Charles S. Peirce's Egyptological Studies

483

TRANSACTIONS OF THE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETY

Vol. 52, No. 4 (2016) • doi: 10.2979/trancharpeirsoc.52.4.01


Abstract

The paper gives a survey and presents a

critical analysis of Peirce’s studies in Egyp-

tology from 1885 to 1904, as documented

mainly in MSS 1227, 1228, 1244, and

1294. It examines Peirce’s studies and

advances in the language and script of Phar-

aonic Egypt as well as his assessments of

the scientific achievements of the Ancient

Egyptians. Among the linguistic topics in

focus are Peirce’s assumptions concern-

ing the iconicity of hieroglyphic writing,

his conjectures on the origins of indexi-

cal words from nouns, and his hypotheses

concerning the proximity of Ancient Egyp-

tian to the ursprache of humans. The paper

traces some of Peirce’s hypotheses concern-

ing the structure of Egyptian to his fun-

damental assumptions about iconicity and

indexicality in language. Altogether, Peirce

was not only very familiar with the state

of the art of contemporary Egyptology, but

he also achieved a remarkable competence

of the Egyptian language and its hiero-

glyphic writing. While some of Peirce’s

insights into the language and civilization

of the Ancient Egyptians are still tenable,

others reflect certain misinterpretations of

the scholarship of his time, which call for

correction in light of the state of the art of

today’s Egyptology.

Keywords: Charles S. Peirce, Ancient Egypt,

Egyptology, history of science, hieroglyphs,

iconicity in language, origins of indexical

words, ursprache.

1. Introduction

In his Lowell Lectures on “Some Topics of

Logic,” Lecture VIII of 1903, Charles S.

T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 52 Number 4484

Peirce, looking back at his career as a historian of science, declared the

following:

On five occasions in my life, and on five occasions only, I have had an

opportunity of testing my Abductions about historical facts, by the

fulfillment of my predictions in subsequent archeological or other

discoveries; and on each one of those five occasions my conclusions,

which in every case ran counter to that of the highest authorities,

turned out to be correct. The last two cases were these. Prof. Petrie

published a history of Egypt in which he treated the first three dynas-

ties as mythical. I was just about writing a history of science and in

the first chapter I showed why those Dynasties including the name of

Menes and other facts ought to be considered historical. Before my

book was near completion, Petrie himself found the tomb of Menes.

(CP 7.182, fn. 7)

This remarkable retrospect shows that Egyptology was not simply a

hobbyhorse within Peirce’s extraordinarily broad spectrum of inter-

est but also a research field in which he made some discoveries that

anticipated later findings of Egyptology and outlasted his time. Peirce’s

approach to Egyptology was semiotic in the sense in which he charac-

terized his life’s work on 23 December 1908 in a letter to Lady Victoria

Welby. As he put it there, “it has never been in my power to study any-

thing, – mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynam-

ics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology,

phonetics, economic, the history of science, whist, men and women,

wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic” (SS 1977: 85–6).

None of Peirce’s manuscripts on Egyptological topics appeared in

print during the author’s lifetime, but some have become published since

1985, when Carolyn Eisele first included selected pages from them in

her two-volume edition Historical Perspectives on Peirce’s Logic of Science.

The subtitle of her edition, A History of Science, is indicative of one of

the reasons why Peirce began to study Egyptian Antiquity. The history

of science since Egyptian and Babylonian Antiquity was a research field

in which Peirce was “one of America’s most eminent scholars” of his

time (Eisele 1979: 143). However, Peirce’s Egyptological studies did

not remain restricted to inquiries into the role of the Egyptians in the

history of science for long. In 1892, he also began to study the lan-

guage and the hieroglyphic writing system of Ancient Egypt, and in

1904, he felt himself competent enough to pass a general judgment on

the “important advances” of Egyptology since the 1870s (Peirce 1904:

957). The importance that Peirce attributed to Egyptological studies in

general and to the rediscovery of the Ancient Egyptian language and

hieroglyphic script in particular can be gauged from the fact that Jean-

François Champollion, the decipherer of the Egyptian hieroglyphs and

founding figure of Egyptology, is included in Peirce’s list of the 300

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Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

“Great Men of History” of 1892 (see vol. 5 of his Writings) as the only

“linguist” or as one of only four linguists, if we count the three “philol-

ogists” in this list, F. C. Dietz, J. Grimm, and Sir W. Jones, among the

linguists, too.

Research in Peirce’s Egyptological studies has so far remained restricted

to editorial work. As a result, some of the papers dealing with the role of

Ancient Egypt in the history of science have become available in print.

However, Peirce’s manuscripts on the Egyptian language and its writing

have remained unpublished. They can only be consulted in their origi-

nal MS form or in the form of its microfilm edition. A research project

conducted at the Department of Northeast African Archaeology and

Cultural Studies of the Humboldt-University of Berlin, a successor to

the Berlin Egyptologists whose writings Peirce consulted in his time,

aims at a critical assessment of the results of Peirce’s studies on Pharaonic

Egypt.1 Its purpose is to offer a perspective on Peirce’s Egyptological

studies with a special focus on Peirce’s studies in the language and script

of Pharaonic Egypt, especially in MSS 1227, 1228, 1244, and 1294.

2. Chronology of unpublished manuscripts and published

papers

Robin’s Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce of 1967

is a first point of reference for a survey of Peirce’s Egyptological writ-

ings. It offers brief synopses and gives dates for manuscripts in which

Peirce deals with topics concerning Ancient Egypt, but its summary

descriptions and dates are not always reliable and up to date. The best

bibliographical information on Peirce’s unpublished manuscripts can

be found in the volumes of Peirce’s Writings edited so far, but these

cover only the time until the summer of 1893, if advance information

on contents of vol. 9 is included.2 From the fall of 1893 onwards,

Robin’s catalogue is still the only available source of bibliographical

reference.

In the following chronological list of Peirce’s published and unpub-

lished Egyptological writings, some of the inaccuracies of Robin’s dates

and descriptions are corrected in light of a study of the microfilm edi-

tion of Peirce’s manuscripts (MS) and of the editorial studies published

or prepared for publication by the Peirce Edition Project until 2017

(W1-W9). A chronological survey suggests that Peirce’s writings on

Ancient Egypt may be divided into a prelude and four research phases.

1885–86 (date according to W5, p. 498)

The unpublished MS 1089 is the first of Peirce’s MSS dealing with an

Egyptological topic, although only marginally so. Only the second of

its 12 pages contains a brief reference to the Egyptian “great Artab,”

a dry measure of Ancient Egypt, whose capacity Peirce describes as

amounting to 36.176 liters. The 1901 edition of the Century Dictionary

T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 52 Number 4486

(http://www.global-language.com/century/) contains an article by

Peirce on this measure under the entry artaba.

1892–93 (research phases I and II)

The papers of 1892–93 are mainly notes, drafts, and manuscripts for

the Lowell Lectures on the History of Science, which took place from

November 28, 1892, to January 5, 1893, on Monday and Thursday

evenings. Five of them have been included in the still unpublished

vol. 9 of Peirce’s Writings (W9), whose Table of Contents has been

made available to the authors of this article in its manuscript form.

For the other unpublished papers, the contents are summarized in

accordance with Robin’s Catalogue.

• August 1892 (MS 1287), pp. 43–52, publ. in W9 as item 22,

“Lecture II, Part 3, Section 3: Pyramid Measurements and the

Fabric of Theory] (R[obin] 1287: 43–52), August 1892.”

• Fall 1892 (MS 1297), pp. 2–3, 6–7, and 8–9, publ. in W9 as item

20, “[Lecture II, Part 3, Section 1: The Egyptian Mind] (R 1297:

2–3, 8–9, 6–7), fall 1892.”

• Fall 1892 (MS 1303), pp. 2–5, publ. in W9 as item 21, “[Lecture

II, Part 3, Section 2: The Character of Egyptian Intellect] (R 1303:

2–5), fall 1892.”

• December 3–5, 1892 (MS 1276), pp. 2–29, publ. in W9 as item

24, “[Lowell Lecture III: Egyptian Science] (R 1276: 2–29), 3–5

December 1892.”

• December 1892 (MS 1277), publ. in Eisele, ed. (1985: 201–215)

as “‘Further Ancient Science – Chaldean and Greek Astronomy’

(with remarks on the Chaldees’ scientific superiority over the

Egyptians) Lowell Lecture V.” Included in W9 as item 28, “[Lowell

Lecture V: Chaldean Science and Early Greek Science] (R 1277:

2–36, 38–53; R 1275: 45, 44, 46–56), 12 December 1892.”

• c. Dec 1892/Jan 1893 (MS 1298), unpublished: “Egyptian

History; Chaldean Astronomy,” 4 pp.

• c. Dec 1892/Jan 1893 (MS 1228), unpublished: “Notes on

Egyptian Hieroglyphs.” Written in parallel with MS 1294.

• January 1893 (MS 1294), pp. 2–6, 15–20, 24 publ. in W9 as item

41, “Egyptian Science (R 1294: 2–6, 15–20, 24), January 1893.”

• not before Jan. 1893 (MS 1296), unpublished: “Thothiana,” 7 pp.

This MS contains the beginning of a paper for the Bulletin of the

American Mathematical Society on “Aahmes” and Egyptian math-

ematics. “Aahmes” is a 19th century transcription of the name of

the copyist of the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (pBM EA 10058),

JoH-msj.w /ˌjaʕħə-ˈmasjəw/, ‘The-moon-is-born.’

• c.1893 (MS 595), pp. 16–17, unpublished section of the “Short

Logic,” partially published as CP 2.286–291, 2.295–296, 2.435–

443, 7.555–558.3

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Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

1898–99 (research phase III)

The manuscripts of 1898–99 were mainly written in the context of

Peirce’s plan to write a History of Science in one volume (MSS 1269–

1273), as first announced in a letter of 1898 (cf. Eisele, ed. 1985:

297–411). At that time, Peirce intensified his studies in the language

and writing system of Ancient Egypt, begun in January 1893. Robin’s

estimate for MSS 1269–1271 is “c.1892,” but since MS 1227 is dated

“March 22, 1898” and contains notes for MSS 1269–1271, and MS

1269 contains a reference to Budge (1898), Robin’s date must be

corrected to 1898. Only two of these MSS have been published so

far. The corrected chronological order of these MSS from 1898–99

is the following:

1. MS 1227, “Notes on Egyptian Hieroglyphs,” dated “March 22,

1898,” a notebook.

2. MS 1271, “A Sketch of the General History of Science,” 6 pp.

3. MS 1270 is a partial copy of MS 1271. “Egyptian Science and the

Typical Egyptian,” 3 pp.

4. MS 1272 of is an earlier draft of MS 1269. Among its topics are

“Egyptian science: the Great Pyramid; the lack of theoretical inter-

est among the Egyptians reflected in their failure to advance scien-

tific knowledge, and the ‘irrefragable’ proof of Egyptian stupidity.”

5. MS 1269 is the first chapter of Peirce’s unfinished “History of

Science.” It has been published in Eisele, ed. (1985: 310–47)

under the title “Egypt and Science.”

6. MS 1292, of 1899, is the draft of an article on “How Did Science

Originate?” in which Peirce argues that science originated in

Babylon, not Egypt, and that there was a lack of scientific interest

in Ancient Egypt.

1902–1904 (research phase IV)

• L 75. Peirce’s 1902 application to the Carnegie Institution con-

tains, in the alternative version edited by J. Ransdell as Version 2,

Part 3 (L 75, Draft C, pp. A46–47), two pages with remarks on

the morphology and iconicity of the Egyptian Language.

• MS 1244, related to MS 1263, is “On Egyptian and other ancient

languages and other topics.”

• MS 1263 has been published in Eisele, ed. (1985: 956–961)

under the title “Chronology of Arithmetic with references to the

collection of Mr. George A. Plimpton, to the Astor Library, and to

other available collections.”

This bibliographical survey shows that Peirce’s Egyptological stud-

ies, after the first rather marginal note on a topic of metrology in

1885, began in 1892 with his notes for the Lowell Lectures on “The

History of Science.” With respect to their contents, roughly but not

T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 52 Number 4488

always accurately summarized by Robin, the four phases of his writ-

ings on Egyptological matters reflect a growing expertise in Ancient

Egyptian civilization and a steady progress in Peirce’s Egyptian lan-

guage competence.

The first phase of Egyptological research, from August to the fall of

1892, comprises Peirce’s early papers on “Egyptian science,” MSS 1287,

1297, 1303. The information on which these papers is based is mainly

from books on the history of Ancient Egypt written for a wider audi-

ence (von Bunsen 1848–1867; Rawlinson 1882; Wiedemann 1884).

Some information is from Byrne (1885–92: I 308–316), a study in

General Linguistics with a selective compilation of data on Egyptian

and Coptic from sources that were already outdated at the time. Peirce

also included in these papers some information from the expert studies

mentioned in the references of his sources, such as the one by de Rougé

(1866), an author frequently quoted by Rawlinson (1882).

During the second phase, from December 1892 to 1893, Peirce

began to study the Egyptian language and addressed new themes of

the science and technology of the Ancient Egyptian civilization. The

group of papers from this period shows how Peirce, by means of sys-

tematic library studies, became familiar with specialized Egyptological

literature. Peirce now collected the relevant bibliographical data

directly from the most recent Egyptological reference works written

by Ibrahim-Hilmy (1886–88) and Brugsch (1891). He also started

working through several of the studies discussed by these authors and

took notes from grammars of Hieroglyphic Egyptian. Unfortunately,

he made much use of the grammar by Le Page Renouf of 1875, which

was not the best available at this time.

The third phase of Peirce’s Egyptological studies comprises six

papers from 1898 to 1899. By now, Peirce had become an expert on

Egyptological matters. He produced another detailed extract from the

Egyptian grammar by Erman (1894a) based on the most reliable source

of his days.

Only a decade later did Peirce resume his Egyptological studies in a

fourth phase of research from 1902 to 1904, in which he produced three

more papers, which give evidence that Peirce’s expertise had reached a

level on a par with the Egyptological scholarship of his time.

3. The “old Egyptian mind” and its place in the history of

science

From his notebooks MSS 1228 and 1227, it is possible to reconstruct

a good part of Peirce’s early Egyptological horizon. MS 1228 contains

notes on the chronology of the Pharaonic Egyptian dynasties. This is the

research field to which Peirce also contributed the answer to the ques-

tion of whether the first three dynasties were real or mythical quoted in

the Introduction to the present paper. Furthermore, the MSS contain

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Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

notes on outstanding Egyptian papyri and their editions as well as

excerpts from literature on the Giza pyramids (pp. 3–11). The sources

for Peirce’s studies in Hieroglyphic Egyptian quoted in notebook MS

1228 are Le Page Renouf ’s Elementary Grammar of the Ancient Egyptian

Language (1875), Rawlinson’s History of Ancient Egypt in its American

edition of 1882, Joachim’s translation of the Papyrus Ebers of 1890,

and the general Egyptological reference works by Ibrahim-Hilmy

(1886–88) and Brugsch (1891).

