Sacred Signs
Sacred Signs
Welcome to the SACRED SIGNS web-site.
This web-site is intended to provide further more detailed information and images to complement the text in Sacred Signs (also published as A Very Short Introduction to Egyptian Hieroglyphs), published by Oxford University Press in 2003.
It provides some pieces of text both on monuments and which have been published in books. The texts are worked through in the web-site in transliteration and translation or in translation in order to give a flavour of the originals and to expand upon the examples cited in Sacred Signs. For those who have some knowledge of Ancient Egyptian, it may be useful to use the texts as reading exercises. Some of the texts were created for the Liverpool University Reading Group between 2002 and 2004 and I am very grateful to my students there for their comments and questions regarding the texts.
The sections are organised according to the book:
Chapter 1: The Origins of Writing in Egypt
Chapter 2: Hieroglyphic Script and Egyptian Language
Chapter 3: Hieroglyphs and Art
Chapter 5: Hieratic and Documentation
Web-links have been provided where they are known, but it should be noted that for most of the texts on papyrus or ostraka, they are published in books which are difficult to obtain. The texts are therefore my transcriptions taken from the publications and with due acknowledgement to the scholars who worked upon those texts. If there are any texts which have escaped such acknowledgement, please inform me.
All images were taken by Penelope Wilson over the last twenty years and if there are any infringements upon copyright material, please inform me.
I would like to thank Dr Roger Dickinson for creating the web-site.