How to Carve Hieroglyphs Just Like the Ancient Egyptians Did

In ancient Egypt, writ­ing hiero­glyphs was a high­ly spe­cial­ized skill, one com­mand­ed by only a small frac­tion of the pop­u­la­tion. The fact that there were more than 1,000 char­ac­ters to mem­o­rize prob­a­bly had some­thing to do with that, but the vari­ety of sur­faces on which hiero­glyphs were writ­ten could­n’t have made it any eas­i­er. Depend­ing on the occa­sion, ancient Egyp­tians used papyrus, wood, met­al, and pot­tery shards as writ­ing sur­faces. The most mon­u­men­tal or reli­gious­ly impor­tant texts, how­ev­er, got carved into stone, thus ensur­ing the words a kind of eter­nal life — a par­tic­u­lar con­cern in the cas­es of tomb walls and sar­copha­gi.

There may be lit­tle call to write hiero­glyphs today, but the tech­niques to do so haven’t been lost. In the new video above from the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um, sculp­tor and stone carv­er Miri­am John­son demon­strates how to carve into stone the name of Pharaoh Khu­fu, who built the Great Pyra­mid (and indeed, was buried in it).

The first step is to write that name, sur­round­ed by its car­touche, on a sheet of car­bon paper. This isn’t the brush and ink that the ancient Egyp­tians would have used, grant­ed, but for the rest of the project, John­son sticks to the old-fash­ioned ways. With the image trans­ferred, and using noth­ing more than a mal­let and a chis­el, she carves the hiero­glyphs into the stone not just once but twice.

The first time, John­son carves in “sunken relief,” a tech­nique that involves cut­ting the image out of the sur­face of the stone. The sec­ond time, she ren­ders Pharaoh Khu­fu’s name in “raised relief,” which requires cut­ting out every­thing but the image, cre­at­ing the effect of the hiero­glyphs ris­ing out of the stone. With the for­mer “you see more of the shad­ows”; with the lat­ter, “you’ve got more oppor­tu­ni­ty of putting more tex­ture into the char­ac­ters.” Seen in a state of com­ple­tion — by a lay­man, at least — John­son’s carv­ings would­n’t look out of place in a muse­um exhib­it on ancient Egypt. Even if tools man­u­fac­tured in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry pro­duce a few sub­tle dif­fer­ences from the real thing, give these stones a mil­len­ni­um or two to age, and they’ll sure­ly look even more con­vinc­ing.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed con­tent:

How to Read Ancient Egypt­ian Hiero­glyphs: A British Muse­um Cura­tor Explains

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Roset­ta Stone, and How It Unlocked Our Under­stand­ing of Egypt­ian Hiero­glyphs

What Ancient Egypt­ian Sound­ed Like & How We Know It

3,200-Year-Old Egypt­ian Tablet Records Excus­es for Why Peo­ple Missed Work: “The Scor­pi­on Bit Him,” “Brew­ing Beer” & More

You Could Soon Be Able to Text with 2,000 Ancient Egypt­ian Hiero­glyphs

Watch a Mas­ter­piece Emerge from a Sol­id Block of Stone

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.