[184]Our [Fig. 48] shows the impressions of these round timbers in the brick work of the White Temple at Erech, of which [Fig. 45] shows the plan. [Fig. 49] shows a wooden sarcophagus found in a First Dynasty tomb at Tarkhan in Egypt, which imitates a recessed building with a similar strengthening of round timbers. [Fig. 50] shows an actual tomb found at Abu Roash in Lower Egypt with some timbers still in place.
[185]The Egyptian designs (Figs. [42], [44] left, [43]) are supposed to render a palace façade, an assumption incapable of proof and ignoring the fact that the tombs have recesses on all four sides. But whatever the original of this design may have been, its abbreviated rendering in Egypt resembles an abbreviated rendering of temples in Mesopotamia ([Fig. 44] right) very closely.
[186]At Abydos three of these, perhaps built under the Second Dynasty, survive. See Petrie, Abydos, III (London, 1904), Plates V-VIII.
[187]Scharff, Archaeologische Beiträge zur Frage der Entstehung der Hieroglyphenschrift (München, 1942).
[188]See Kingship and the Gods, 20 and 350, n. 15.
[189]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.
Some of the phonetic signs of Egyptian consist of only one consonant. In a discussion concerned with Egyptian writing there would be no reason why they should be mentioned in particular, since they do not differ in principle from the other signs. But in a wider historical context the signs with the value of a single consonant are of unique importance: they seem to be the distant ancestors of the alphabet.
[190]Petrie, Royal Tombs, I, Plate 19, No. 11.
[191]Scharff, op. cit., 55.
[192]Some features of Mesopotamian civilization remain almost unaltered during the Protoliterate period, hence it is very important that the Egyptian links can be proved to derive from the latter part, which is known to be a time of expansion in any case. The evidence for the synchronization of the rise of Dynasty I in Egypt with the later part of the Protoliterate period in Mesopotamia consists of three groups: