[new: PDF] What is a Hieroglyph? (with Stephen Houston) (original) (raw)

2020, in L’homme 233 (2020), p. 9-43. https://journals.openedition.org/lhomme/36526

The writing systems of the world vary by origin and development. Most descend from a few creations that, despite their shared origins, change in reaction to their progenitors. Over time, contrast and difference generate a whole series of new scripts, often as part of a process in which writing affirms and marks group identities (Houston & Rojas 2020). Almost all such scripts are line-or stroke-based ; if they ever did have a pictorial basis, it is now long gone, or at least far in the background. But a few scripts do exist that, throughout their history, have retained pictorial signs and a commitment to depicting things. These are the hieroglyphic systems. Alongside the preserved pictoriality of hieroglyphic signs-a major and deliberate cultural choice-we find a thorough integration of hieroglyphic writing with aesthetic culture. Like other scripts, hieroglyphic writing represents language, but it is also an encyclopedically dense mode of visual communication, at once inviting and exclusionary, and, at times, even virtuosic in its making and interpretation. Hieroglyphic signs do not just stand for linguistic values : they are inviolable things in their own right, implying a particular ontology and a capacity for performance. Although some of these properties are found in other types of scripts, hieroglyphic writing has them to a concentrated, intense degree.