Ironically, the methods of some of the scholars who were Peirce’s

source when he wrote on the allegedly underdeveloped science of the

Ancient Egyptians have meanwhile been unmasked as unscientific.

For example, on p. 11 of MS 1228, Peirce quotes the writings on the

Giza pyramids by the archaeologists Howard Vyse (1840–42), Smyth

(1867), and Petrie (1883). Howard Vyse had made important discov-

eries in the pyramids of Cheops and Mykerinos by means of what is

described today as “gunpowder archaeology.” Smyth followed the pseu-

doscientific metrological and numerological approach of John Taylor,

who claimed that divine inspiration had played a role in the construc-

tion of the Great Pyramid. Smyth had been a central figure in pyrami-

dology until Petrie’s triangulation survey of 1880 disproved his theories

with evidence showing that Smyth had made incorrect measurements.

In cases such as this, Peirce succeeded in revealing the dubious nature

of some contemporary research methods and results, whereas some of

his other conjectures about the Pharaonic culture, such as his verdict

on the lack of “poetical imagination” of the Ancient Egyptians, in MS

1294, have proven to be untenable.

MS 1227 of 1898 deals in its first part with Ancient Egyptian

mathematics (p. 1–25). This part includes notes on the dimensions

and the orientation of the Great Pyramid at Giza, taken from W.M.F.

Petrie (1883), thoughts on Egyptian and Mesopotamian chronol-

ogy (pp. 3–12), and excerpts from Eisenlohr’s edition of the Rhind

Mathematical Papyrus of 1877 (pp. 13–25). The Rhind Papyrus is

a copy by the hand of a certain JoH-msj.w (“Ahmes” or “Aahmes”),

c.1550 bc. Peirce’s verdict on this mathematical treatise is devastating:

“Throughout the book the procedures are unsystematic and clumsy.

They show that the Egyptians had no turn for mathematics” (1904:

959). MS 1227 also contains etymological and semantic considerations

on some key expressions of Ancient Egyptian mathematics, for which

Peirce consulted Brugsch (1867–82).

Some of Peirce’s early remarks on the “old Egyptian mind” reflect

certain prejudices against the Orient in the age of colonialism. In 1892,

Peirce describes the mind of the Ancient Egyptians as strange: “A strange

mind it was, as strange as the Chinese mind, which in some respects it

somewhat resembles, as strange as the country of Egypt is,” he ponders

in MS 1297 (p. 3 [Peirce’s paging]). At that time, Peirce confessed that

T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 52 Number 4490

his general “opinion of the Egyptians was not extravagantly high” (MS

1277, in Eisele, ed. 1985: 209; 1892). He even went so far as to speak

of “the general stupidity of the Egyptians” (MS 1269, c.1892).

The latter judgment resulted from Peirce’s readings in the history of

science, from which he concluded, in 1898, that there was a “lack of

scientific interest in Egypt” with the result that the Egyptians “never

made any advance in truly scientific knowledge” (MS 1272, p. 5).

Peirce contrasted the “unscientific” mind of the Ancient Egyptians with

the scientific one of the Babylonians and attributed the alleged lack of

science in Ancient Egypt to religious reasons: “The Egyptian kings cov-

ered their walls with accounts of what they proposed to do in the future

life without caring to record any chronological dates. The Babylonian

kings undertook laborious researches in order to assign their precise

chronological relations to other nine or ten centuries before them” (MS

1263, in Eisele, ed. 1985: 957; 1904).

Undoubtedly, Peirce would have revoked such rash conclusions had

he known of later discoveries concerning the actual level of the scien-

tific knowledge of the Ancient Egyptians. In 1902, for example, the

publication of the Fragments of the Old Kingdom Annals, also known

as the “Palermo Stone,” by Schäfer, brought evidence that the chron-

iclers of the Old Kingdom had a calendric and factual knowledge no

less advanced than the one of the Old Babylonians (cf. Schäfer 1902:

10–11). These Annals do not only contain the full list of all royal names

of the first four dynasties, inform about the exact number of years,

months, and days of each reign, and describe annually the most mem-

orable royal deeds in detail; they even document the annual flood levels

of the Nile. Today, the chronology of the 2nd and 3rd millennia bc

documented in Egyptian sources is considered to be much more reli-

able than the surviving Mesopotamian sources.

Another reason for the early stagnation of science in Ancient Egypt

that Peirce sees is a geographical one. In contrast to the maritime

Greeks, who progressed early and quickly in science because of their

fertile intercultural exchange with the Phoenicians, Egyptians, and

Babylonians, the Egyptians remained relatively self-sufficient in their

geographical isolation of their Nile Valley, said Peirce in the concluding

remarks to his Lowell Lectures on “The History of Science,” in January

1893:

The manner in which the great and startling advances in scientific

thought have been made appears very clearly. It is by the violent

breaking up of certain habits, combined with the action of other hab-

its not broken up. Thus, the highest level of Egyptian thought seems

to have been reached at a very early age. So it appears to us, and so it

always appeared to the Egyptians, for they always reverence the ideas

of antiquity, as superior to those of their own time. Now the great

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Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

factor in the development of the Egyptian mind was undoubtedly

the physical geography of the country which probably produced its

effects in a reasonably small number of generations after it was first

felt. (CP 7.270)

Peirce did not go so far as to dismiss the cultural achievements of the

Ancient Egyptian civilization altogether. For example, he held the

accomplishments of the Egyptian architects and pyramid builders in

great esteem. They were “wonderfully clever engineers” (MS 1277;

Eisele, ed. 1985: 203), was his praise. However, in a contrast to his

pragmatic maxim of 1878, that postulates the necessity of considering

the effects and “practical bearings of actions” more than the mere ideas

underlying them (CP 8.119; c.1902), Peirce did not always evaluate the

Pharaonic scientists according to the results of their material culture.

For example, after studying the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, he con-

cluded that the Ancient Egyptians were unable to generalize. This con-

clusion may or may not be correct with respect to Aahmes, the author

of the Rhind MS, but if the Egyptians were “wonderful engineers,” it is

most unlikely that they lacked the capacity of generalization, as Peirce

concludes in the following:

We have seen what the Egyptians were; – wonderfully clever engi-

neers, but always working by a rule of thumb. Aahmes, the arithme-

tician, never lays down a rule in general terms, and of course never

proves anything in general terms. In fact, the Egyptians never gener-

alized, and the lore and wisdom for which they were so celebrated,

was, considered as a science, upon a level with the household receipts

which fill up corners of country newspapers. Of generalization there

was scarce a trace. (MS 1277; Eisele, ed. 1985: 203)

The domain of literary genres is another area of Egyptian culture in

which Peirce reached wrong conclusions because the knowledge of his

time was still incomplete. Peirce was convinced that “you find a com-

plete absence of comic literature,” from which he even conjectured that

the Ancient Egyptians seemed “to be utterly unable to take a joke”

(MS 1303, p. 8). Today, there is no reason to assume that humor

played a lesser role in Ancient Egypt than in any other culture (cf.,

e.g., Houlihan 2001). Peirce, by contrast, could associate humor in

Ancient Egypt only with foreign authors who wrote about the cul-

ture of the Nile Valley, for example, Herodotus. “There is a story in

Herodotus about a thief in the treasury of Rhampsinitus = Ramessu

Neter-hek-pen, Egyptian King, which a modern wag has made a funny

book about” (MS 1303, p. 8). The identification of “Ramessu Neter-

hek-pen” with Herodotus’ Rhampsinit was suggested by von Bunsen

(1848–67: II 574). (Today, the respective Name of Ramses VI – who

reigned from 1142/40 to 1134/32 bc – is usually read as Row-ms-s(w)

T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 52 Number 4492

Jmnw-Hr-XpS=f nTr Hq#-Jwnw, i.e., ‘Rīˁamasese Amun-is-upon-his-

sword-arm, God and Ruler of Heliopolis.’) The “wag” that Peirce men-

tions is probably August von Platen, the author of the tragicomedy Der

Schatz des Rhampsinit of 1825.

Premature judgments and the incomplete knowledge base of his

time also explain why Peirce reached wrong conclusions about the his-

tory of Pharaonic medicine. In one of his “Lessons from the History

of Science,” Peirce argues that a prerequisite for medical progress in

any culture is “scientific imagination” (CP 1.46; c.1896). In the (pre)

history of medicine, thus Peirce, scientific imagination is apparent in

the magical practices of the ancient and the so-called primitive cultures.

From his study of the Papyrus Ebers, the most significant Egyptian

medical compendium of Ancient Egypt, translated by Joachim in 1890,

Peirce derived the premature conclusion that magic was nonexistent in

Ancient Egypt. Today, we know better. There is a rich and significant

stock of literature documenting magical formulas and recipes from the

Pharaonic Period (cf., e.g., Borghouts 1978; Ritner 1993). Before these

became accessible, Peirce’s premature declaration was:

Find me a people whose early medicine is not mixed up with magic

and incantations, and I will find you a people devoid of all scientific

ability. There is no magic in the medical Papyrus Ebers. The stolid

Egyptian saw nothing in disease but derangement of the affected

organ. There never was any true Egyptian science. (CP 1.47, 1896)

It is noteworthy that Peirce’s conclusion, according to which a lack

of magical practice would indicate a lack of scientific imagination, is

in sharp contrast with the opinion of many Egyptologists of his time.

From Erman (1885/87: 476) until far into the 20th century, Egyptian

magic used to be considered “a barbarous offshoot of religion” (Erman

1907: 148) and, as such, an indicator of primitive or even “degener-

ated” culture.

Some of Peirce’s rash verdicts on the allegedly low scientific achieve-

ments of the Ancient Egyptians have their origin in prejudices against

the scientific achievements of the Ancient Egyptians that were rather

common in 19th century scholarship. Even renowned Egyptologists

were not immune to such prejudices. Adolf Erman’s otherwise pioneer-

ing book on Egyptian cultural history is a good example (cf. Schenkel

2006). It exemplifies the tendency of a generation of Egyptologists who

had given up earlier idealistic approaches in favor of an allegedly rigor-

ous method of studying ancient cultures in light of the scientific prog-

ress achieved in the spirit of positivism:

Now that we have learned to understand the monuments, to read

the inscriptions, and to study the literature of ancient Egypt, the old

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glamour has departed, and in place of the ‘dim religious light’ of past

time, the pitiless sun of science has risen, and we see the old Egyptians

as they really were, neither better nor worse than other folk. Their old

‘wisdom’ appears in some respects less wonderful, in others it even

grows repulsive, while their customs are not more peculiar than those

of other nations, and merit neither our ridicule nor our reverence.

(Erman 1894b: 2–3)

Parallels between some of Peirce’s opinions on “Egyptian science” and

Erman’s contemporary judgments on the same topic are easy to find.

Erman, too, speaks of the “little value” that should be attributed to

the “Egyptian contributions to learning.” He found it equally “natural

to suppose that [. . .] they have not rendered much service to science”

(Erman 1894b: 448). Erman also deplored the lack of genius among

the Ancient Egyptian mathematicians. His opinion on Aahmes’s math-

ematical insights was quite in accordance with Peirce’s above-quoted

judgment on the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus:

Mathematics as well as medicine seems to have remained stationary

at the same stage that it had reached under the Old Empire; progress

was made in certain details, but a genius seems never to have arisen

to give a fresh impetus to this science. There was indeed no need. The

problems presented to the skill of the arithmetician were ever the

same, and if the solution, which was often only an approximate one,

had contented the government of the Old Empire, it sufficed also

for that of the New Empire. Mathematics served merely a practical

purpose for the ancient Egyptians, they only solved the problems of

everyday life, they never formulated and worked out problems for

their own sake. (Erman 1894b: 364)

In sum, there is good reason to assume that Peirce’s low esteem for

the role played by the Ancient Egyptians in the history of science

reflected prejudices held even by renowned Egyptologists of his time.

Erman’s work had an enormous influence on later studies in Germany

as well as in Great Britain and the United States. The leading 20th

century Egyptologists of the latter two countries, Alan H. Gardiner

and James Henry Breasted, were Erman’s students. Hence, it seems

quite possible that the general tendency of historians of science to

hold Mesopotamian science in higher esteem than the Egyptian one

is due to the respective discipline’s attitude towards its object of study

rather than to the inherent qualities of the extant sources. Altogether,

Peirce had certainly acquired an excellent knowledge of the state

of the art in Egyptology, but he was also a victim of the cultural

narrow-mindedness of some of the contemporary experts whose writ-

ings he consulted. However, as his Egyptological studies advanced,

T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 52 Number 4494

Peirce was also able to revise some of his earlier rash or unfounded

conclusions.

4. Hieroglyphic writing

4.1 The hieroglyphs and their transcription, Egyptian morphology,

and methods of text analysis

From the description of Robin’s catalogue, which lists them under the

heading of “Notes on Egyptian Hieroglyphs,” one might gather that

MSS 1228 and 1227 are crucial in the evaluation of Peirce’s linguis-

tic expertise in Ancient Egyptian and its writing system, but this is

only partially the case. On the one hand, Peirce wrote also elsewhere

on hieroglyphs, especially in MSS 1244 and 1294, on the other, MSS

1227 and 1228 also deal with several other Egyptological topics.

In contrast to what one might expect from Peirce’s great concern

with signs of all kinds, the papers of 1893 and 1898 deal neither with

hieroglyphic writing as a sign system nor with the typical Egyptian man-

ner of intertwining verbal signs with pictorial representations in multi-

modal text-image compositions. That Peirce gave so little attention to

Ancient Egyptian text-image composition is not altogether astonishing

since even the most renowned Egyptologists of his time paid little atten-

tion to these aspects of their object of study. Instead, they used the image

part of the ancient monuments almost exclusively as sources of informa-

tion about material culture or as a means of solving lexical problems. For

instance, Erman’s important study of the texts and images on the tomb

walls of the Old Kingdom, Rede, Rufe und Lieder auf Gräberbildern des

Alten Reiches (1918), went without a single picture.

MS 1228 consists of a notebook of 48 unnumbered pages. The first

written sheet of paper is headed “1893 Jan 21 Astor Library” [New

York], but the estimate of the editors of W9 for the date of the whole

notebook is “c. Dec 1892/Jan 1893.” The 21st of January was appar-

ently the day when Peirce consulted three books in Astor library, from

which he took two notes on typographical topics that he wrote down

below the date. The first quote is from Hansard’s Typographia of 1825.

