What Changes When a Repertoire Changes? On the Evolution of the Egyptian Hieroglyphs between the New Kingdom and the Ptolemaic Period

When a hieroglyphic repertoire changes, what changes is not only the inventory itself. Most signs and values later regarded as Ptolemaic were already available; what changed is where, by whom, and how densely they could be used. This displaces the figures that have framed the “dramatic expansion” of the script: about 700 signs in Gardiner’s list, more than 7,000 types in the IFAO Catalogue, 2,000–2,500 in the deflated counts for the Greco-Roman period (Collombert 2007; 2023a; Thiers 2023). They answer different questions: sign lists inventory printing types, not ancient usage (Schenkel 1974; Meeks 2004), and the deflated counts exclude variants held to carry no linguistic value.
The argument rests on two orthogonal inventories, graphemic (linguistic values) and grammemic (visuo-spatial values) (Klinkenberg & Polis 2018; 2026), which arbitrate between Collombert’s exclusion of non-significant variants and Meeks’s claim that every variant carries information (Meeks 2007b; 2023b). A decision procedure follows: starting from the graphic stimulus, is its shape attested in the earlier repertoire (always against a given corpus), and does it acquire a new function at either level? Two tests run in opposite directions. Read with classical sign lists, the Theban funerary stelae of Munro’s phases I–V (Munro 1973) show no change in values across the Ptolemaic threshold, only in ductus, some rare sign shapes, and layout. Conversely, the late Eighteenth Dynasty palette of Nehemay (Metropolitan Museum of Art, MMA 30.7.1), inscribed with a hymn to Thoth largely in enigmatic writing (Drioton 1933), is legible with late repertoires: most of the values Drioton flagged as Ptolemaic hold on a new reading, and the procedures involved are already at work.
A repertoire therefore does not date an object; it indexes a written register. Change lies also on a normative axis: the reservation or lifting of a register, the redistribution of areas of use, the formation of school norms. Measuring it requires a reference corpus that includes registers and keeps genres apart.