Typography Tuesday
In his article “On Hieroglyphic Type” in Matrix 6, Winter 1986, pp. 116-129, David Wishart, proprietor of the Hayloft Press, writes:
Faced with a passage of Egyptian hieroglyphs (figure 1), the lay reader may well sympathize with the words of Jean-François Champollion: “All these signs, of such different forms, are constantly mixed together and a hieroglyphic inscription looks truly chaotic; nothing relates to anything else; objects most opposed in nature are in direct contact and produce monstrous alliances.”
Champollion, of course, would go on to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822, after which there became a need for hieroglyphic types to publish about Egyptian writing. Wishart again writes:
During the 1840s several founts of hieroglyphic type were designed and cut to expedite the publication of Egyptian texts; . . . one German (known as the Lepsius or Theinhardt fount., with the signs in outline, figure 2) and one French (with the signs solid, figure 3). . . . A fount (the characters solid, in the French manner), was cut in England for the first English-Egyptian Dictionary and Grammar (figure 5, 1867). . . . A century after Champollion’s decipherment, Sir Alan Gardiner . . . decided to commission a fount for his own use (figures 1 and 4) [for his 1927 book Egyptian Grammar].
