One moved on to examples of different Egyptian scripts including the lingua franca of diplomatic correspondence in ancient times, Akkadian. This language was used, 3,000 years ago, by the
diplomatic staff of powerful rulers throughout the Middle East.
Early examples of hieroglyphs began with a facsimile of the Narmer Palette and an early ivory label
of King Den, and moved to the ‘hidden meaning’ cryptograph. There followed inscribed examples of funerary statues, graffiti on ostraca, and hieroglyphs in architecture in the form of a magnificent
door lintel.
A section followed on the ‘Art of Writing’ with examples of demotic and hieratic, before continuing
with the "The Power of Writing as the Words of the Gods" and the importance of the scribe and
Thoth their god of script. The accompanying seven foot ‘Was’ sceptre, a symbol of authority, was
itself most impressive. So was the fine example of ‘taking credit’ in the form of a text created in
the name of Tutankhamun ‘taken over’ by Horemheb.
One moved next to ‘the Art of Writing’, descriptive of the life of a scribe (with particular examples
from Deir el Medina, and from there to a series of examples of Ancient Egyptian literature including
a papyrus with part of a famous Middle Kingdom text, ‘The Story of Sinuhe’ and a stela with a poetic composition.
Next followed examples of scripts developed from hieroglyphs including Meroitic from Kush (Nubia) and Proto-Sinaitic. The penultimate part was devoted to the cracking of other codes including Linear B and Maya with good examples of the text. The exhibition concluded, somewhat strangely, but no doubt with an eye to the Millennium, with reference to the Rosetta spacecraft to be launched early in the new era with the task of cracking the code of the building blocks of the universe.
It is of course the hieroglyphs of Ancient Egypt that still exert a fascination today. Newcomers to the subject can make a good start with the British Museum’s own publication by Mark Collier & Bill Manley,
"How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs", British Museum Press, 1998. For further information on the other subjects covered in the exhibition, there is "Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment"
by R Parkinson, British Museum Press, 1999. AE
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