"The ancient Egyptian script was first deciphered during the colonial period, when Egypt was under the occupation of Western powers. The European world has long admired, yet often misunderstood, ancient Egyptian culture, partly due to its distinctiveness in spite of its linguistic proximity to other Semitic and African languages. The complexity of the script made it difficult for scholars of the time to fully grasp the visual and phonetic dimensions of this pictorial writing, as well as the vast expressive possibilities it offered to those who were proficient in using it. Remedying this gap, this new volume elegantly explains and highlights the visual potential of Egyptian scripts. Its twenty-three articles shed light on the creativity, innovation, and freedom exercised by ancient Egyptian writers and scribes, revealing how intimately each text is connected to its creator and how it reflects their individual perception of the text’s meaning, both visually and semantically. This book is a must-read for Egyptologists and for anyone interested in the visual culture of ancient Egyptian scripts and texts." - Fayza Haikal, The American University in Cairo.“The footprint a civilization leaves behind is its culture. The crown jewel of Ancient Egypt is its sacred writing system, the hieroglyphs, the key to its monumental culture. This book is a milestone, offering a new angle of research in Egyptology by incorporating Aesthetics, in a rigorous way, in the methodology. Hieroglyphs were not just superbly engineered, they were an art form bridging the sacred and the profane. They were the precious liquid that espoused the vessel’s form, be it the human mind, or the minds of the gods.” - Yves A. Champollion, Wordfast LLC, Paris.“As the modern decipherer of hieroglyphs and founding father of Egyptology, Jean-François Champollion, already underlined in his seminal Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens Égyptiens in 1824, “the art of writing in ancient Egypt was fundamentally linked to the art of painting.” To be more precise and quote the late Jan Assmann, one of the most influential Egyptologists of these last decades, “Hieroglyphics were a matter of art, not of normal writing.” Indeed, by their very figurative nature, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs are one of the most artistic writing systems ever invented in human history. This suggests that the real experts in hieroglyphs in ancient Egypt were artists, or literate artists, rather than scribes, or simple and mere scribes. The artistic nature and implications of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs have often been underestimated and hence underinvestigated but anyone interested in this fundamental aspect of ancient Egyptian writing systems will find new avenues of research, new questions and new answers in Visual Aesthetics of Ancient Egyptian Writing. In a very stimulating way, this book gathers various contributions on the subject from well-known and established experts, as well as from younger scholars who more recently embarked on this fascinating and fruitful research trail.” - Dimitri Laboury, University of Liège, Belgium.“The present volume offers a much-needed precis of current research into the fascinating intersection of ancient Egyptian art and writing. The selection of papers covers a wide range of topics that offer new insights into old questions, with particular emphasis on the visual and performative aspects of phonetic signs and determinatives (classifiers) as polysemic icons, which invite the reader/viewer to engage the texts on multiple levels. In a similar vein, the various papers also challenge scholars to move beyond the foundations of traditional philology, with its focus on surface grammar and translation, in order to grapple with a deeper and more nuanced grammar of culture. This volume constitutes an essential addition to the library of anyone interested in the aesthetics ancient Egyptian writing systems and will provide invaluable comparative material for similar work in the other logo-syllabic scripts of antiquity.” - Joshua Aaron Roberson, University of Memphis, USA.“Hieroglyphs were deciphered just over two hundred years ago. But that was just the start! There is so much to this complex, pictorial script, much of it taking us well beyond the nature of our own alphabetic script(s). This volume comprises a wide-ranging, innovative set of contributions investigating the aesthetic, cognitive and socio-cultural dimensions of the script within and beyond its linguistic usage. It provides a platform for a new wave of inter-disciplinary research ranging from the art historical to the semiotic and beyond.” - Mark Collier, University of Liverpool, UK.“Common graphic ideologies view writing primarily as a secondary code fulfilling its function in the ideally transparent representation of language: writing working best when effacing itself. This volume challenges such ideologies and demonstrates how ancient Egyptian writing is part of a broader aesthetic culture and there to be seen and experienced in its full presence. Much cultural knowledge is embedded in ancient Egyptian writing, making this a major heuristic to cultural and material representations that are not easily accessed otherwise. A written text can be crafted in ways that vastly transcend the words it represents: with a visual rhetoric of its own and to express additional layers of meaning, to create spaces, and, not least, to elicit pleasure with a strong impact on the senses of the beholder. Beyond the limited explicit metadiscourse on ancient Egyptian writing, a rich implicit metadiscourse is given in regular and extended practices of writing themselves. The difficult question can thus be asked: what did the visual aspects of writing mean to the ancient actors themselves? In addressing ancient practices that clearly challenge alphabetistic ideologies of writing, the volume also invites reconsidering whether such graphic ideologies are a good fit for the alphabet itself.” - Andréas Stauder, École Pratique des Hautes Études - PSL, Paris.
