Note 189 — APPENDIX The Influence of Mesopotamia on Egypt Towards the End of the Fourth Millennium B.C.[169]

We have shown that in early Mesopotamian script words sounding alike (e.g. “to live” and “arrow”) could be written with the same sign and the meaning clarified by the addition of determinatives which were not pronounced but indicated what kind of notion was rendered. In Egypt from the first we find the same devices in use. The hieroglyph depicting a rib can also be used to render the verb “to approach,” in which case two legs are added as a determinative. Just as in Mesopotamia the picture of the arrow became a phonetic sign for ti, so the Egyptian signs become phonetic signs. There is, however, a difference. In Mesopotamia both consonants and vowels were rendered by the sign. In Egypt the vowels were ignored, and only the consonantal skeleton of the word was rendered. This was natural to the Egyptians, because the consonants of their words remained constant while the vowels changed in the conjugation and declension (as with us the verb “to break” has in the past tense “he broke”). To turn to our example, the picture of the rib stood for spir when it meant rib, soper when it meant “to approach,” and so on. (This is the vocalization in Coptic, the latest stage of Egyptian which used the Greek alphabet and, therefore, wrote vowels.) The phonetic value of the sign of the rib is therefore spr. In this way the Egyptians adapted the notion of how language might be rendered (which they evidently got from Mesopotamia) to the peculiarities of their own language. I do not want to suggest that Egyptian necessarily calls for a script in which only the consonants are written. Scharff (loc. cit.), points out that Hebrew and Arabic developed in their punctuation a method of rendering the changing vocalization alongside the permanent consonantal skeleton of the words.