Archaeologists Find Earliest Monumental Egyptian Hieroglyphs

A team of archaeologists from Belgium, the United States and Egypt has uncovered some previously unknown rock inscriptions, which include 5,200-year-old Egyptian hieroglyphs, at the archaeological site of El-Khawy, near the ancient Egyptian city of Elkab.

The newly discovered panel of signs features images of a bull’s head on a short pole followed by two back-to-back saddlebill storks with a bald ibis bird above and between them. This arrangement of symbols is common in later Egyptian representations of the solar cycle and with the concept of luminosity. Image credit: Yale University.

The newly discovered panel of signs features images of a bull’s head on a short pole followed by two back-to-back saddlebill storks with a bald ibis bird above and between them. This arrangement of symbols is common in later Egyptian representations of the solar cycle and with the concept of luminosity. Image credit: Yale University.

“This newly discovered rock art site preserves some of the earliest — and largest — signs from the formative stages of the hieroglyphic script and provides evidence for how the ancient Egyptians invented their unique writing system,” said John Coleman Darnell, professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University.

Prof. Darnell and his colleagues from Yale, the Cinquantenaire Museum (Royal Museums of Art and History) in Brussels, Belgium, the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, and the Aswan and Edfu Inspectorates also discovered rock art depicting a herd of elephants that was carved between 4,000-3,500 BC.

“One of the elephants has a little elephant inside of it, which is an incredibly rare way of representing a pregnant female animal,” Prof. Darnell said.

The archaeologists also identified a panel of four signs, created circa 3,250 BC and written right to left — the dominant writing direction in later Egyptian texts — portraying animal images of a bull’s head on a short pole followed by two back-to-back saddlebill storks with a bald ibis bird above and between them.

The arrangement of symbols is common in later Egyptian representations of the solar cycle and with the concept of luminosity.

“These images may express the concept of royal authority over the ordered cosmos,” said Prof. Darnell, director of the Yale Egyptological Institute in Egypt and co-director of the Elkab Desert Survey Project (EDSP).

“This discovery isn’t new in the sense that this is the first time that anyone has seen these hieroglyphs; this is the first time that anyone has seen them on such a massive scale,” he said.

“These individual hieroglyphs each measure just over a half meter in height, and the entire tableau is 27.5 inches (70 cm) in height. Previously found signs were only one or two centimeters in size.”

“In the modern world this would be akin to seeing smaller text on your computer screen and then suddenly seeing very large ones made the same way only on a billboard.”

Prof. Darnell examines the hieroglyphs from atop a tall scaffold. Image credit: Yale University.

Prof. Darnell examines the hieroglyphs from atop a tall scaffold. Image credit: Yale University.

The area where the archaeologists located the inscriptions is in the northern desert hinterland of Elkab.

“This area, along with Hierakonpolis, located across the river and known as its twin city, were very important centers in ancient Egypt, and demonstrate that the communicative system in these areas is not limited to the more commonly found small tokens or labels,” Prof. Darnell said.

“These discoveries reveal that there was not a slow development of writing primarily for bureaucratic use as previously believed, but that hieroglyphic writing was more geographically widespread and topically diverse at the time of or shortly after its development.”

“This also suggests that there is a much more expansive use of the early writing system than is indicated from other surviving archaeological material.”

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