Egyptian Hieratic

David Grant Stewart, Sr.

I can not find anyone who has a clue what is meant by "reformed Egyptian" (Mormon 9:32, 1 Nephi 1:2.) It is nothing more or less than old Hebrew written using Egyptian Hieratic characters for brevity. This explains why Arabic, which we would assume to be the descendant of ancient Egyptian hieratic, is nothing of the sort. It is Hebrew written in hieratic. "Reformed Egyptian" is nothing more nor less than an early form of what we know today as Arabic.

Although there have been great changes over the four thousand years of its existence, it is still not difficult to demonstrate that modern Arabic script is the direct descendant of what we call Egyptian hieratic. The following Arabic characters are all identical or very close to their hieratic ancestors with exactly the same sounds: J, D, T, K, Q, R, H, F, S, in addition to all of the numerals, which with slight transposition come directly from ancient Egyptian hieratic.

Here are some examples demonstrating the direct descent of Arabic letters from the Egyptian hieratic. In each case, two Arabic characters are presented so that you can see the true shape of the letter, i.e. without the final flourish.

The Arabic T تت and Hieratic T t are identical, merely facing opposite directions. The little raised part on the far right of the Arabic is the initial T.

The Arabic letter B بب is likewise the same shape but the opposite direction, and much smaller, than the Hieratic B b. A dot is put under the Arabic B to distinguish it from the Arabic T.

The ancient Egyptian RZH sound r is preserved in the Arabic J جج which is identical, but facing the opposite direction. Once again, two such letters must be typed to show one in combined form.

The Arabic S سس is identical to the Hieratic S z, except that it has three vertical lines instead of two.

The Arabic W و, was taken directly from hieroglyphic A, which was proportionately smaller in the hieroglyphs as و is in Arabic compared to other letters. It is exactly the same character used in exactly the same way.

An interesting character in Arabic is the ه which is used precisely as the M in Egyptian. Both carry the sound H, and the Arabic ه as you can see is simply an abbreviation of the M by preserving only the top loop. And in both Egyptian and Arabic, in the final position the character can carry the sound of TH. Remember Japheth UKM, which Egyptologists misread as the Hebrew word גרך GEREKH, “stranger”?

The Arabic F ف is essentially the same as the F in Hieratic f. Of course it is irrelevant that the Arabic flourish always goes up and the Hieratic has no flourish.

The Arabic letter ع is identical to the Hieratic m, turned the other way as always. The original sound was a nasal, represented by NG and GN, at the end or beginning of a syllable, respectively. When we say “sing” we do not actually pronounce the N, we simply nasalize it. The Greeks preserve this character with their double gamma γγ as in αγγελος, ANGELOS, a messenger. Anyway, the Egyptians preserved this as an M, and the Arabs have preserved this as a respectful grunt. The Hebrews have the same letter in ע, but they have forgotten altogether what it sounded like so the Hebrews maintain a deferential silence in memoriam of a sound that has altogether died out of their language.

I think the point is made, so I’ll close this note with the fact that the light H sound in Arabic أ is identical to the light H sound in Egyptian hieratic, H.

Many Hindis are descended from the ancient Egyptians. This explains the prevalence of the family name "Gupta" among them. The word “Gupta” is Egyptian. Remember "Egyptus" which signifies "that which is forbidden?" (Abraham 1:23). It is more obvious in the Greek, AEGUPTOS = AE alpha privative (signifying absence or negation), GUPTOS, given, permitted, allowed.

It also explains why the Devanagari/Sanskrit script in which Hindi is written is nothing more than a modified Egyptian hieratic. The Hindis rotated the characters 90° and drew a horizontal line over most of them.

Our numbering notation, which we call Arabic, is nothing of the sort. Its ancestry is: English < Arabic < Persian < Hindi < Egyptian.

Consider this:

Egyptian hieroglyphic: to weep: KI! REM

Sanskrit or Hindi: to weep repeatedly: YeM YeMfM REM-REM

The similarity of the Slavic languages and Sanscrit is incredible. Countless examples could be given, but consider just one:

Bulgarian earthy, earthly: земенъ ZEMEN

Sanskrit or Hindi earth, land: jmon ZAMIN

In the original hieratic writing system, every character was custom composed to depict the desired meaning. That is why even the Middle Kingdom scribes and priests were unable to read hieratic without special training. Nevertheless, a generic hieratic font is useful for talking to scholars on their own terms. But before I am finished, I will have to get into assembly language to the point that I can compose my own hieratic font. Each character must be custom assembled at the time, and the software must permit that.

Jim Loy has provided an excellent web page for you to learn Egyptian hieratic in just a few minutes. His brilliant piece of work is at http://home.prcn.org/sfryer/Hieratic/lesson1.html

The book Writing Late Egyptian Hieratic, by Sheldon Lee Gosline, Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, Indiana, 1999, is remarkable in that it actively acknowledges the long overdue recognition that Chinese characters have much in common with Hieratic, but even there not as much is recognized in common as should be. Until it is recognized that both Chinese and Hieratic characters were originally custom composed and that each stroke had its own matrix of meanings, neither old Chinese nor old Hieratic will be correctly read. As recent as this book is, it still has no decent Hieratic font; all the characters are written in very low resolution dot matrix printing and are much harder to read than had they simply been handwritten. Otherwise, the book would have been an excellent tutorial.