet would require nine letters ( anthrôpos ). Of course, ‘ ’ is an unusually simple word for Demotic as far as writing is concerned and usually many more strokes are required, but a simple example is useful here. When Ptolemaios dragged the reed pen across the page to write Greek, the telos of his writing can be placed not at the level of the word but that of the letter (or perhaps the syllable, cf. Cribiore 1996: 40–42): here he pulls the stroke downward to make the spine of a kappa , and here he has finished the kappa and moved onto the alpha . Each motion of the pen is teleologically driven not by the word but by the alphabetic letter. But with the Demotic word , where is the telos? Here Ptolemaios drags the line downwards to create the spine of what? At what point has he reached some sort of half-way point, like a ‘ rem ’ or a ‘ metch ’? At no point. Not until the whole word, the whole image is complete is there any sense of resolution or finality.
One might envision a spectrum between image and alphabet, drawing and writing. Although neither of these scripts, Greek nor Egyptian, provide actual pictures, if one considers such scripts on a sliding scale (from writing to drawing) would the two scripts be located at different points? For the former, the motions of the pen find their telos in an alphabetic letter, for the latter the motions can find no other telos than the ‘man’ himself standing before the writer’s eyes ‘ ’. It may seem like a minor point but it is an important one: the script mediates the relationship between (literate) persons and their language. Certain ideas, anxieties, and creative possibilities are simply not available to a Greek writer but available to an Egyptian (and vice versa) for no reason other than their scripts. When one turns to Demotic’s predecessor script, Hieroglyphs, some of these script-based thoughts can be inferred. Penelope Wilson writes of the Pyramid Texts of Dynasty 5 inside the burial chambers of kings Teti and Pepi I where animal hieroglyphs were individual- ally mutilated (Wilson 2003: 71): “The animal signs were written without legs, birds had their heads cut off, knives were inserted into the bodies of snakes or crocodiles, human figures were drawn incomplete, etc.”, in the fear that these hieroglyphic images would come to life and threaten the dead person in his or her eternity. Is such a fear possible for a Greek, or for anyone with an alphabetic script? Alphabetic scripts have their own use of damnatio memoriae , but the fear of the word can never be realized in such a way that the words qua images become the animals they appear to be. Egyptian, at least in hieroglyphic form (which again is the ancestor of the Demotic script), is rooted in a visuality which an alphabetic script cannot attain. Furthermore, this visuality is both conscious and manipulated in that sliding scale between words and art. For example, in Egyptian there are a number of so-called ‘determinatives’ — pictures which clarify visually a word’s meaning (note the ͼ determinative to the left of the central tear in Figure 6 ). If one can imagine English being written not with an alphabet but ‘Egyptianly’, determinatives would make it easier to differentiate between two homophonic words such as the verb ‘to bear’ and the animal ‘a bear’. By adding a determinative — a little picture of a bear next to one word and a picture of a person carrying something next to the other — the homophones can be distinguished. These are clearly visual elements of writing. But what is interesting is that these elements were not just passively received as a natural part of writing and reading but were often actively played with in ‘art’ (used in a non-westernizing general sense; cf. Baines 1989). For example, there are a number of Egyptian pictures and sculptures with inscriptions bearing words without determinatives — a grammatically unusual feature. Why is this so? Because the picture or the sculpture itself also functions as one giant determinative for the inscription’s ‘ungrammatical’ word. Rather than writing a determinative of a man or woman, the composer of the inscription used the sculpture as script, as the determinative (cf. Wilson 2003: 68–83). This is an entirely different ‘art of writing’, in that the boundaries between art and writing — much stricter in alphabetic scripts — become permeable to the extent that it is difficult to locate exactly where the writing stops and the mimetic visual art begins (cf. Baines 1985; 1989; 1994).