(Peirce quotes it as “1824.”) It was copied from a chapter on the typog-

raphy of Arabic numbers from one to ten. The second quote is from

a chapter on the “excellence” of certain printing fonts for arithmetical

figures. Peirce gives Stowe’s Printer’s Grammar of 1808 as its source,

but the correct source of this quote is John Johnson’s Typographia of

1824, vol. 2, p. 44. Both quotes seem unrelated to any Egyptological

topic, but the books from which they are taken also deal with the his-

tory of writing in general and contain some references to hieroglyphs,

too. Thus, Peirce may have consulted them after all other pages of this

notebook had already been written on. His purpose, on January 21,

1893, may well have been to complement his earlier notes with further

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Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

references from books on the history of writing. In the end, however,

he may not have found anything useful concerning hieroglyphs in the

literature he consulted at Astor Library – which is not too surpris-

ing since these works were written before the decipherment of the

hieroglyphs.

On p. 11 of MS 1228, Peirce quotes Brugsch’s Aegyptologie of 1891

in a context suggesting that the book was new to him. Brugsch was

a member of the first generation of Egyptologists after Champollion.

The same source is quoted in MS 1276, dated December 3–5, 1892.

The thematic connection of the first 11 pages of MS 1228 (as described

above) with the topics of the Lowell lectures in December 1892 sug-

gests that Peirce wrote them before his visit to Astor Library, in the

autumn of 1892.

Only from p. 13 onwards does MS 1228 begin to address the topic

of hieroglyphic writing. On pp. 13–15, Peirce listed all the hieroglyphic

graphemes with their respective sound values that Brugsch, in his Index

des hiéroglyphes phonétiques (1872b), had identified as attested in Old

Kingdom sources. In a second list, beginning on p. 17, we find those

signs that Brugsch had listed without any further characterization or

reference. Figure 1 shows an excerpt from this list.

Totally unmarked

7 s

8 ket

33 s

61 maā

130 b

136 f

154 set

156 sem

196 fet

212 bȧk

Figure 1. Hieroglyphs copied by Peirce from Brugsch (1872b). Excerpt from MS

1228, p. 17.

T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 52 Number 4496

The page shown in Figure 1 is evidence of Peirce’s genuine interest in

the historical development of the Egyptian writing system, but it also

shows that he still lacked a deeper understanding of Brugsch’s prin-

ciples for arranging the graphemes. As can be seen from Figure 2,

Brugsch (1872a) presented his information on hieroglyphs in four col-

umns. Col. 1 gives an identification number, and col. 2 lists the hiero-

glyphic grapheme, here with a variant and the letter B, which specifies

that the second variant is “late.” Col. 3 lists a selection of more or less

isofunctional graphemes or grapheme groups (here: three) and their

respective phonetic transcription by means of the Latin alphabet. The

graphemes of this column are additionally marked as “A.” (for “old”) or,

as in Figure 2, as “B.” (for “late”), or also as “*” for “not attested in the

dictionary.” Col. 4 gives an additional reference to the page number of

the Dictionnaire hiéroglyphique et démotique of 1867–82.

Figure 2. Extract from Brugsch’s list of hieroglyphic graphemes (1872a: 119).

In the case of very frequent graphemes, attested in all periods of the

Egyptian language (e.g., in the case of phonograms representing a sin-

gle consonant), Brugsch gives no additional information. However, the

lack of extra information does not imply that the respective sign had

not been in use since the earliest times. Brugsch’s list is not entirely con-

sistent in its structure except that it classifies the hieroglyphs according

to their pictorial shape. The author provides no systematic information

concerning the grapheme inventories of particular periods. Above all,

his classification is far from being comprehensible to a readership with-

out first-hand knowledge of Hieroglyphic Egyptian. Whatever inten-

tion Peirce may have had in dividing the graphemes of his list into

two discrete classes (“ancient empire” and “totally unmarked”), it is

quite clear that he could not have drawn any valuable conclusions from

Brugsch’s inconsistent principles of classification.

Most of the second half of MS 1228 (pp. 25–43) is filled with

excerpts from Le Page Renouf ’s Elementary Grammar of the Ancient

Egyptian Language of 1875. This book is representative of an earlier

phase of Egyptian philology that was already outdated in the 1890s.

Peter Le Page Renouf (1822–1897) was Keeper of Oriental Antiquities

in the British Museum from 1886 to 1891, published important works

on Egyptian religion and was a renowned Egyptologist in his time (cf.

Brugsch 1891: 138). Nevertheless, his grammar is a rather mixed bag,

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Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

an unsystematic selection of phenomena from all periods of the history

of the Egyptian language. It shows that Le Page Renouf ’s skill to dis-

tinguish between the significant and the insignificant was rather low.

More than once, the author jumps from one detail to another, and

all too often, his descriptions of linguistic data and the conclusions

drawn from them are weird. The modern reader has the impression

that Peirce might even have been aware of some of these shortcomings

since he limited himself to extracting the basic function words but did

not tackle Le Page Renouf ’s section on verbs (1875: 47–60), which

happens to be particularly labyrinthine.

Notebook MS 1228 ends with a table of the then newly adopted

Egyptological transcription system proposed by Adolf Erman (1889b)

and Georg Steindorff (1892), followed by a sample text (pp. 44–47;

page numbers conjectured since the Harvard microfilm seems to be

faulty). On p. 45, there is the list of 25 hieroglyphic phonograms

representing single consonants with their transcription symbols accord-

ing to the “School of Berlin,” which was to become the Egyptological

standard for the next century. Figure 3 shows how Peirce copied it in his

own handwriting. His compilation differs only in some minor details

from forms of the conventional transcription alphabet that is still in use

today, with the restriction that the sign sequences 1–2 and 19–21 are

in a reverse order, sign 13 is omitted, and that the hieroglyph x has

been inserted between 16 and 17 (Schenkel 1988; Kammerzell 1995,

2005: 172–199). The source of the unusual order of Peirce’s list was

Brugsch (1891: 94–95). Brugsch essentially follows Erman (1889b),

especially Erman’s interpretation that the signs # , j, o and

w in Earlier Egyptian, formerly transcribed as a, ȧ, ā, w, did not cor-

respond to vowels in Earlier Egyptian. However, Brugsch had still kept

a few minor idiosyncrasies no longer accepted today; he was notorious

for merging genius with carelessness.

On the opposite page (p. 44), Peirce illustrates, by means of three

examples, how the new transcription affected the form of rendering

royal names: “This turns Menes into menʔ, Teta into ṯetet, Cheops [into]

ḫwfw, Souphis II [into] shefraʕ or ḫaʕfraʕ.” Pages 46 and 47 present the

sample text discussed and depicted below (Figure 6).

MS 1227, a notebook subsumed by Robin under the same title as

MS 1228, that is, “Notes on Egyptian Hieroglyphs,” is dated “March

22, 1898.” This date is plausible because the notebook contains a ref-

erence to Peters (1897). Like MS 1228, its pages (48 in total, 7 blank;

MS microfilms 0048-0072) are unnumbered. Only pp. 34–42 deal

with hieroglyphs. Here, we find extracts from J. H. Breasted’s English

translation of A. Erman’s Ägyptische Grammatik (1894a). These com-

plement Peirce’s earlier notes taken from Le Page Renouf ’s grammar

of 1875, which had become obsolete with the publication of Erman’s

compendium.

T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 52 Number 4498

Umschreibung

1 ˀ or iˀ 8 p 15 ḥ 22 t

2 Ꜣ 9 f 16 ḫ (χ) 23 ṯ

3 ˀˀ y 10 m 17 s 24 d

4̋ ï 11 n 18 š sh 25 ḏ

5 ע ˁ ع 12 r 19 ג g غ

6 w 13 rw 20 k

7 b 14 h 21 ḳ (q)

Figure 3. The hieroglyphic “alphabet,” as copied by Peirce (MS 1228, p. 45).

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Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

Pronominal morphology, to which several pages in MS 1228 of 1892/3

are dedicated, is not a topic of MS 1227. Particular attention is given

to verb morphology, verbal semantics, and syntax. Peirce’s choice of

topics from Erman’s work is noteworthy. It shows both what Peirce was

interested in and what he did not care about. In contrast to MS 1228,

there are no notes on writing, phonology, or on numerals. Prepositions,

relative pronouns as well as interrogative and negative sentences are

among the topics in which Peirce was interested. Peirce had examined

these topics already in MS 1228, but now he could work with the more

comprehensive data that had meanwhile become available from Erman

(1894a). Peirce adopted mainly an onomasiological approach, i.e., he

started with selected concepts to find out which word forms served

to express them. Instead of documenting the meaning of all relevant

wn m#o, lit. “it is true” used as substantive “truth”

Plural is used with abstract nouns and names of material

jmy in the sense of “belongings” follows the “to whom”

“to him belongings”

ns “possesses” used for “belonging to”

Causatives of biliterals have fem. inf.

Final (recte: Initial) disappears from causative

II gem. are doubled in protasis

Figure 4. Sample from MS 1227 illustrating Peirce’s selective method of data

collection (p. 35).

T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 52 Number 4500

word forms and constructions in Egyptian texts, he restricted himself

to jotting down how or whether specific concepts—such as ‘truth’

or ‘possession’—and selected functions of language—such as giving

orders, asking questions, or conditionals—are expressed in Egyptian.

Figure 4 shows Peirce’s extracts from Erman (1894a: §§ 103, 111, 138,

139, 161, and 178). Here, the keywords are “truth,” “abstract nouns,”

“belonging to,” and “protasis.” They illustrate how Peirce set specific

thematic foci in his data collection.

His selective method of study suggests that Peirce did not aim

at developing a degree of linguistic competence that would enable

him to analyze and translate any hieroglyphic text. Instead, he was

more interested in finding out how the language of the Ancient

Egyptians expressed certain notions that he regarded as key concepts

of the history of ideas. Nonetheless, during his study of Ancient

Egyptian, Peirce acquired sufficient knowledge to state, in 1904, with

a good dose of modesty, that he had himself made his own transla-

tion of the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus to improve Eisenlohr’s

translation of 1877. In his own words, “Although I possess but the

merest smattering of Old Egyptian, I have translated the whole

book for myself, so that I may venture to entertain some opinions

upon particular passages of it” (MS 1263, p. 1; Peirce 1904: 957).

A comparison of Peirce’s hieroglyphic chirography in MSS 1228

and 1227 shows that Peirce’s writing skills had considerably improved

during the five years that had elapsed between the former and the

latter MS. In the notebook of 1892/93, the hieroglyphs are more or

less careful copies of the respective models of Peirce’s sources. These

exercises in hieroglyphic chirography exhibit typical beginners’ char-

acteristics: large size, unnecessary details, and tentativeness of shape

with little standardization. MS 1227, the later of the two MSS, shows

a much more skilled handwriting, quite similar to a professional

Egyptologist’s way of rendering hieroglyphs by means of simplified

forms (Figure 5).

In contrast to his earlier practice, Peirce began to write hieroglyphs

from right to left in MS 1227. This is remarkable because Peirce

does not follow his main source, Erman’s grammar of 1894, in this

respect. Erman (1894a), for practical reasons, spells hieroglyphic texts

from left to right so that Peirce’s departure from this Egyptological

authority of the 1890s also marks a greater self-confidence in dealing

with hieroglyphs. This may be due to two reasons. First, Erman had

explicitly stated, that “the writing properly runs from right to left and

only exceptionally (when employed for certain decorative purposes)

from left to right” (1894a: § 5). This information cannot be from

Le Page Renouf because his grammar contains only the nondescript

and ambiguous statement that “the letters are read in the order in

which they are written” (1875: 8). Second, Peirce was left-handed,

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Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

sometimes complaining about it as his “incapacity for linguistic expres-

sion” (MS 632, pp. 5–6) and sometimes attributing to it his capacity

for diagrammatic thought (cf. Kent 1987). Hence, it is likely that

Peirce found it more convenient to spell hieroglyphs from right to

left.

Towards the end of MS 1228, Peirce transliterated (“copied accu-

rately,” as he put it) a passage in three columns from the Old Kingdom

biographical inscription found in Weni’s tomb at Abydos (Figure 6).

The excerpt is written in columns just like the original. The hiero-

glyphs are glossed by their phonetic transcription, a literal translation,

and there are some morphological comments. According to a note in

MS 1294, Peirce had chosen de Rougé (1866: pl. VIII) as his source

after comparing this edition with Birch (1873), Erman (1882), and

Brugsch (1891). This excerpt shows that Peirce was not only famil-

iar with the most recent Egyptological transcription conventions but

had also acquired some competence in Earlier Egyptian. There is only

one mistake. Peirce mistook Xo, ‘appear (in glory), shine’ for X#,

‘1000’ (Peirce: “number”), as a consequence of confusing the transcrip-

tion symbol o with #, which are both, even today, conventionally pro-

nounced as /a/. In fact, in the early days of Egyptology, the respective

hieroglyphs had been interpreted as corresponding to vowels rendered

by ā and a. This was (and still is) a rather common lapse with beginners

in Egyptian language studies.

A modern translation of the three columns of hieroglyphic writ-

ing is “His Majesty sent me to Jabharta to fetch a coffin (lit. lord-of-

life), including the sarcophagus box (lit. chest-for-the-living) as well as

its lid, and a superb precious pyramidion for (his pyramid, named)

‘Maliniliidu-will-appear-in-perfect-state,’ my mistress.” A comparison

of Peirce’s glosses with a modern Egyptological analysis of the same

lines shows how far he had advanced in his studies and to which degree

his conjectures were exact (Figure 7).

Specimens of Peirce’s hieroglyphic handwriting Fonts for comparison

in MS 1228 (1892/93) in MS 1227 (1898)

Le Page

Renouf (1875) JSesh (2014)

(p. 39), (p. 35) (p. 38), (p. 35)

(p. 35),

(p. 37) (p. 39)

(p. 39),

(p. 33) (p. 38), (p. 35)

Figure 5. The advance of Peirce’s skill in writing hieroglyphs from 1892 to 1898.

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502

Figure 6. Excerpt from the columnar inscription of Weni from Abydos in the

line drawing by de Rougé (1866: pl. VIII, l. 37–38) (left), faced with Peirce’s

handwritten copy of it and his intercolumnar glosses of 1892/93 (MS 1228,

pp. 46–47).

Even though his choice of translation equivalents and his note in MS

1294 prove that Peirce used the analysis offered by Brugsch (1891:

493), whose words “wundervollen, köstlichen” are reflected in Peirce’s

translation “wonderful and costly,” Peirce did not follow Brugsch in

every detail. For example, he interpreted the form in onX-w correctly

as a plural morpheme, as opposed to Brugsch, who took it for a partici-

ple marker, which seems less likely today. The reading that Peirce opted

for is in agreement with Erman (1882: 22).

From a modern point of view, it is also interesting to note that Peirce

adopted the method of interlinear (respectively, intercolumnar) gloss-

ing in his textual studies. The use of this method may appear progres-

sive, but Peirce was not the first to adopt it. It used to be a standard

method of early Egyptologists until the 1890s, but the practice was

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Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

Hierogl.

