Abstract

In her book, Prophets, Lovers and Giraffes, Dr. Orly Goldwasser puts forward the idea that the determinative system in Ancient Egyptian writings may lend us some insight into the way the Ancient Egyptians perceived and organized the information in their world. And furthermore, she states that this system of organizing the mind can be extended to describe the mental organization system in modern humans. She believes that determinatives, as non-phonetic symbols whose purpose is to give a sphere of meaning to the word to which they are attached, can actually be organized into a hierarchical system that reflects our mental organization.

However, her proposal does not seem to accurately reflect the general organization of the hieroglyphic system, because in her study, her samples were limited to examples from the natural world, rather than also examining determinatives related to cultural items. Having collected a list of all the words from Erman and Grapow’s Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache ending in determinatives depicting vessels of clay, stone, or metal, I found that the hierarchical organization Goldwasser proposed simply was not applicable to cultural objects. And as a result, cannot be further generalized.