In contrast, alphabets, although less amenable to certain kinds of visual play, allow for possibilities that logographic scripts cannot have. Not just expressions like ‘I am the Alpha and Omega’ or a feeling for the divisibility of the written world into its constituent elements (in Greek, stoikhea can mean both ‘letters’ and ‘physical elements’), but alphabetic scripts give rise to their own sorts of games or delusions. The 2 nd -century CE Greek writer Athenaeus (10.453c) reports an ‘Alphabetic Tragedy’ written by the comic playwright Callias in 5th-century BCE Athens — probably produced shortly after Athens’ alphabet reform in 403 BCE (Slater 2002). In the play, the members of the Chorus are individual letters and the songs they sing consist of letters combining into syllables: a familiar school exercise for literate Greeks (for early alphabet education, cf. Cribiore 1996: 37–40). It seems like it would be dreadful to listen through every single syllabic combination (e.g. ‘ beta alpha ba ’ or ‘ gamma alpha ga’ , etc.) but since it was set to tragic music and probably a tragic parody, it must have been at least mildly amusing. But what is important here is that this Greek fixation on sound and elemental combinations could not have had the same force for an Egyptian — for even though Egyptians, too, could ‘spell out’ sounds, much of the logographic aspect of their script stood beyond alphabetic elements in a realm of pure visuality.
It may be argued that graphical boundaries ought not be so starkly drawn, since if one only reads a little further in Athenaeus (10.454a–f) visual aspects of the Greek alphabet can be found. Athenaeus quotes three scenes (from Euripides’ Theseus , Agathon’s Telephus , and a play of Theodektos) where an illiterate man ( agrammatos ) describes an inscription to someone else (inscriptions of the name ‘Theseus’). Since the man is illiterate he can only describe what the letters look like — e.g. a ‘Scythian bow’ or a ‘lock of hair’ which would represent a sigma . But it must be emphasized that this is a playfully staged experience of illiteracy, not reading. The letter sigma has nothing to do with these objects, and this is part of the dramatist’s game. But logograms, although they, too, are not pictograms, still function on that plane of visuality that alphabets do not: the image is the word. To read Greek in the way that these illiterate characters do is to misread and to misunderstand the basics of letters forming syllables. This foreign way of reading is what is being staged in these three plays as an emphasis on how unusual it is to locate such a visual dimension in Greek.
Regarding the particular case study of this chapter, when Ptolemaios wrote the line “ aigyptisti de hypegrapsa, hopôs akribôs eidêis ”, what precisely did he mean? There are two points of pressure in translating this Greek sentence in this particular context, two points where a reader might play with translation. The first is this verb ‘ hypegrapsa ’ a compound of the verb ‘ graphein ’: on the one hand, it can mean ‘to write’, on the other it can mean ‘to paint, draw’. The second is this verb ‘ eidêis ’: on the one hand it means ‘to know’, on the other it can mean ‘to see’. In other words, if one wanted to be perverse, one could translate the sentence as “I have sketched out below in Egyptian, in order that you see accurately”. This is, of course, not what Ptolemaios had in mind but it raises the question: where exactly does Egyptian lie on that spectrum of meanings for graphein , where between writing and painting? When Akhilles read the Demotic part of the letter, did he change positions on this hypothetical scale of reading versus seeing? When compared to Greek, one can perceive a heightened visuality between Egyptian logograms and alphabetic permutations.
But it may be questioned ‘perceivable to whom’? Who would consider one script more ‘visual’ than another, and who would consider ‘visuality’ as a criterion for scriptural hierarchy? Ancient testimony is scarce for Greek views of Demotic or vice versa. Although a number of Greeks discuss Egyptian scripts — Herodotus (2.36), Diodorus Siculus (3.3), Chairemon (fragment 12), Clement of Alexandria ( Strom . 5.4), Horapollo, etc. — their understanding is far from the bilingualism suggested by this letter. Furthermore, it is one thing to consider hieroglyphs’ relationship to an alphabetic script, and quite another to consider a much later cursive descendant of those hiero- glyphs (i.e. Demotic). For that reason, in the next section, I would like to turn briefly to compara- tive evidence: another alphabetic script (English) coming into contact with another hieroglyphic descendant (Chinese). This comparandum will be helpful for observing the ways in which scriptural hierarchies construct themselves and how such hierarchies of visuality become articulated (especially when the original hieroglyph is no longer recognizable, as in Demotic and Chinese.) Possibilities emerge of how Ptolemaios might have subjectively experienced these two scripts, Greek and Egyptian, whether he experienced them as fundamentally different, and whether he allotted primacy to one or the other.