MS 1228: h # [b] w [Hn] f r |b h # t country

Sending me?

plural? majesty he (mouth) to quarry ’Ibhhat

Modern: h#b:clf -w Hm-f r- jbh#-t-clf

send:clf:nmlz.prs -1sg majesty-3 sg .m to- topon - f - clf

Hierogl.

MS 1228: r |n n t nêb princely onX h n sarcophagus

tomb n onX w

to bring Lord life box coffin (orig. water) to life plural

Modern: r- jn-t nb-clf- onX hn(w)-clf n- onX-w

to- bring-inf lord-clf- life box-clf for- live:pa - pl

Hierogl.

MS 1228: Hno o# stone / Picture f Hno bn bn t pyramid / Picture b| t

with cover he with pyramidion wonderful

Modern: Hno- o#- clf-clf-f Hno- bnbn-t-clf sD#-t

with- door-clf- clf-3 sg .m with- pyramidion-f - clf precious- f

Hierogl.

MS 1228: Shps t n ro m r r n Xo nêfêr Picture Hnwt Princely

costly

feminine to Merenrao number beautiful princely

Modern: Sps-t n- Xo-Mr:n:row -nfr-clf Hnw-t-clf(-j)

noble-f for- appear:fut-Malniliidu- clf-

be_perfect:stat:3sg .m -clf

mistress-f - clf

(-1 sg )

Figure 7. Comparative analysis of Peirce’s notes in MS 1228 on the excerpt from

the inscription of Weni from Abydos (Figure 6; in vertical rows) with a modern

transcription in horizontal lines according to the principles of Di Biase-Dyson,

Kammerzell, and Werning (2009). The morphological markers are 1: 1st pers.; 3:

3rd pers.; CLF: classifier; F: fem.; FUT: future; INF: infinitive; M: masc.; NMLZ:

nominalizer; PA: active participle; PL: plural; PRS: present tense; SG: singular;

STAT: stative; TOPON: toponym.

then abandoned. 20th century Egyptologists considered glossing ama-

teurish since well-defined and more or less synchronic corpora, such

as those treated by Erman (1880, 1889a), had become available. From

that time on, Egyptology sought to become a field of studies on equal

footing with the well-established disciplines of Semitics or the Classics,

in which interlinear glossing was frowned upon. Only recently has it

been relaunched (cf. Di Biase-Dyson, Kammerzell, and Werning 2009:

343–346).

T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 52 Number 4504

4.2 Iconicity of the signs of hieroglyphic writing

The iconicity of hieroglyphic writing and of the pictorial art of Ancient

Egypt are topics that have attracted the attention of Egyptologists for

long, even though systematic studies are of recent date (Tefnin 1984;

Fischer 1986; Assmann 1988; Goldwasser 1995; Lincke and Kutscher

2012). The term icon is from Peirce’s typology of signs. In contrast to a

symbol, which Peirce defines as a conventional sign related to its object

in an arbitrary way, an icon is a sign that “stands for something merely

because it resembles it” (“Contribution to a philosophy of notation,”

CP 3.362, 1885). Icons “serve to convey ideas of the things they repre-

sent simply by imitating them” (“What is a sign?” EP2: 5, 1894). Any

picture that is similar to the object it represents is an icon of this object.

The additional insight that “all pictures, depend [also] upon conven-

tions” (“Prolegomena to an apology of pragmaticism,” CP 4.530, 1906)

does not make pictures symbols or partially symbolic signs because the

predominant mode of representation determines the class to which a

sign belongs.

What does Peirce have to say about the iconicity of hieroglyphs in

particular? Since his earliest writings, in which he still called the icon a

copy or a likeness, Peirce has given hieroglyphs as an example of iconic

signs. In 1866, he wrote:

I must call your attention to the differences there are in the manner

in which different representations stand for their objects. In the first

place there are likenesses or copies – such as statues, pictures, emblems,

hieroglyphics, and the like. Such representations stand for their objects

only so far as they have an actual resemblance to them – that is agree

with them in some characters. The peculiarity of such representa-

tions is that they […] stand for whatever they resemble and resemble

everything more or less. (“The Logic of Science, Lowell Lecture VII”

W 1: 467)

Peirce makes no pretense to Egyptological originality when he exempli-

fies, in his early paper of 1866, the iconic sign by means of hieroglyphs

and “statues, pictures, and emblems,” but even after his first in-depth

studies of the Egyptian language of 1892 and 1893, he continues to

affirm that the Egyptian hieroglyphs are essentially iconic signs.

From today’s perspective, Peirce overemphasizes the iconicity of

the hieroglyphs and he tends to simplify the semiotic complexity of

the Egyptian writing system, at least when he refers to the hieroglyphs

in papers on signs in general. In 1894, for example, Peirce’s assess-

ment is:

[In] the Egyptian language [. . .] the writing is all in pictures. Some

of these pictures came to stand for sounds,—letters and syllables. But

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Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

others stand directly for ideas. They are not nouns; they are not verbs;

they are just pictorial ideas. (“What is a sign?” EP2: 7)

The view that the hieroglyphs, except for the ones that stand for

consonants (not for “letters”!), are “all in pictures” certainly echoes

pre-Egyptological views on the pictorial nature of hieroglyphic writing,

such as the ones disseminated by Le Page Renouf (see sect. 4.4). Peirce

is correct when he states that some hieroglyphs stand for consonants

or sequences of several phonemes. This statement refers to the pho-

nographic part of the hieroglyphic writing system. However, what he

says about the other hieroglyphs that stand “directly for ideas” requires

a closer examination from the point of view of modern Egyptology.

Table 1 contrasts some of Peirce’s statements with views generally

accepted in modern Egyptological linguistics.

Table 1. Peirce’s comments on the Egyptian language of 1894, confronted with

insights from modern Egyptology.

Peirce, “What is a sign?”

(EP 2: 7, 1894) Insights from modern Egyptological linguistics

The writing is all in

pictures. All hieroglyphic graphemes are pictorial in shape.

Some of these pictures

came to stand for

sounds,—letters and

syllables.

A limited number of hieroglyphic graphemes cor-

respond to a single consonant or a sequence of two

consonants. Especially the phonograms representing

a single consonant have a particularly high token

frequency.

But others stand

directly for ideas. Besides phonograms there are meaningful signs—

logograms and classifiers. Logograms prototypically

correspond to lexical morphemes of spoken language.

Classifiers are without counterparts in oral language.

They are attached to lexemes, word forms, or phrases.

They are not nouns;

they are not verbs; these

are just pictorial ideas.

Since the hieroglyphic writing system employs no

signs corresponding to vowels, the vocalic tiers of

spoken word forms left no direct traces in written

language. Hence, the contrast between different parts

of speech based on the same root may be neutralized

in writing.

When Peirce states that hieroglyphs, except for the phonographic ones,

“stand directly for ideas,” he adopts the terminology of his time. James

Mark Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology of 1901, to

which Peirce contributed numerous entries, defines an “ideogram (or

-graph)” as a “written sign or symbol, not a name, which conveys its

meaning by its own form, being often a pictorial representation (a pic-

tograph) of the object symbolized.” The article goes on to disseminate

the prejudice of its time that the “ideograph characterizes an important

stage in the primitive evolution of writing […]. Our own language and

those from which it is derived are of course phonographic. As examples

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of ideographic records may be cited […] Egyptian hieroglyphics”

(Jastrow 1901: 507).

Today, the term ideogram has become replaced by the one of logo-

gram in Egyptological and in general linguistics. The term is more

precise insofar as it substitutes the implicit reference to the notion of

“idea” for a reference to lexical and morphological units of language

of the respective writing system. In the Egyptian language, there are

lexical and morphological logograms (lexicograms and morphograms).

Although lexicograms may be images of what they represent, as in the

case of ssm.t, ‘horse,’ they are not icons of their objects at all, in

other cases. However, those lexicograms that are not iconic at first sight

usually do depict something that is still somehow related to what they

represent. For example, the logogram for ‘wine,’ , certainly represents

nothing wine-like, but since it depicts a bundle of two jars, is in a met-

onymic relation with ‘wine’ (for these types of relations, cf. Lincke and

Kutscher 2012: 130–133). Nevertheless, lexicograms may also, albeit

rarely, be iconic representations of things that are quite different from

their referential object. For example, the lexicogram stands for z#

‘son,’ but it has the shape of a bird.

From the point of view of Peirce’s typology of signs, the term icon

is therefore especially applicable to hieroglyphs of the (horse)-type.

Since, in Earlier Egyptian, an average of about two thirds of all the

tokens in hieroglyphic texts consist of uniconsonantal phonographic

(“alphabetic”) signs and, in addition, the logographic hieroglyphs are

not all iconic ones, the conclusion is that hieroglyphic texts do not

predominantly consist of iconic signs. Probably no more than 20 per-

cent of an average text written in hieroglyphs are iconic signs. If we

apply Peirce’s icon-index-symbol trichotomy to hieroglyphic writing,

the conclusion is that hieroglyphs are for the most part symbols, that

is, signs by convention or habit, even though they are “all in pictures.”

Undoubtedly, this holds true at the level of tokens.

At the level of types, things are a little trickier. In addition to the

limited set of fully conventionalized signs, there is an open set of iconic

signs (see sect. 4.4). The great majority of the latter are repeater-like

classifiers that specify pictorially the meaning of the preceding sequence

of phonograms. All repeater-like classifiers are in complementary distri-

bution. They are the allographs of a very general grapheme whose func-

tion is to specify something like “〈idem〉.” In other words, they are the

product of a rule that says “Add to the preceding lexeme, word-form,

or phrase X a sign representing the referential object of X.” Hence, the

predominance of symbolic signs is also true of the hieroglyphs as types.

4.3 The hieroglyphs in light of Peirce’s typology of iconic signs

Only from 1903 onwards did Peirce begin to elaborate and extend his

typology of signs that had mainly been restricted to the icon-index-

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Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

symbol trichotomy during the years of his in-depth Egyptological stud-

ies in the 1890s. In the first stage of the extension of his classification,

Peirce introduced two trichotomies of iconic signs whose application to

the hieroglyphs may contribute valuable insights. One is the division of

icons into iconic qualisigns, sinsigns, and legisigns (“Nomenclature,” CP

2.254–263 and EP 2:294–296, 1903). The other is the division of icons

into images, diagrams, and metaphors (“Sundry Logical Conceptions,”

CP 2.277, and EP 2:274, 1903).

By applying the first of the two trichotomies, it is possible to solve

the debate about the alleged overlap between iconic and symbolic

signs of writing. It has often been asked whether iconic hieroglyphs

and other iconic signs of writing are not also symbols since they are

equally determined by conventional rules. In the framework of his

system of the ten main classes of signs of 1903, Peirce answers this

question by introducing his distinction between iconic and symbolic

legisigns. Legisigns are a class of signs determined by a law, a rule, or a

convention. Any kind of writing, whether phonographic, logographic

or ideographic, is a system of legisigns, but there are other legisigns,

such as symbolic gestures, national flags, or noniconic traffic signs,

that are not signs of writing.

There are iconic, indexical, or symbolic legisigns. An iconic lexico-

gram, such as , ‘horse,’ is an iconic legisign, the noniconic lexico-

gram , ‘son,’ is a symbolic legisign. Both are legisigns because they

are conventional or lawlike signs. The lexicogram , being similar to

its object of reference, is an icon, whereas the lexicogram , dissim-

ilar to its object, is a symbol. These two signs represent two distinctive

groups in the hieroglyphic writing system, the ones of symbolic and

iconic legisigns. Notice that the hieroglyph is also used to write the

meaning of duck. Hence, there are two homographic logograms with

two distinct meanings. When used to represent the idea of a duck, the

hieroglyph , which is a symbolic legisign when it stands for ‘son,’ is

an iconic legisign.

Legisigns, also called types, form a class of signs that belongs to

the trichotomy of the interpretant, within which there are two more

classes of signs, sinsigns, and qualisigns. A sinsign, also called token, is

a singular sign. Pictures, considered as individual visual representations

and concrete material objects, are iconic sinsigns. The third member

of this trichotomy is the qualisign, that is, “a quality which is a sign”

(“Nomenclature,” EP 2: 291, 1903). No hieroglyph and no picture are

mere (or pure) qualisigns, since a mere quality in its suchness cannot

represent anything except, perhaps, for itself. Furthermore, a quality

needs to be embodied before it can act as a sign (ibid.), but once it is

embodied, it is actually a sinsign since all tokens of a type are sinsigns.

Here it becomes evident that there is a relation of inclusion between

qualisigns, sinsigns, and legisigns. The categorically higher types of sign

include the categorically lower ones, but not vice versa. Symbolic as

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well as iconic legisigns, which are phenomena of Thirdness, include sin-

signs, phenomena of Secondness, insofar as legisigns need to be embod-

ied if they are to act as signs in communication. Embodied legisigns

(types) are sinsigns, singular signs or the tokens of a type. As legisigns,

the lexicograms and have no concrete existence. They are actu-

alized only in the form of their tokens or replicas, which are sinsigns.

Furthermore, since tokens can only represent through the qualities of

shape and color, sinsigns also include qualisigns.

Egyptian Hieroglyphs were executed in a variety of techniques, for

example, in raised or sunk relief (with or without coloration), in carv-

ing or line drawing (with or without internal details), in painting (with

near-natural or plain-colored filling). In a text written in black hiero-

glyphs, the token of the iconic legisign evinces the quality of

blackness in addition. The token of this legisign thus includes a qual-

isign of blackness. However, this does not mean that the legisign

represents a black horse. The idea of a black horse would have to be

represented by means of a sequence of legisigns. The first is the iconic

legisign ssm.t, ‘horse,’ alternatively also written phonographically as

the sequence of consonantal phonograms plus an iconic horse classifier

. The second is the symbolic legisign , which stands for

the adjective km.t, ‘black.’

The subdivision of icons into images, diagrams, and metaphors is

relevant to the study of iconicity of hieroglyphic writing as well as to the

study of pictures in general. Images “partake of simple qualities” (CP

2.277), which they share with the object they represent. This definition

applies to ordinary pictures as well as to the iconic hieroglyphs. The

hieroglyph of a horse in the shape of a horse or of a pyramid in the shape

of a triangle, , representing the silhouette of a pyramid, are examples

of icons of the image class. The same is true of ordinary drawings of

horses or pyramids. What distinguishes the two is that the hieroglyph is

an iconic legisign, whereas the drawing is an iconic sinsign.

Diagrammatic icons are signs that “represent the relations, mainly

dyadic, or so regarded, of the parts of one thing by analogous relations

in their own parts” (ibid.). In other words, diagrams are icons whose

similarity to their object is restricted to the representation of the rela-

tions between their elements. Typical examples of diagrammatic icons

are subway maps, infographics, statistical graphs and logical graphs.

