NUMBERS

THE WORDS OF THE GODS

Hieroglyphic Numbers

In the primal waters at the dawn of time, the Egyptian god Ptah brought himself into being. This bearded god had skin blue as the night sky, and he carried a scepter whose form combined the Egyptian symbols of stability, dominion, and life. In his heart, Ptah conceived of the world, and his tongue turned his thoughts into words. At the sound of his voice, the universe changed. The amorphous eight gods of the Ogdoad, including the primeval waters, darkness, chaos, and the invisible power, came together. There they formed the primeval mound, the first piece of the earth. The act drained the power of the Ogdoad and the mound became their tomb, but their sacrifice created the birthplace of the sun, the father of the Egyptian pantheon.

This mound was the center of the earth, which the Egyptians believed resided right in the middle of their nation. The Egyptians called the central part of the world the Mansion of the Life Force of Ptah, which the ancient Greeks translated as Aigyptos, the origin of our word "Egypt."

The magic of Ptah's words created the world, and words in ancient Egypt had real power. This was especially true for hieroglyphics, which the Egyptians called the words of the gods. These artistic writings, along with other magical diagrams, cover the walls of their tombs and temples. But hieroglyphs are more than mere writing. When Egyptians wanted just to write, they used the hieratic script, a simplified form of hieroglyphs. They used the hieroglyphs only when their words needed a small portion of the same power that Ptah had used to create the world. They used the magic of words to protect themselves from the evil that was in the spirit world.

Such spells usually took the form of either monologues or stories. In monologues, Egyptians spoke directly to the gods, and they would plead with a god for his or her assistance. However, the words contained so much power that these spells contained threats directed at the gods. The magic in the monologues' words was apparently strong enough to prevent divine retribution for their harsh words. Similarly, words infused stories, the second form of a magical spell, with divine power. Hence telling a tale of a god healing another god had the power to heal.

The diagrams that accompanied the hieroglyphs were also magic. Spells granted them the ability to come to life to serve the dead or protect the living. One such spell, the opening of the mouth, allowed the spirits both of the dead and the divine to enter or leave a mummy, statue, or drawing. Ptah's name literally translates into the words "the opener," interpreted precisely in this sense. Ptah, in fact, was the patron god of the craftsmen who built and decorated the tombs and temples of ancient Egypt.

These craftsmen had to create the images according to precise specifications because of their mystical nature. Important objects needed to have more magic and hence needed to be drawn bigger. They also had to be drawn with attention to mathematical proportion so they wouldn't come to life misshapen and malformed. These "magical blueprints" required that all the parts were carefully detailed. Hence the figures took on odd poses to clearly depict each essential body part. Many of the poses also possessed symbolic value and in turn conveyed different occult powers. Egyptians were quite capable of accurately drawing figures in natural postures, but these images were not art but, rather, detailed specifications for their afterlife.

Words had so much power that they were often dangerous, even to their users. The bad parts of a magical story could harm someone as easily as the good parts could help. So when a tale included an evil event such as a murder, it often skipped these parts or made a vague reference to such events. Even the symbols used to make up words presented some danger. Imagine the frustration you'd feel if your soul woke up shortly after your funeral only to be chased around your tomb by the spirit of a venomous snake. This would have happened because some craftsman didn't take the proper precautions when writing a word containing the j sound, whose symbol takes the form of a cobra. A better-trained craftsman would have drawn the snake sliced up or impaled for the safety of the deceased.

There is no mathematics written in hieroglyphs, but numbers are used for the occasional date or quantity. They use a straight vertical line, A, to represent the number one. This is no surprise since virtually every culture uses a similar symbol to represent 1 just as we do. This practice is tens of thousands of years old and far predates writing, which is a mere five thousand years old. It seems to have been started by hunter-gatherers who used notched bones or sticks to record quantities. While it's easy to cut a straight line with a knife across a piece of wood, a curved shape, like our 2, would be needlessly difficult. So, when a denizen of the ice age needed to remember the number 5, he or she would make five straight cuts into a stick. The Egyptians carried on this practice in their writing. Hence, the Egyptian 3 appears as AAA, just like three notches on a bone.

Unlike their contemporaries, such as the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians didn't group their 1s in specific patterns. For example, 4 could be written in one line as [??], or in two rows of two as [??]. This is consistent with their other hieroglyphs, since the layout was concerned more with the aesthetic look of the word than with a systematic layout. For example, the word "day" could be written [??]. These three symbols represented a hut, a mouth, and a quail chick and made the sounds of h, r, and w respectively. Because the first two symbols were short compared to the picture of the quail, it was often written as below, filling up the space on the temple wall more uniformly.

The numbers 1 and 3 had special use in Egyptian hieroglyphs. As we've seen, the symbol [??] can represent the sound made by the letter w, but it could also represent an actual quail. In order to help the reader distinguish between the two, the Egyptians wrote a symbol identical to the number 1 below the drawing when they wished to identify the object and not the sound. Similarly they could pluralize the object by writing the number 3 below it. For example, the following depicts both the singular and plural of fish.

The system of writing numbers as a bunch of 1s has a serious flaw. Look at the number [??]. It's far from obvious that this is the number 21. Too many lines blur together making them difficult to count. The Egyptians, like most ancient cultures, used symbols to represent groups larger than 1. For example, they used [??], a picture of a cattle hobble, to represent the number 10. Using the [??] and the A symbols, they represented numbers up to 99. For example, the number 21 could be written [??].

For larger numbers they used the symbols [??],[??],[??], and [??] to represent 100;...