Sign-list EGYPTIAN GRAMMAR LIST OF HIEROGLYPHIC SIGNS IN the following pages an attempt is made to enumerate the commonest hieroglyphs found in Middle Egyptian, to determine the objects depicted by them, and to illustrate their uses. It would be easy enough to augment our list very considerably, though there might be difficulty in finding good forms of the rarer signs which would then have to be included. But such an augmentation might well do more harm than good, by unduly dispersing the student's interest, instead of concentrating it upon the signs most frequently met with. It must never be forgotten that in the eyes of the old Egyptians the hieroglyphic writing always remained a system of pictorial representation as well as a script. Hence the capricious variety exhibited in the more elaborate inscriptions. To take but one example, the sign for' statue' Ii (A 22) is apt to change sex, head-gear, dress and accoutrements according as the context or the scribe's fancy may dictate. This is the principal reason why the printing of hieroglyphic texts is so unsatisfactory. No fount of type is sufficiently rich or sufficiently adaptable to do justice to the Egyptian originals. Indeed, there is only one wholly satisfactory method of publishing hieroglyphic texts, namely reproduction in facsimile. Two possibilities here present themselves, facsimile by hand and facsimile by photography. The objection to facsimile by hand is, of course, the very laborious nature of the process. Facsimile by photography has the disadvantage that it will serve only for perfectly preserved texts. As a second-best alternative, the employment of autography is to be recommended, as in Sethe's Urkultdm der I8. Dynastic and in the Brussels Bibliotheca Aegyptiaca. The printing of hieroglyphic texts in type is really suitable only for grammatical or lexicographical works, especially where the hieroglyphs are to be combined with European characters. The discussion of this question is not without a practical purpose; it aims at impressing upon the student the great desirability of a good hieroglyphic handwritz"ng. Far too lax standards in this respect have been tolerated in the past, and one of our principal aims in creating the new fount of type here employed for the first time was to give a fresh impetus to this side of the hieroglyphic scholar's trauung. The forms shown in the new fount are those normally used in the tombs of the Eighteenth Dynasty, though in some cases earlier forms had to be added in order to elucidate pictorial meanings which by that time had become either modified or forgotten. The beginner may safely use our types as his models, but he must realize that copying from the actual monuments gives a knowledge of hieroglyphic writing unobtainable in any other way. The commonest hieroglyphs received their traditional, relatively stereotyped, forms in the very earliest Dynasties. Misinterpretations and confusions may, therefore, be expected at least as far back as the time of the Pyramid-builders. Some of the objects depicted may have been obsolete at a still more remote date, exx. the three-toothed harpoon of bone 1(T 20) and the form of mast represented by , (P 6). In other cases it is the method of depiction, not the object itself, which had become obsolete by the time that inscriptions began to be plentiful. 43 8