Syntactic structure constitutes a diagram, whether represented in the

form of a tree diagram, a box diagram, as a dependency diagram, or

only mentally. In fact, grammar in general (cf. Shapiro 1983) and all

semiotic systems are of the nature of a logical diagram. Spoken Egyptian

is no different from any other language in this respect, but the classifiers

in its writing system (see below, sect. 4.4) constitute an extra character-

istic of its diagrammatic iconicity.

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Although Peirce introduced the terms image and diagram only in

1903, he had distinguished between the two kinds of icons earlier. In

c.1895, Peirce discusses diagrams as “icons of the algebraic kind” and

images as “icons of a non-logical kind.” In this context, Peirce inter-

prets language structure in general as diagrammatic and hieroglyphic

signs in particular as images. However, in contrast to his above-quoted

statement of c.1894, that in “the Egyptian language […] the writing is

all in pictures,” he now restricts himself to saying that “there are” iconic

hieroglyphs:

That icons of the algebraic kind, though usually very simple ones,

exist in all ordinary grammatical propositions is one of the philo-

sophic truths that the Boolean logic brings to light. In all primitive

writing, such as the Egyptian hieroglyphics, there are icons of a

non-logical kind, the ideographs. In the earliest form of speech, there

probably was a large element of mimicry. But in all languages known,

such representations have been replaced by conventional auditory

signs. These, however, are such that they can only be explained by

icons. But in the syntax of every language there are logical icons of

the kind that are aided by conventional rules. (“That Categorial and

Hypothetical Propositions are one in essence,” CP 2.280; c.1895)

In sum, whereas the morphology and syntax of all languages is dia-

grammatically iconic, only “ideographic” languages have iconic signs of

writing that belong to the class of images. Two issues of particular inter-

est from the perspective of general linguistics in this context are the

hypothesis that all languages have evolved from iconic signs (on which

more will be said in the last section of this paper) and the claim that

the conventional signs of any spoken language “can only be explained

by icons.” An explanation of a language is evidently a grammar or a

grammatical analysis of it. With this thesis, Peirce apparently reiterates

the claim that grammars are diagrams, which is only a specific instance

of the more general Peircean semiotic postulate that “all valid necessary

reasoning is in fact thus diagrammatic” (“Lessons from the history of

science,” CP 1.54; c.1896).

4.4 The Egyptian classifiers

In the glosses to Peirce’s analysis of the inscription of Weni from Abydos

(Figures 6–7), the comment Picture appears three times. The first is at

the bottom of the second of the three columns next to the hieroglyph

and below the word “stone” (Figure 6; in Figure 7, line 3, left). The

second is in the upper part of the third column. Here, the gloss states

pyramid / Picture, next to the hieroglyph (in Figure 7, line 3 right).

The third is further down in the same column to the right of the word

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nêfêr and below the hieroglyph (in Figure 7, last line, center right).

The three instances that Peirce glosses as Picture are cases of so-called

hieroglyphic classifiers.

Classifiers, formerly “determinatives,” have only been a subject of

more detailed analysis for the past two decades (Goldwasser 2002; Lincke

2011). They occur only in Written Egyptian and are without a counter-

part in Spoken Egyptian, i.e., they are not “pronounced.” As elements of

graphic form with meanings of their own, they are grammatically bound

morphemes, whose function is to indicate that the form to which they

are attached belongs to a particular semantic class. Hieroglyphic classi-

fiers are rather similar to the classifiers of languages with morphological

classifiers (which are pronounced), but in contrast to these languages,

which have only noun and numeral classifiers, Hieroglyphic Egyptian

has also verb classifiers (Lincke and Kammerzell 2012).

For example, in the Old Egyptian chronolect of the 3rd millen-

nium, the word form o#, ‘door, cover, lid,’ contains in its written

form the classifier . This classifier marks the object represented by

this word (its referent) as belonging to one and the same category as

the one of words such as jn(r), ‘stone,’ Db.t, ‘brick,’

w#D, ‘malachite,’ bj#, ‘ore,’ rwjj.t, ‘architrave,’ or

z(#)T, ‘libation stone.’ The classifier , also glossed by Peirce as Picture,

is a word form classifier in bnbn.t, ‘pyramidion.’ It is also a

referent classifier in the name of the pyramid , whose most

likely reading is Xo-Mr.n-row-nfr ‘Maliniliidu-will-appear-in-perfect-

state’. Other occurrences of this classifier in the Old Kingdom can be

found in the words m(H)r, ‘pyramid,’ n’.t, ‘pyramid com-

plex,’ Hr.j, ‘plateau of the Giza necropolis’ and in many pyramid

names.

These examples show that Peirce’s term Picture for the classifiers in

his MS 1208 of 1892/93 is a semiotic misnomer. A hieroglyphic clas-

sifier is not a picture of an actual object within the category marked

by the classifier. Instead, it represents a prototypical member of this

category. The categories created by classifiers are not natural ones. They

are language and culture specific and in this sense conventional. An

element of motivation is inherent in most classifiers. However, to cate-

gorize various kinds of stones together with such diverse objects such as

door, cover, lid, ore, or architrave is certainly hardly natural.

When Peirce chose the misleading term Picture to gloss the classi-

fiers of his text, he may once more have done so under the influence

of Le Page Renouf, who also uses the expression “pictures of the object

spoken of ” to designate classifiers, albeit not as a technical term:

Almost every Egyptian word is followed by an ideographic sign, which

is either the picture of the object spoken of, or a conventional sym-

bol of the class of notions expressed by the word. The word ȧḥ, an

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Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

ox, for instance, may be written or , the sign being the

picture of the animal, and a hide, being the recognized symbol of

all quadrupeds. These two kinds of ideographic signs, when placed

at the end of words are called determinatives. Those of the first kind

we shall call ideograms, those of the second generic determinatives. (Le

Page Renouf 1875: 2)

On the other hand, Peirce was certainly familiar with the basic prin-

ciples of hieroglyphic classifiers. He knew that these were not always

pictures of material objects, but could also be “conventional symbols

of the class of notions,” as Le Page Renouf put it. To call classifiers

“pictures” or to define them as icons of the image type is acceptable

in case of an image iconic classifier such as the one that shows a sit-

ting woman, , to indicate that the preceding lexeme, word form,

or phrase represents a female person. This is a typical member of the

group of taxonomic classifiers, which are, in varying degrees, image-

iconic (Lincke 2011; Lincke and Kammerzell 2012). A particularly

high degree of iconicity is characteristic of classifiers that represent

the same object as their host. This type of classifier has similarities

with the so-called “repeaters” among spoken language classifiers (but

they are, of course, not repeaters in the strict sense of the word since

they differ in form from the phonographically written host). A lucid

example is the sign that occurs as classifier only in the context of a

single word form, namely, Tb.t, ʻsandal.ʼ

The number of classifiers that are completely dissimilar to the class

of objects they classify is rather limited in Egyptian. Good examples

are (used on a variety of nouns and verbs referring to undesirable

things or states) and , which in Late Egyptian may be a residu-

ous class marker. However, even these two abstract classifiers acquired

their classifying functions only secondarily (cf. Figure 8, below; cf.

Lincke and Kammerzell 2012: 72–75 for another case of this kind).

Diagrams need not have a visual representation on paper; grammati-

cal diagrams are first of all mental diagrams. However, it must always

be possible to represent a mental diagram visually. Figure 8 illustrates

how the system of verb classifiers of a single Late Egyptian text, the

Story of Wenamun of Papyrus Moscow 120 (a hieratic text of the

11th century bc), may be represented in the form of a diagrammatic

icon (for more details, cf. Kammerzell 2015). The 114 verbal lexemes

of the narrative are grouped into fifteen major classes marked by the

classifiers Ø (“Zero”), , , , , , , , , , , , ,

, and . A further subdivision is achieved by the use of secondary

signs as parts of multiple classifier constructions. The font size of the

English translation equivalents indicates the relative frequency of the

respective lexeme. The dotted lines enclose verbs that exhibit a varia-

tion in classifier usage.

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Linguistic iconicity and the applicability of its principles to the study

of hieroglyphic texts involve still another issue, namely the one of mul-

timodality. In the rich visual culture of Pharaonic Egypt, the border-

line between images (iconic sinsigns) and written verbal icons (iconic

legisigns) is sometimes hard, if not impossible to draw. Due to the

iconic substratum of the hieroglyphs, which makes the written signs

formally similar to pictures, there is quite often a gradual transition

between these two modalities. Evidence of the fuzziness of the border-

line between writing and image in Egyptian text-image compositions

is the following:

• A key word of the Egyptian verbal-visual culture is the verb ,

zxA, which does not only mean ‘to write’ but also ‘to draw,’ or ‘to

paint.’ Insofar, it is an equivalent of the English verb to record, of

the French verb tracer, or of the German aufzeichnen. Hence, the

verb used to represent the verbal-visual cultural production of

the Ancient Egyptians does not differentiate between the modal-

ities of writing and drawing.

• With respect to their physical characteristics, elements

of Egyptian pictorial representations tend to be highly

standardized (cf. Schäfer 1930; Robins 1994). The production

of images follows rules similar to the ones that apply to

hieroglyphic writing. This allows the transfer of signs from

Figure 8. A diagram of the system and usage of verb classifiers in Papyrus Moscow

120.

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Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

the verbal to the pictorial modality and vice versa with hardly

any modification of their form (Tefnin 1984; Fischer 1986;

Assmann 2009: 74–79).

• Multimodal text-image compositions combining writing

with images are common in Pharaonic Egypt. Among their

characteristics is the existence of so-called ambimodal signs

(Lapčić 2014), that is, elements of the text-image composition

that are not only ambiguous as to whether they should be

interpreted as signs of writing or as images but belong to either

modality at the same time. The occurrence of ambimodal

signs does not mean that hieroglyphic writing is systematically

indistinguishable from images. Ambimodal signs are clearly

restricted to specific contexts at the interface of written and

pictorial representations.

• Hieroglyphic writing is a hybrid system without a fixed set of

graphemes that readers and writers had to learn as a whole.

The hybridity of this system consists in a specific mix of list-

based and rule-based data processing. The core of the system

consists of a closed set of highly conventionalized, though

not in all cases arbitrary, hieroglyphs. This comprises a set of

phonograms (representing a single consonant or a sequence

of more than one consonants), a set of common logograms,

and a set of generic classifiers—altogether no more than 300

graphemes. In addition, there a is a large open class of less

conventionalized signs, up to 2,000 distinctive sign shapes

in 3rd millennium texts, consisting of logograms and highly

specific, mostly repeater-like classifiers. All of the latter are both

meaningful and image iconic. Most of these signs were created

for their specific cotexts during the process of text formation

according to general rules for the design and the interpretation

of hieroglyphs. The same rules also apply to the creation of

pictures. In sum, all hieroglyphs look like pictures, but only

the hieroglyphs of the aforementioned open class convey their

information in the same way as pictures do. Hence, there is not

only multimodality at the interface of words and images, but

there is also writing-internal multimodality.

This in mind, it seems remarkable that Peirce glossed only classifiers

with a high degree of iconicity as Pictures, as in the expressions

o# ‘cover, lid,’ bnbn.t ‘pyramidion,’ and Xo-Mr.n-

row-nfr ‘(the pyramid called) Maliniliidu-will-appear-in-perfect-state.’

He refrained from applying the same term to the less iconic classifier ,

which serves to categorize entities of the royal and divine spheres and

occurs in the word forms nb ‘lord’ and Hnw.t ‘mistress,’

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whether on purpose or not. In this sense, it may appear odd that also

the repeater-like classifier in , hn(w), ‘box, coffin,’ (a sign

with a high degree of image-iconicity) is without the gloss Picture (cf.

Figure 6).

5. Grammar, morphology, and etymology

5.1 Syntactic evidence of the Egyptian “pictorial mind”

Peirce is convinced that the vocabulary and the syntactic structure of

Egyptian, too, are more iconic than the ones of other languages. To

him, this peculiarity of Egyptian is quite consistent with the “pictorial

mind” of their speakers (MS 595, p. 16; c.1893). To understand how

he substantiates this claim, it is necessary to begin with a few remarks

on Peirce’s theory of syntactic iconicity (see also Nöth 2015).

5.1.1 Words as signs and the interpretants of words

It is well known that Peirce distinguishes between the sign, its object,

and its interpretant. The sign is the “the substance of the representa-

tion, or the Vehicle of the Meaning,” whereas the interpretant is essen-

tially its meaning, “that which […] makes its Intelligence” (“Synopsis

of Logic,” MS 1345, microfilm 1163; c. 1896). For example, “looking

at a map, the map itself is the Vehicle, the country represented is the

Natural Object, and the idea excited in the [interpreter’s] mind is the

Interpretant” (ibid.). In relation to its object, the sign is an icon, and

index, or a symbol.

Spoken or written words are essentially symbols because their rela-

tion to their object is determined by a habit and a cultural convention.

However, only words that represent a general idea and the “vehicle” of

which is entirely unrelated to its object are symbols. Onomatopoeic

and deictic words as well as proper names are not symbols. The former

are icons because their “vehicle” is similar to the object they represent.

The latter are indices because they do not stand for general concepts but

denote singular objects.

Since “all thought is in signs,” as Peirce put it in his “Questions con-

cerning certain Faculties claimed for Man” (CP 5.253 and W 2:193–

211; 1868), the interpretants of words are signs, too, mental signs.

Although a word as a sign and the interpretant of this sign ultimately

represent the same (dynamical) object, the interpretant represents it

in a different way, with the result that it may also turn out to be of a

different type of sign. Symbols are too abstract to be fully understood,

agues Peirce. We cannot think by means of symbols alone. This is one

of the “defects of symbols” (CP 6.338, 1908). To understand what a

sequence of symbols, a text, means, the reader needs to interpret some

of its symbols in the form of mental images and others with reference to

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previous “collateral” experience that a symbol and a text cannot convey

by itself since it is too abstract. The former way of interpreting words is

iconic; the latter is indexical:

All thinking is conducted in signs that are mainly of the same gen-

eral structure as words; those which are not so, being of the nature

of those signs of which we have need now and then in our converse

with one another to eke out the defects of words, or symbols. These

non-symbolic thought-signs are of two classes: first, pictures or dia-

grams or other images (I call them Icons) such as have to be used

to explain the significations of words; and secondly, signs more or

less analogous to symptoms (I call them Indices) of which the col-

lateral observations, by which we know what a man is talking about,

are examples. The Icons chiefly illustrate the significations of predi-

cate-thoughts, the Indices the denotations of subject-thoughts. The

substance of thoughts consists of these three species of ingredients.

(“Some Amazing Mazes, Fourth Curiosity,” CP 6.338; c. 1909)

Here and elsewhere, Peirce’s semiotic syntax postulates that the inter-

pretants of logical predicates and, derived therefrom, of verbs and adjec-

tives, are essentially icons, whereas the ones of logical subjects and, by

derivation, of proper nouns as well as pronouns, are essentially indices.

