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
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