What Is a Hieroglyph ?

Abstract

We consider two unrelated traditions of hieroglyphic writing, Maya and Egyptian, to discuss distinctive features of such mixed, logo-phonetic writing systems. Hieroglyphic scripts are characterized by their sustained pictoriality and by sign forms that are not reducible to stroke, line patterns or fonts. Moreover, the systems are tightly integrated with a broader aesthetic culture, and represent an encyclopedically dense mode of visual communication. Independent of instrumentalist ideologies of communication often associated with alphabetic writing, hieroglyphic writing goes far beyond that function of supposed, reductive transparency. Implicit meta-discourses point to the fundamentally distinct ideologies of hieroglyphic writing. Hieroglyphic signs do not just stand for linguistic values : they are inviolable things in their own right, suggesting a particular ontology and a capacity for performance. Excess, on both the visual and the semantic levels, distinguishes hieroglyphic writing, and can be variously accentuated in diverse contexts. At once inviting and exclusionary, the two systems thrived for millennia in diverse and changing societies, in inextricable collaboration with their aesthetic cultures and worldviews.

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