Nouns, by contrast, form a mixed category since they may occur, like

verbs and adjectives, in predicative positions and, like proper nouns,

equally in subject positions.

A predicate, argues Peirce in several papers, is a rhematic icon that

calls up a mental image formed as the result of the experience of many

scenes of the same kind that have left “a sort of composite photograph”

in the interpreter’s mind (e.g., “Reason’s Rules,” CP 5.542; c.1902).

For example, the predicate—gives—to—“conveys its meaning” iconi-

cally “because the interpreter has had many experiences in which gifts

were made; and a sort of composite photograph of them appears in his

imagination” (ibid.).

Furthermore, a verb also evokes the iconic scenario of the syntactic

roles that it presupposes as its logical subjects (a term that includes

grammatical subjects and objects). We know that an act of giving pre-

supposes a giver, a gift, and a recipient of the latter. The verb to give is

thus a “fragment of a possible proposition having blanks, which being

filled with proper names make the verb a proposition” (“On Existential

Graphs,” MS 483, p. 3; c.1901). The blanks (“—”) associated with

the verb give are the slots to be filled by logical subjects. Peirce inter-

prets the latter as indexical signs, whose objects are singular objects of

reference, as in Anthony gave a ring to Cleopatra (“Reason’s Rules,” CP

5.542; c.1902).

The subjects, in the form of the proper nouns Anthony and Cleopatra,

are indexical signs since they refer to individuals who have existed in a

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specific time and place. All proper nouns designate and identify indi-

viduals indexically. The noun phrase a ring, in this context, is less index-

ical because it does not specify a singular object, although it must have

been one particular piece of jewelry, and the scene represented by the

sample sentence can only be interpreted in this way. On these prem-

ises, Peirce attributes indexicality not only to proper nouns, but also

to noun phrases in subject position, since subjects are “either names of

objects well known to the utterer and to the interpreter of the proposi-

tion […] or they are virtually almost directions how to proceed to gain

acquaintance with what is referred to” (ibid.).

However, a noun phrase in a predicative position functions logically

like a verb. It has thus an iconic interpretant. This is what Peirce argues

in a passage of the undated MS 516, in which he calls icons rhemes,

without making the distinction between rhematic icons and rhematic

indices that he introduced in 1903 (see above, sect. 4.3):

Every verb is a rhema. But a common noun is a singular and super-

fluous formation. Its function is the same as that of the Proper Name.

That is, it merely draws attention to an object and so puts its inter-

preter into condition to learn whatever there may be to be learned

from such an attention. Now, attention can only be drawn to what

is already in experience. A proper name can only function as such

if utterer and interpreter are already more or less familiar with the

object it names. But the peculiarity of a common noun is that it

undertakes to draw attention to an object with which the interpreter

may have no acquaintance. For this purpose it calls up in his mind

such an image as a verb calls up, appeals to his memory that he has

seen different objects the subjects of that image. (“On the Basic Rules

of Logical Transformation,” MS 516, pp. 39–40; n.d.)

5.1.2 The case of the Egyptian language

After the above considerations, Peirce moves from these premises

to conclusions regarding the Egyptian language in the undated and

unpublished MS 516. After stating that nouns are logically ambigu-

ous since they are in some contexts indices that draw attention to a

particular object but in others icons that evoke mental images and

the argument that nouns are apparently, for this reason, logically

superfluous, Peirce goes on to examine the nature of nouns of ancient

languages:

A language which, like the Greek does not need to insert the verb

“is” in such a sentence as “The man is wise,” plainly has not yet fully

developed the conception of the common noun. Its noun retains

something of the rhema. This is the case with the Semitic languages,

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Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

which moreover have few common nouns which are not regular

formations of verbs. […] When we come to a language which in

place of the verb “is” puts a demonstrative pronoun, as the ancient

Egyptian does, it is pretty clear that its nouns are more rhemata than

names. (“On the Basic Rules of Logical Transformation,” MS 516,

pp. 40–41; n.d.)

The line of argument that Peirce develops here amounts to saying that

the parts of speech and the syntax of Ancient Greek, the Semitic lan-

guages, and Egyptian are more iconic because their common nouns

are in various ways less indexical than the ones of the Indo-European

and other languages. Whereas in Ancient Greek syntax, a copula

may simply be incorporated in the sentence subject, and the Semitic

languages have few nouns not derived from verbs, the noun phrases

forming the logical subject in Egyptian are more iconic than the ones

of other languages because a copula may merge with the demonstra-

tive pronoun in subject position. What the three languages have in

common is that their verbs merge in some way with their subjects,

respectively, with a demonstrative pronoun in its position. Peirce

explains the linguistic details of this characteristic of the Egyptian

language as follows:

[In] Old Egyptian, there are few words […] which are distinctively

common nouns. Every general word excites a pictorical idea. Even to

the modern student, the pictorial ideograph becomes a considerable

part of the idea it excites; and the influence of the hieroglyphics, the

modes of expression, etc., is to make “a composite of pictures” partic-

ularly expressive in describing the idea conveyed. (“That Categorical

and Hypothetical Propositions are one in essence,” CP 2.354; c. 1895)

Peirce’s first argument, that there are fewer “distinctively common

nouns” in Egyptian than in other languages, repeats what he also writes

in MS 516, namely, that the vocabulary of Egyptian is more verblike

and hence more iconic than the one of other languages. His second

argument, that “every general word excites a pictorial idea,” considers

the nouns of the Egyptian language explicitly from the two perspectives

of the sign and of the interpretant. As signs, nouns are symbols. Peirce’s

definition of symbols as “general representations” (e.g., Lowell Institute

Lectures on “The Logic of Science; or Induction and Hypothesis,”

W1: 468; 1866) is echoed in the expression “every general word.”

When Peirce refers to the “pictorial ideas” excited by these symbols,

he describes how Egyptian minds interpret general words, which are

symbols qua sign, as icons.

The particular iconicity of Egyptian nouns, thus Peirce, results from

the iconicity of their written form. The second evidence of the higher

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degree of iconicity of the vocabulary and grammar of Egyptian that

Peirce adduced in c.1895 specifies the above-quoted argument of MS

516 that in Egyptian sentences, the copula “is” tends to merge with a

demonstrative pronoun in a subject position:

Now our word “is,” the copula, is commonly expressed in Old

Egyptian by a demonstrative pronoun. It is evident that this

demonstrative has in such sentences the force of a relative. Where

is the verb? We feel that it is contained in the general words. (“That

Categorical and Hypothetical Propositions are one in essence,” CP

2.354; c. 1895)

If the idea of the verb, which is an icon in its interpretant, is contained

in the sentence subject, the interpretant of the whole sentence should

be more iconic than in languages where the idea of the verb remains

separate from the one of the noun. Peirce exemplifies his analysis as

follows:

In short, “man is mortal” is expressed in Old Egyptian in a form

which expressed the following psychological process of thinking,

“What is spoken of is man, which what is spoken of is mortal.” This

is precisely the way in which the same idea is conveyed in my general

algebra of logic. (Ibid.)

What Peirce claims here is that the logical subject, man, is being shifted

to a predicative position, is a man, so that its interpretant is more iconic

to the Egyptian “pictorial mind” than to the mind of a speaker of an

Indo-Europeans language. The surface structural syntactic subject, the

nominal clause what is spoken of, turns out to be a logical dummy sub-

ject since it contains only a reference to the act of uttering the proposi-

tion, whose main information is again expressed in a predicative form.

The translated version of the original logical predicate, that is, what is

spoken of is mortal, follows the same syntactic pattern, but the pred-

icate is mortal is now a predicate in both languages. Peirce’s implicit

argument is thus that the Egyptian version of the proposition “Man is

mortal” contains two predicates instead of one, which means that its

interpretant is twice as iconic.

In MS 595, Peirce develops a rather similar line of argument. Here,

the sign whose interpretant he analyses as being iconic is not a sym-

bol (the common noun man), but an indexical word, the proper noun

Aahmes:

That different races regard nouns in sentences in quite different lights,

admits of no doubt […]. Many languages have no “verb substan-

tive”*. [In the footnote, P. criticizes Priscian’s interpretation of the verb

‘to be’ in Greek as meaning ‘happening or inference’] The Old Egyptian

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Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

often has in place of is a relative pronoun. In our way of thinking this

seems very unapt. But the Egyptian had a pictorial mind; and when

he saw a hieroglyphic ideograph of a man, what it said to him was,

“what we are thinking of is a man.” Hence, the sentence “Aahmes is a

man” would be thought by him under the form “What we are think-

ing of is Aahmes which what we are thinking of is a man.Ӡ [Note on

p. 17: The pronoun in question is pw, primarily a “demonstra-

tive.” But demonstratives are used as relatives in almost all languages,

if not in every one.] (“Short Logic,” MS 595, pp. 16–17; c.1893)

The differences between the nominal clauses of the various languages

of the world continue to be the subject of dispute in modern linguistic

typology (Sasse 1993), but Peirce’s assertion that “there are few dis-

tinctively common nouns” in Egyptian cannot be empirically sub-

stantiated. Peirce must have adopted it from Le Page Renouf. In his

Elementary Grammar of 1875, the author argues:

One of the chief differences between the Egyptian language, on the

one hand, and the Indo-European and Semitic, on the other, is that

the distinction between roots, stems, and words can hardly be said to

exist at all in the latter. The bare root […] is almost invariably identi-

cal in Egyptian with the word in actual use. […] The actual Egyptian

word taken by itself is no part of speech, but within the limits of the

notion it represents is potentially noun, verb, adjective, adverb, &c.

(Le Page Renouf 1875: 49)

What remains to be examined, in addition, is whether the Egyptian

nominal clauses constructed with the demonstrative pw really testify

to a “pictorial mind.” What is the linguistic evidence in support of this

assertion? And why does Peirce argue that “this demonstrative has in

such sentences the force of a relative”?

Peirce’s above-quoted premise is that “demonstratives are used

as relatives in almost all languages,” but modern linguistic insight

is that only in some languages, relative pronouns are the result of

a grammaticalization of demonstratives (cf. Heine et al. 1993: 66).

The Egyptian demonstrative pw, ‘that,’ by contrast, is always clearly

distinguished from the relative pronoun ntj, ‘which.’ Furthermore,

Peirce’s above-quoted paraphrase of the Egyptian equivalent of the

proposition “Man is mortal” as ‘what is spoken of is man, which what

is spoken of is mortal’ is not acceptable from a modern point of view.

How can this idea be expressed in a correct sentence of the Egyptian

language?

Since the Egyptians distinguished between different ontological

states of dead individuals (cf. Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae, s.v. #X =

lemma no. 203 and s.v. mwt = lemma no. 69320), the translation of the

English adjective mortal into Egyptian is not easy. To express the idea

T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 52 Number 4520

of mortality, the Egyptians would not use a word form of the root mwt,

‘to die,’ but speak of the ‘(still) living ones.’ This in mind, the proposi-

tion “Man is mortal,” expressed by means of a nominal clause with the

demonstrative pw, would have either of the following syntactic forms:

(1)

onX pw z(j)

live:ptcp dem man:sbst

PREDICATE SUBJECT

Man is mortal.

(2)

z(j) pw onX

man:sbst dem live:ptcp

TOPIC COMMENT

Man is mortal.

Variant (1) expresses the concept of ‘mortal’ by the active participle of

the verb onX, ‘live,’ i.e., ‘the living one.’ This form is then used as the

predicate in the first position of a clause with the demonstrative pw

in its second position, forming the nucleus of the subject, expanded

by the appositional noun z(j), ‘man.’ A literal rendering of this con-

struction would be, “That, namely man, is a living one.” Variant (2)

uses the noun z(j), ‘man,’ initially as the sentence topic, followed by a

cataphoric pw and by the syntactic comment onX, ‘the living one.’ This

might be rendered literally as “That is man: a living one.”

In Written Egyptian, it is impossible to decide whether the syntactic

structure of a nominal clause is predicate–subject or topic–comment,

but it is reasonable to assume that in Spoken Egyptian, intonation,

facial signs or other gestures were reliable means of differentiation.

Contrary to what Peirce believed, the demonstrative pw did not have

“the force of a relative” in either case.

5.2 The origins of indexical words from symbols via grammaticalization in

Ancient Egyptian

Peirce dedicated several pages of MSS 1227 and 1228 to conjectures

on the evolution of prepositions from nouns in Egyptian. In modern

linguistics, this diachronic change is known as grammaticalization. The

reason for Peirce’s particular attention to this topic lies most proba-

bly in his general interest in classifying words as signs, as discussed

above. In 1895, Peirce defined prepositions and prepositional phrases

as indexical signs:

The demonstrative pronouns, “this” and “that,” are indices […].

Other indexical words are prepositions, and prepositional phrases,

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such as on the right (or left) of. […] Other prepositions signify rela-

tions which may, perhaps, be described; but when they refer, as they

do oftener than would be supposed, to a situation relative to the

observed, or assumed to be experientially known, place and attitude

of the speaker relatively to that of the hearer, then the indexical ele-

ment is the dominant element. (“Of Reasoning in General,” EP2: 14,

16; 1895)

Since nouns as signs representing general ideas are symbols but tend to

become (parts of ) indices as interpretants in propositional contexts, as

described above, the morphological shift from a noun to a preposition,

being a shift from a symbol to an index, should be a rather natural one.

However, a noun cannot change to a preposition without any index to

trigger the shift. As a symbol, a common noun is “a sign which refers

to the Object that it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an association

of general ideas” (“The Essence of Reasoning,” CP 2.249, 1903). Peirce

argues that the generality of a genuine symbol creates, in the interpret-

er’s mind, the effect of “a mere dream; […] it does not show what it is

talking about. It needs to be connected with its object. For that pur-

pose, an index is indispensable. No other kind of sign will answer the

purpose” (ibid., CP 4.56; 1893). In sum, a symbol by itself, without an

index, cannot change into an index.

After having collected first data on Egyptian prepositions from the

rather superficial conjectures of Le Page Renouf (1875: 20–30) in 1893

(MS 1228, p. 36–43), Peirce made a second compilation, based on

Erman (1894a: §§ 306–314) in 1898 (MS 1227, p. 34–39). To these

data, he added notes on the “literal,” respectively “original” meaning

of the forms. Some of them are certainly too speculative or not even

plausible, but others offer quite original and most plausible insights

into processes of grammaticalization. As shown in the following, there

are even some notes formulating insights that anticipate etymological

findings recognized by professional Egyptologists only years later and

which can still be found in Egyptological grammars today.

Table 2 presents a summary of Peirce’s notes on the origin and

evolution of Egyptian prepositions. The etymological conjectures

may well be his own. Some of them cannot be traced to contempo-

rary sources, while others have successors in much later Egyptological

writings (e.g., Edel 1955/64: § 755 and Gardiner 1957: § 173). As

the comments in Table 2 show, conjectures 1–7 are essentially still

acceptable to modern Egyptological linguists. Only minor revisions

seem necessary.

