Want to understand hieroglyphics? Look at emojis

AFP

How does an academic explain the importance of ancient hieroglyphics to modern audiences glued to their phones? Through the cunning use of emojis.

The Israel Museum in Jerusalem this week opened the “Emoglyphs” exhibition, comparing the pictograms of antiquity with those of today.

“I usually find it very hard to explain how hieroglyphs are used as a script,” said the show’s curator Shirly Ben-Dor Evian.

“Then it occurred to me that some of the things can now be explained more easily because we are all writing with pictures now — it has become very widespread.”

AFP

From the heart symbol to little monkeys and foaming glasses of beer, the pictograms of our own time have enlivened discussion on social media and online messaging since the late 1990s.

Some emojis — from the Japanese word for a combination of an image and a written character — have hieroglyphic equivalents, said Ben-Dor Evian, who argues that the images are a language in their own right.

The exhibition in a small gallery within the Israel Museum welcomes visitors with a wall bearing similar pictograms from both eras.

The modern purple-suited dancer emoji with his hand raised strikes a similar pose to an Egyptian in a loincloth from 3,000 years ago.

“There is a similarity in design and shapes, which is very interesting because there are thousands of years and very big cultural gaps between those two systems,” Ben-Dor Evian said.

In the Egyptian system, hieroglyphs could designate an object or an idea in so-called ideograms, indicate the sound of the word or serve as classifiers specifying the semantic category of the word.

But emoji are self-sufficient in designating an idea, a feeling or an object, and are not intended to be accumulated to form a sentence.