Ancient Egypt Hieroglyphs — Contemporary Reading for Fresh Ideas in Art
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31866/2410-1915.24.2023.287659Keywords:
hieroglyphs, artistic properties, aesthetic experience, living cultural heritage, correspondence of artsAbstract
The aim of this article is to rationalise emotional, intellectual and aesthetic impact of Egyptian hieroglyphs through their examination with the research tools of the aesthetics as an academic discipline and its related sciences. Their evocative power made them possess the property of life, resulting in attributing the ancient Egyptian writing with the power of storing a universal sagacity. The latter is suggested as both a rationale and an outcome of every creative process to which the art of hieroglyphs seems to invite. Results. Nevertheless, through taking a down-to-earth stand for a methodological choice we aim to be reconnected with techniques of making a single hieroglyph and getting insight into conceptual principles of tying them in rows of a text that generate intentional ancient meaning to be decoded and delighted through present day lens. Scientific novelty. The study tries to establish a new both bond and relationship between the signifier and the signified to allow contemporary reading of the ancient signs that could bridge modern man with their Ancient Egypt ancestors. Following Ferdinand de Saussure’s exposition of the semiotic nature of the symbolisation process it opens an investigation into ways the modern mind can bear new meaning that will substitute the extinct signified in relation to the compelling ancient signifier a single hieroglyph is. Conclusions. Adhering to a formal scrutiny of the outer form of an ideogram in the first place, we intend to both challenge and inform contemporary art with strongly symbolic nature of ancient Egypt thought and spirituality that yielded those polysemous signs created with extremely sublime logic of artistic wisdom and craft. A nonrandom and revealing interchange between logics and aesthetics suggests the given art form can bring to light some strict and invariant rational laws that constituted it.
References
Betrò, M. C. (1996). Hieroglyphics: The Writing of Ancient Egypt. Abbeville Press [in English].
Beziau, J.-Y. (Ed.). (2017, January 10–12). The Arbitrariness of the Sign in Question [Proceedings of the seminar]. College Publications [in English].
Bocheński, J. I. M. (2016). Logika [Logic]. Salwator [in Polish].
Dassow, E. von (Ed.). (1998). The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day (R. O. Faulkner & O. Goelet, Trans.; 2nd ed.). Chronicle Books [in English].
Forceville, C. (2008). Metaphor in pictures and multimodal representations. In W. Raymond, & Jr. Gibbs (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought (pp. 462–482). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511816802.028 [in English].
Gardiner, A. (1957). Egyptian Grammar Being an Introduction to the Study of Hieroglyphs (3rd ed.). Griffith Institute [in English].
Goodman, N. (1976). Languages of Arts. Hackett. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350928541 [in English].
Hagen, R.-M., & Hagen, R. (2007). Egyptian Art. Taschen [in English].
Ikram, S., & Dodson, A. (1998). The Mummy in Ancient Egypt. Thames and Hudson [in English].
Imhausen, A. (2016). Mathematics in ancient Egypt: A contextual history. Princeton & Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691117133.001.0001 [in English].
Janson, H. W. (1979). Egyptian Art. In History of Art (pp. 51–65). Thames and Hudson [in English].
Katan, N. J., & Mintz, B. (1987). Hieroglyphs: The writing of ancient Egypt. British Museum Publications [in English].
Regulski, I. (2022). Hieroglyphs: Unlocking ancient Egypt. British Museum [in English].
Royal Symbols. (n.d.). Canadian Museum of History. Retrieved March 17, 2023 from https://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/civil/egypt/egcgov5e.html [in English].
Saussure, F. de (1972). Course in General Linguistics. Payot [in English].
Wildung, D. (2009). Egyptian Art in Berlin: Masterpieces in the Bodemuseum and in Charlottenburg. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin [in English].
Xiran, R., Miaozi, H., Xianbo, M., Deshan, R., & Xiran, R. (Eds.). (2010). A Canon of Chinese Characters. Contemporary World Press [in English].
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish in this journal agree to the following terms:
1) The authors reserve the right to the authorship of their work and transfer to the journal the right to first publish this work under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows others to freely distribute the published work with a mandatory reference to the authors of the original work and the first publication of the work in this journal.
2) The authors have the right to enter into independent additional agreements for non-exclusive distribution of the work in the form in which it was published by this journal (for example, to place the work in the electronic repository of the institution or to publish it as part of a monograph), provided that the reference to the first publication of the work in this journal is maintained.
3) The journal's policy allows and encourages authors to post their manuscripts on the Internet (for example, in institutional repositories or on personal websites) both before submitting the manuscript to the editorial board and during its editorial processing, as this contributes to the emergence of a productive scientific discussion and has a positive effect on the efficiency and dynamics of citation of published work (see The Effect of Open Access).