However, in light of modern Egyptological linguistics, it is not

likely that Egyptian prepositions always derive from nouns. Some

have developed from a verb (preceded by a relator), an adverb, or an

adjective (cf. Gardiner 1957: §§ 179–181), although these cases are

not common. Gardiner lists a handful of “compound prepositions

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Table 2. Peirce’s notes on the origin of Egyptian prepositions compared with

current standard of research.

No. Form Peirce’s comment (P) on the nominal origins of Egyptian

prepositions with verified or possible source and current

standard of research (C)

(1) P: top ‘upon’ < ‘head’ (MS 1227: 39),

Erman 1894a: § 314 (cf. Brugsch 1867–82: IV 1535–1539)

C: dp- ‘upon’ < dp ‘head.relator’

(2) P: H# ‘behind’ < ‘back of head’ (MS 1227: 39),

Erman 1894a: § 314 (cf. Brugsch 1867–82: III 916)

C: H#- ‘behind’ < H# ‘occiput.relator’

(3) P: Hêr ‘above’ ‘face’ (MS 1228: 35),

cf. Brugsch 1867–82: III 977–978

C: Hr- ‘on’ < Hr ‘face.relator’

(4) P: χnt ‘among’ < ‘nose’ (MS 1227:39),

Erman 1894a: § 314 (cf. Brugsch 1867–82: III, 1108–1109)

C: Xnt- < Xnt ‘front.relator’

(5) P: ter ‘since’ < ‘heart[sic], goal’ (MS 1228: 37),

Brugsch 1867–82: 1554–1556

C: Dr- ‘since’ < Drw ‘end.relator’

(6) P: χeft ‘opposite’ < ‘face’[sic?] (MS 1228: 38),

Le Page Renouf 1875: 28 (cf. Brugsch 1867–82:

III 1078–1080)

C: Xft- ‘facing’ < Xft ‘opposite.relator’

(7) P: χer ‘under’ < ‘testicles’ (MS 1228: 35),

cf. Brugsch 1867–82: III 1120–1124

C: xr- ‘under’ > (!) xr.wj ‘testicles’ (that is ‘under.adjz.du.m’)

(8) P: er ‘to, for’ < ‘mouth’ (MS 1228: 33),

cf. Brugsch 1867–82: III 838–840; Stern 1880: § 531

C: r- ‘(attached/close) to’, related to Sem. *la-

(9) P: ermen ‘until’ < ‘arm’ (MS 1228: 38),

Le Page Renouf 1875: 28 (cf. Brugsch 1867–82: III 858–859)

C: r- mn- < r-mn ‘to-remain.inf ’

(10) P: nesu ‘belonging to’[sic] < ‘tongue’ (MS 1228: 37),

Le Page Renouf 1875: 27 (cf. Brugsch 1872: 12 or Brugsch

1867–82: III 803–806, VI 537)

C: this is not a preposition but n(j)-sw ‘belonging_to-3sg.m’

(11) P: em ‘from’ < ‘body, trunk, side[sic]’ (MS 1228: 33),

cf. Brugsch 1867–82: IV 1669–1670

C: m-‘in, from, with’ [etymology unavailable]

(12) P: Henā ‘with’ < ‘palm branch; servant’ (MS 1228: 36–37),

cf. Brugsch 1867–82: III 961

C: Hno- ‘with’, related to Sem. (cf. Arabic oinda)

(13) P: en ‘to’ (MS 1228: 33), en [relative] (MS 1228: 28) <

‘ocean, great water’ or ‘piss’ (cf. Brugsch 1867–82: III 774, VI

703–704)

C: n-, related to Sem. *li-

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Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

consisting of an infinitive” (1957: § 180), but only two of these have

become fully grammaticalized in Later Egyptian (r-jwd- … r-, ‘to

separate … from’ > Coptic ⲟⲩⲧⲉ, ‘between,’ and r- S#o- ‘to begin’ >

ϣⲁ, ‘until’). A shift in the opposite direction, from prepositions to

nouns, may also have occurred in some cases (since the derivation of a

noun from a preposition is a productive process of word formation in

Earlier Egyptian). For example, in form no. 7, the noun xr.wj, ‘testi-

cles,’ probably derives from a preposition (and not vice versa). In no. 8,

the consonantal form of the preposition is also the one of a noun des-

ignating a body part, but in this case, there are two objections against

deriving the preposition r-, ‘(attached/close) to’ from r’, ‘mouth.’ First,

the semantic shift from ‘mouth’ to ‘attached to, close to’ is not very

convincing. At any rate, it cannot be found in Heine et al. (1993).

Second, this preposition, in contrast to the noun, may be connected

with a Semitic cognate (for more details, see Werning 2014, esp. p.

318). Hence, Egyptian r- ‘(attached/close) to’ is most probably derived

from an Afroasiatic protoform. It cannot be the result of a process of

grammaticalization within Egyptian.

In contrast to the first seven conjectures listed in Table 2, there are

no reliable data to support the conjectures 9–12. In 9 and 10, what

Peirce believed to be prepositions are in fact constructions consisting

of more than one grammatical morpheme, whereas this does not hold

true for the nouns rmn, ‘arm,’ and ns, ‘tongue.’ These only happen to be

phonetically similar to the alleged “prepositions,” but they are etymo-

logically unrelated. A noun for ‘body’ or ‘trunk’ (11) as the origin of the

preposition m-, ‘in, from,’ is not documented in Old Egyptian. Peirce

gives no source for this derivation. He may have assumed the existence

of a lexeme * m, ‘body, trunk,’ from the translation “der Leib, der

Körper, das Selbst” offered by Brugsch (1867–82: IV 1667–70), who

also wrote that and were synonyms. However, the respective

nouns o(w), ‘portion, part,’ and gs, ‘half,’ are etymologically

unrelated to the preposition m- ‘in, from, with.’ In his notes of

1892/93 (MS 1228), Peirce had still relied on sources that standardly

transcribed gs as “ma.” That this was mistaken became known only

after the discovery of the Pyramid Texts in 1880/81. In 1898 (MS

1227), Peirce used already the correct reading g-s

-gs according to

Erman (1894a: § 315) without repeating the earlier mistake. It is also

remarkable that Peirce did not opt in favor of , i.e., Hnk.t. Brugsch

(1867–82: VI 550) had still interpreted this word form as mat, ‘place,’

but today we know that it is to be read Hnk.t, ‘bedchamber.’ The seman-

tic change from ‘place’ to a locative marker is well-attested (Heine et

al. 1993: 172–173) and would have been a better conjecture, but of

course, there is no etymological relation between Hnk.t ‘bedchamber’

and any preposition.

T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 52 Number 4524

To our knowledge, a good grammaticalization source for the prep-

osition Hno-, ‘with’ (12), has not yet been suggested, but Peirce’s

derivation of it from the noun Hnj, ‘plant of the marshes, sedge,’

is not convincing. He may have misunderstood Brugsch (1867–82: III

96), who means something else when he postulates the noun Hun (as he

transcribes the form Hnj), ‘palm or vine branches carrying fully devel-

oped dates and grapes,’ as the etymon of the phonogram Hn. Despite

the homophony of their first two consonants, the two forms Hn and

Hno- are unrelated.

Derivation 13 must be rejected both on morphological and on

semantic grounds. The speculation about a semantic shift from ‘ocean,

great water’ or ‘piss’ to a preposition acting as a dative or benefactive

marker lacks any plausibility. It is also unclear which of the lemmas

designating the meaning of ‘body of water’ and ‘urine’ Peirce may have

had in his mind. Nên or nun, ‘great water, ocean’ (Brugsch 1867–82: III

774), nt, ‘flood, efflux, fluid’ (VI 703–704), or even muīt, ‘efflux, urine’

(VI 555), are possible candidates.

A reason why some of his conjectures on the origins of Egyptian

prepositions went wrong may be that Peirce tried to find a nominal root

for all prepositions, which is not a correct assumption (cf. Gardiner

1957: §§ 179–181). An example of an overinterpretation of this kind

is Peirce’s etymological derivation of m-, ‘in, from, with’, from an

assumed noun with the meaning of ‘body, trunk’ (11) for which he

could hardly have found evidence in Le Page Renouf (1875). In the

MS of 1898, there are two addenda to the notes copied from Erman

(1894a: § 307), which show that Peirce was still in search of other

possible nominal roots for the preposition m-. In the first, his anno-

tation states “#m means fist, Hm[t] (means) woman.” The second note

states “ is imperative of (synonym of to eat), which is a

negative: what is devoured is negatived and in […] (illegible)” (MS

1227, p. 38 [=0068, left]). These observations may be evidence that

Peirce took the path from a body part noun to a preposition as the

default case of grammaticalization, an assumption that is still rather

common in modern linguistics.

With such insights, Peirce was considerably ahead of his time, at

least of the Egyptological authors he had quoted in his notebooks, but

also of those whom he might have studied otherwise. In the grammars

or dictionaries of his time, there are occasional allusions to possible

“original” or “literal” meanings of some Egyptian prepositions, but

as far as we know, none of the Egyptologists of his time ever tried to

demonstrate in detail that Egyptian prepositions had generally evolved

from nouns. In his Grammaire démotique, Brugsch (1855: § 316)

mentions that one group of simple prepositions in Demotic, the later

Egyptian chronolect spoken and written from the 8th century bc to

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Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

the 5th century ad, descended from nominal etyma and consequently

formed the set of “prépositions simples substantives.” “Cette classe

assez nombreuse se compose d’un nombre de signes démotiques qui,

pour la plupart, anciennement ne signifiaient qu’un nom substantif, et

qui, par un emploi singulier, étaient destinés à servir de prépositions.”

However, in his own discussion of these prepositions (Brugsch 1855:

§§ 317–325), there is almost nothing to substantiate this claim, and

Brugsch gives no hint that he assumed a similar path of development

for those elements which already in Earlier Egyptian occurred as sim-

ple prepositions (the “prépositions simples relatives” of Brugsch 1855:

§§ 314–315).

Birch (1857) and de Rougé (1868) are two other important works

on Egyptian grammar of the decades before Peirce began to study

Egyptian, but in his notes on the topic, Peirce does not quote them.

Furthermore, the chapters on prepositions and body part nouns by

Birch (1857: 256–259) and de Rougé (1868: §§ 144–148) say noth-

ing about the evolution of prepositions from nouns. The same holds

true for the first comprehensive study of Hieroglyphic Egyptian, J. F.

Champollion’s posthumously published Grammaire égyptienne (1836:

448–499). For Coptic, Stern (1880: § 531) stated, “Auch die präpo-

sition ist im koptischen aus dem nomen hervorgegangen,” without

suggesting that similar processes of semantic change might have taken

place already in earlier stages of the Egyptian language. So far, it thus

seems that Peirce’s ideas on the evolution of Egyptian prepositions from

nouns must have been his own.

As observed above, prepositions have not evolved directly from

nouns by a simple shift of word category. Instead, the nominal ety-

mon of the preposition must have been preceded by a preposition or

followed by a postposition or a case marker. In the course of grammati-

calization, the former nominal form then took over the function of the

whole construction and thus became a preposition. There are data from

several stages of the history of Egyptian corroborating this assumption.

For example, m- xnw, ‘in the interior,’ became m-

xn-, ‘in,’ and ended in xn- ‘in, at, on, from.’ Similar cases can be

found in Westendorf (1965–77, s.v. ⲃⲟⲗ, ⲥⲁ, ⲧⲏⲣ=, or ⳉⲏ) and have

been described by Werning (2014: 236–237). Most nouns that changed

into prepositions in this way are expressions for body parts or relational

nouns, such as ‘interior.’

The premise that a noun cannot evolve directly into a prepo-

sition is quite in accordance with Peirce’s semiotic linguistics. They

can only have evolved from noun plus relator phrases (i.e., adposi-

tional phrases), for not only prepositions are indexical words but also

prepositional phrases, pronouns, demonstratives, and proper nouns,

as Peirce explains in the passage from “Of Reasoning in General” of

T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 52 Number 4526

1895, quoted at the beginning of this section. In that paper, Peirce

adds the following footnote, which testifies to the breadth of his con-

cept of the indexical expressions, from which prepositions may have

evolved:

If a logician had to construct a language de novo, – which he actu-

ally has almost to do, – he would naturally say, I shall need preposi-

tions to express the temporal relations of before, after, and at the same

time with, I shall need prepositions to express the spatial relations of

adjoining, containing, touching, of in range with, of near to, far from,

of to the right of, to the left of, above, below, before, behind, and I shall

need prepositions to express motions into and out of these situa-

tions. For the rest, I can manage with metaphors. (“Of Reasoning in

General,” EP2: 16; 1895)

In the context of his remarks on the indexicality of prepositions, Peirce

also addresses the meanwhile well-documented finding that the spatial

prepositions of some languages tend to be motivated by the geographi-

cal characteristics of the country of their speakers and concludes with a

note on a geolinguistic peculiarity of Ancient Egyptian:

Only if my language is intended for use by people having some

great geographical feature related the same way to all of them, as a

mountain range, the sea, a great river, it will be desirable to have

prepositions signifying situations relatively to that, as across, seaward,

etc. […] The Egyptians had no preposition nor demonstrative having

any apparent reference to the Nile. Only the Eskimo are so wrapped

up in their bearskins that they have demonstratives distinguishing

landward, seaward, north, south, east, and west. (“Of Reasoning in

General,” EP2: 16; 1895)

Ancient Egyptian had indeed no indexical words referring to the

River Nile. What comes closest to grammatical elements express-

ing absolute orientation with respect to the river are the two verbs

Xntj, ‘sail upstream,’ and Xdj, ‘sail downstream.’

Originally, both designated a particular kind of movement by ship

and a direction. In the course of a semantic shift, no later than in

the early second millennium bc, the meaning of the two words was

extended. Their implication of the manner of movement (‘sailing’)

was lost and in combination with verbs such as Smj, ‘to go (by foot or

by chariot),’ the prepositional phrases m- Xnty.t, ‘in sailing upstream,’

and m- Xd, ‘in sailing downstream,’ acquired the prepositional mean-

ings of ‘southward’ and ‘northward’ or even ‘upward’ and ‘down-

ward.’ However, apparently these expressions became never fully

grammaticalized to the genuinely prepositional meanings of ‘up’ and

‘down’ so that these two expressions are no better counterexamples

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Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

to Peirce’s claim than the German nouns Luv, ‘windward side,’ and

Lee, ‘leeward side,’ are, which have remained nouns without becom-

ing prepositions. The expressions for ‘right’ and ‘left’ in Egyptian are

rather similar to the ones for ‘western’ and ‘eastern,’ respectively, but

they may be etymologically motivated either by a reference to the

Nile (looking upstream, as was the Egyptian custom) or as referring

to the upper culmination of the sun.

