The Basenji in Egyptian Hieroglyphs

No scholar agrees on the one indisputable way to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs. The reasons for the debate are many. First, knowledge of the language was lost for more than a millennium. The ancient Egyptians abandoned hieroglyphic text around 400 CE in favor of Coptic, a language that transcribed Egyptian sounds with Greek letters. Moreover, the ancients neglected to leave a dictionary so that future Egyptologists could flawlessly crack the code.

The low literacy rate among ancient Egyptians further complicates the problem of deciphering their language. Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, author of An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, points out that "the exact meanings of many Egyptian words have still to be ascertained. ... The ancient Egyptian scribes were as much puzzled as we are by some of the texts which they copied, and ... owing to carelessness, ignorance, or weariness, or all three, they made blunders which the modern student is unable to correct."

William Kelly Simpson, editor of The Literature of Ancient Egypt, emphasizes this sentiment when he says, "Frequently, a translation is little more than an informed guess."

Fortunately, two key events in the past allow people today to understand the gist of hieroglyphic writing. Especially important was the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799, a slab of carved rock with the same message in both hieroglyphic text and Greek, a familiar language. Furthermore, Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion, the two men who determined the role of phonetic hieroglyphs, paved the way for scholars to understand the construction of ancient Egyptian words. Despite these discoveries, however, we have today only a working understanding of the language—nuances of individual words are still lost.

Several individual hieroglyphs resemble basenjis. The most common one looks like this:

Notice the erect ears, long legs, and curled tail, all distinctive marks of the breed.

That a basenji-like pictogram makes up the word dog is not at all surprising. During the Old Kingdom, when writing was in an early stage of development, the basenji was—based on its popularity in tomb carvings—"the most commonly portrayed type of dog in Egyptian art," claims Patrick Houlihan in The Animal World of the Pharaohs.

Hieroglyphic words use both phonograms and pictograms or ideograms. Phonograms represent sounds. English, for example, is a language that uses phonograms exclusively. The letters b, a, s, e, n, j, i are individual representations of sounds that combine to form the word basenji.

Pictograms or ideograms, on the other hand, are drawings of actual things or ideas. To a speaker of English, a picture of a cow usually means a cow. On the Internet, :--), a common email or chat symbol, represents happiness, while :--( means depression or sadness.