Excise, A Comical Hieroglyphical Epissle

Hieroglyphs

Excise, A Comical Hieroglyphical Epissle  [ edit ]

This satirical letter exploits the mysterious, yet playful, properties of the ancient Egyptian script prior to their decipherment. The devil (Beelzebub) writes to Lord Bute to protest a cider tax using a combination of English words and "hieroglyphs." The term "hieroglyphical" is applied to engage the reader, but the hieroglyphs are actually pictures of common objects that are to be read as rebus-writings of words. For example, a drawing of a human eye is used for the pronoun "I" or a toe as the preposition "to." This rebus principle may lie behind the original phonetic values of hieroglyphs, and may even have played a role in the invention of our own alphabet.

Date

1763

Dimensions

H. 26.8cm, W. 19.1 cm

Provenance

England

Museum

Lewis Walpole Library

Accession Number

763.04.01.01