6. The hypothesis of the proximity of Egyptian to the

ursprache of humanity

Peirce believed that he could substantiate his judgment on the “strange

minds” of the Ancient Egyptians, delivered when he had hardly begun

to study the language, with a critique of Egyptian word order: “The

very structure of the language is topsy turvy,” was his comment in the

fall of 1892 (MS 1297, p. 3, Peirce’s page number). The reasons why he

found the language of the Pharaohs strange are these:

The same word is generally (as well as I can make out without any

grammar or dictionary) a noun and a verb; there are no conjunctions,

only a few vague prepositions. The adjective always follows its noun,

the subject regularly follows the verb. Their modes of expression are

odd and awkward. Khufu, builder of the great pyramid, says in an

inscription that he planned the temple of Isis. Here is how he says

it “Living Horus King majesty Khufu who living find did-he house

Isis ruling pyramid near house Sphynx above north west which house

Osiris Lord Rusut build did-he pyramid-he near god house which

god that.” Here he describes the great pyramid as that pyramid that is

near the Sphynx that is near the temple of Osiris,—defining the big

by the little. (Peirce MS 1297, pp. 3–4; 1892)

Peirce’s early impression that the Ancient Egyptian language is “odd

and awkward” since the word-to-word translation of one of its texts

into English sounds strange makes one wonder whether this early lin-

guistic judgment was dimmed by an Anglocentric bias.

Robin’s Catalogue shows that Peirce did in fact carry out quite a

number of in-depth studies in general and comparative linguistics.

Although he had “no pretension to being a linguist” (CP 2.328;

c.1902), no less than 127 of his manuscripts are classified as ‘linguistic’

by Robin. The Catalogue also contains many references to manuscripts

dealing partially with linguistic topics (MSS 1135–1261 or MS 427).

The topics range from phonetics, graphemics, morphology, grammar,

lexicography, semantics, translation studies, historical and evolutionary

linguistics and general as well as comparative linguistics. Peirce wrote

papers dealing with aspects of Greek, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish,

French, Basque (MS 1226–1247), and there is even a manuscript for an

Arabic grammar (MS 1243) (cf. Nöth 2002). However, most of these

T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 52 Number 4528

MSS are undated, and the few that are dated, except some early ones

on the English language topics, carry dates after 1892. If this evidence

from Robin’s Catalogue justifies the assumption that Peirce’s in-depth

studies in general and comparative linguistics began only in 1892, it is

understandable that in the very beginning of these studies in general

and comparative linguistics, his opinions on the language of Ancient

Egypt were still more marked by prejudices common in his time than

after his later studies.

Why could Peirce have found the Ancient Egyptian language strange

in comparison to other languages? His early claim that Ancient Egyptian

had a “topsy turvy” structure is reminiscent of 19th century theories

of language evolution that postulated a primitive, i.e., structurally

underdeveloped primordial language, also discussed under the name

ursprache. A year after Peirce began to study hieroglyphs, Otto Jespersen,

in Copenhagen, still defended this theory in a book with the telling title

Progress in Language. His thesis was, “The evolution of language shows

a progressive tendency from inseparable irregular conglomerations to

freely and regularly combinable short elements” (Jespersen 1894: 127).

Peirce was hardly one of Jespersen’s readers, but his own remarks

on the alleged “topsy-turvy” structure of Ancient Egyptian fit together

with the theory of the alleged primitive structure of an ursprache, from

which Hieroglyphic Egyptian was believed to be a not too distant off-

spring (cf. Nöth 1977: 136). Peirce’s remark on the “strange” word

order of the Egyptian language is also in line with the assumption that a

language close to the primitive ursprache could not yet have sufficiently

developed the logic of its syntax. A language that defines “the big by the

little” evokes faulty mental diagrams. It invites its interpreters to put

the cart before the horse (cf. Nöth 1993, 1999).

Actually, there is nothing odd with the above-quoted passage, which

Peirce presents in the word-to-word translation from Byrne (1885: 314),

who had quoted it from Bunsen (1867: V 719–721). The passage is from

the inscriptions of the so-called “Inventory Stela,” a monument near the

Great Pyramid at Giza, which is part of a small temple dedicated to Isis

(cf. Hassan 1953: 113–117 and pls. LV-LVI). This stela outlines the

building and furnishing activities of the temple and the restoration of

the Great Sphinx in its immediate vicinity under King Ghawafwa, better

known under his Greek name form Cheops (ruled c. 2575–2550 bc).

In Peirce’s time, this stela was considered an authentic document of

the Old Kingdom. However, today it is known that the “Inventory Stela”

was only erected during the Late Period (713–332 bc). Some linguistic

features reveal that it cannot even be the accurate copy of an earlier text.

Thus, we are faced with a pseudohistorical document, produced, in all

likelihood, during the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty (664–525 bc). It was most

probably aimed at boosting the significance of the Temple of Isis with

the claim that this sanctuary had been there even before Cheops built

529

Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

Peirce living Horus — King majesty Khufu who living

Hieroglyphs

Modern onX Orw MDdw nzw-bjt %wfw D-onX

live:prs Horus unerring:

pa king-monarch

Ghawafwa give:pp live:

stat.3sm

P find did-he house Isis Ruling pyra-

mid near House Sphynx

H

M gm-n-f prw- Js-t Hnw-t- m(H)r r-gs- prw- Owrwn

find-pret-

3sm house- Isis-f-

clf mis-

tress-f- pyra-

mid towards-

side- house- Sphinx

P above north

west which house Osiris Lord Rusut build

did-he

H

M Hr- mH-t-

jmnt-t n(j)- prw- Wsrw nb- R’:sT#w qd-n-f

on- north-f-

west-f that

of- house- Osiris Lord- Netherworld build-

pret-3sm

P pyramid-he near god house which god that —

H

M m(H)r-f r-gs- Hw-t-nTr n-t- nTr-(t) -tn qd-n-f

pyramid-3sm towards-

side- estate-f-god that

of-f- god-f -this:f build-

pret-3sm

P — — — — — — —

H

M m(H)r n- z#-t- nzw Onw:t:sn r-gs- Hw-t-nTr -tn

pyramid for- daughter-f-

king Hunwitsina towards-

side- estate-f-

god -this:f

‘As true as Horus The-Unerring-One, King-Monarch Ghawafwa—may he be granted to

stay alive—lives: He discovered the Temple of Isis-Mistress-of-the-Pyramid besides the

Temple of the Sphinx on the northwest of the Temple of Osiris-Lord-of-the-Netherworld,

and not only built his pyramid besides the estate of the said goddess, but, besides the

same estate, also built a pyramid for Princess Hunwitsina.’

Figure 9. Peirce’s rendering of an Egyptian text passage in MS 1297 compared

with the hieroglyphic original and a modern analysis (abbreviations: 3: 3rd pers.;

f: fem.; pa: active participle; pp: passive participle; prs: present tense; pret:

preterite; sm: singular masculine; stat: stative).

T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 52 Number 4530

his pyramid. Figure 9 reproduces the hieroglyphic text with a modern

transcription below Peirce’s word-to-word translation.

Against the background of the topographical and historical con-

text of the inscription, it is evident, that there is no paradoxical figure-

ground-relation in this text. The much smaller Temple of Isis became

the point of reference for the location of the monumental pyramid

of Cheops because the builders of this stela wanted to make believe

that their monument was older and therefore more important than the

Great Pyramid. A further objection to Peirce’s judgment about the “odd

and awkward” and, therefore, primordial nature of the Egyptian lan-

guage in MS 1297 is that his example is from a source more than two

millennia younger than the earliest attestations of Ancient Egyptian.

It is true, however, that these crucial pieces of information were still

unavailable in Peirce’s days.

Peirce was convinced of the proximity of Ancient Egyptian to

the ursprache of humanity, as we can see from an aside of 1893 on the

“Old Egyptian language, which seems to come within earshot of the

origin of speech” (CP 4.49). From the perspective of modern evolution-

ary linguistics, from which it is now clear that humans must have had

a relatively well developed language already 200,000 (Donald 1991:

122) or even 400,000 (Müller 1990: 89) years ago, it seems strange that

Peirce committed such a gross error in estimating the age of human lan-

guage. However, it is true that 19th century scholars knew little about

the temporal origin of the human species. In his Eighth Lowell Lecture

of 1903, Peirce speaks of “the twenty or thirty thousand years during

which man has been a thinking animal” (CP 5.591). This estimate may

well be borrowed from Haeckel’s History of Creation (1887: 298), where

the “German Darwin” summarizes the general scholarly consensus of

his time on this topic with the words, “beyond doubt, the human race,

as such, has existed for more than twenty thousand years.”

Furthermore, even renowned 19th century Egyptologists believed

that the language of Ancient Egypt was relatively close to the hypothet-

ical ursprache and—even worse—that it was a “primitive” language.

The 19th century Eurocentric dogma of the primitiveness of the lan-

guages of Africa left its traces even in the writings of Le Page Renouf

(1875) and Brugsch (1891: 90). The most famous of the defendants

of this theory was perhaps Carl Abel (1884), whose booklet Über

den Gegensinn der Urworte (1884) so much attracted the attention of

Sigmund Freud that Freud published a full summary of it in 1910.

Among the 19th century Egyptologists, Le Page Renouf adhered to

the thesis of the evolutionary primitivity of the Egyptian language and

mind. His opinion was that “it is difficult to conceive the Egyptians

otherwise than incapacitated by their language from profound philos-

ophy” (1884: 60).

531

Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

Peirce’s own early verdict, ten years after Le Page Renouf ’s judgment,

was still that “the Egyptian language is an excessively rude one” (EP2:

7; 1894). He was also of the opinion that “Egyptian hieroglyphics”

was “primitive writing” (CP 2.280; c.1895). This prejudice, together

with the claim that alphabetic writing is culturally more advanced and

cognitively superior, has had supporters until recently (as discussed by

Assmann and Assmann 1990: 9 and Assmann 2015: 115–120).

The high degree of iconicity that Peirce attributed both to spoken

and written Ancient Egyptian also fits well together with the wide-

spread theory of the origins of language from iconic signs and gestures,

already discussed in Plato’s Cratylus. Peirce’s own remarks on the topic

are the following:

In intercommunication, too, likenesses are quite indispensable.

Imagine two men who know no common speech, thrown together

remote from the rest of the race. They must communicate; but how

are they to do so? By imitative sounds, by imitative gestures, and by

pictures. These are three kinds of likenesses. It is true that they will

also use other signs, finger-pointings, and the like. But, after all, the

likenesses will be the only means of describing the qualities of the

things and actions which they have in mind. Rudimentary language,

when men first began to talk together, must have largely consisted

either in directly imitative words, or in conventional names which

they attached to pictures. The Egyptian language is an excessively

rude one. It was, as far as we know, the earliest to be written; and

the writing is all in pictures. Some of these pictures came to stand

for sounds,—letters and syllables. But others stand directly for ideas.

They are not nouns; they are not verbs; they are just pictorial ideas.

(“What is a sign?” EP2: 6–7; c.1894)

With this remarks on the “rudeness” of Ancient Egyptian right next to

remarks on the “rudimentary” ursprache, “when men first began to talk

together […] in directly imitative words,” Peirce clearly takes up once

more the topic of the proximity of the Ancient Egyptian language to

the origins of language addressed in 1893. After all, both the adjective

“rude” and the noun “rudeness,” from Latin rudis, connote the idea

of ‘uncultured.’ The idea that the ursprache of humans had a vocabu-

lary consisting largely of “directly imitative words” and “conventional

names attached to pictures” was widely debated in Peirce’s century as

the theory of the iconic and indexical origins of human protolanguages

(cf., e.g., Koch 2008).

However, the evidence that Peirce gives for the alleged “rudeness” of

Ancient Egyptian is not from a vocabulary of “directly imitative” words,

i.e., from words of image iconicity, but from the morphology and syn-

tax of the language, i.e., its diagrammatic iconicity, from which he

T R A N S A C T I O N S Volume 52 Number 4532

adduces “strange” examples. When Peirce attributes a “topsy turvy” or

an “odd and awkward” structure to the Egyptian language in 1892, he

complains about a lack of diagrammatic iconicity in the syntactic struc-

ture of this ancient language, which would make the language more

transparent. Evidence that diagrammatic order lacks in the Ancient

Egyptian language would corroborate Le Page Renouf ’s claim as to the

incapacity of their speakers to develop a “profound philosophy.”

Three years later, in c.1895, however, Peirce attributes diagrammatic

iconicity to all languages, when he says that there are “logical icons in

the syntax of every language,” as quoted above from CP 2.280. As early

as 1893, Peirce even seems to have given up his complaint about the

lack of diagrammatic iconicity in the Egyptian language. One year after

his first studies of Egyptian, he already suggests, that the Egyptian way

of constructing sentences may even be more natural than the syntactic

constructions of the Indo-European languages:

Now to one who regards a sentence from the Indo-European point

of view, it is a puzzle how “which” can possibly serve the purpose in

place of “is.” Yet nothing is more natural. [….] “Aahmes what we

write of is a soldier which what we write of is overthrown,” means

“Aahmes the soldier is overthrown.” Are you on the whole quite sure

that this is not the most effective way of analyzing the meaning of a

proposition? (“The essence of reasoning,” CP 4.49; c.1893)

Whereas in this quote of 1893, Peirce still attributes pictorial thought to

the Ancient Egyptians only in an interrogative mood, he is quite affir-

mative in 1902, when he states that “in Ancient Egyptian, it seems that

the pictorial way of thinking, so prominent in the hieroglyphics, was

more influential in their thought than it is with us” (L 75). Since pic-

torial thought was a characteristic of Peirce’s own mind, as he declared

in autobiographical remarks, his own way of way of thinking may have

attracted him to the study of the Ancient Egyptian language. In 1909,

Peirce declared, “I do not think I ever reflect in words: I employ visual

diagrams, firstly, because this way of thinking is my natural language

of self-communion, and secondly, because I am convinced that it is the

best system for the purpose” (MS 619; 1909).

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

fkammerzell@hotmail.com

aleksandra.lapcic@hu-berlin.de

noeth@uni-kassel.de

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1. This study has been made possible by the generous support of the Excellence

Cluster 264 “Topoi – The Formation and Transformation of Space and Knowl-

edge in Ancient Civilizations.”

533

Charles S. Peirce’s Egyptological Studies • Kammerzell, Lapčić & Nöth

2. The authors wish to express their gratitude to André de Tienne, Director and

General Editor, Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University-Purdue University,

Indianapolis, for comments on the first part of this paper and for preliminary

information on the contents of W 9, still in preparation when this study came

to its conclusion.

3. Thanks are due to Helmut Pape, who has drawn the authors’ attention to the

Egyptological relevance of MS 595.

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