Maˈtʼuww (est. 2020) is a project involving linguistics, history, and art to show how connected we are as humans by featuring Egyptian hieroglyphs, which almost all of today's writing scripts are descended from.
The goal of maˈtʼuww is to portray the phylogenetic relationship of Egyptian hieroglyphs and her descendant scripts, and allow a visual comparison between letters, while backing this up with evidence wherever possible.
Although maˈtʼuww is not the first project to attempt writing script comparison, it attempts to do so holistically as the nature of academia promotes specialisation that limits the broader picture of this area of interest.
We hope to provide a visually informative experience that not only just educates, but also inspires curious minds that are eager to learn more.
Throughout my artistic career, I have dedicated myself to portraits. was interested in the human form, especially facial expressions. However, it got to a point where I did not feel as satisfied when completing a portrait as before. I felt that I was not contributing to art in any way or form with my portraits, especially since cameras existed. The idealistic dream of achieving photorealism with traditional media was shattered, since the labourious hours needed to practise and achieve that was not compatatible with my lifestyle. This was when I thought that I should create art that has a purpose, rather than plain images that look good on walls.
There were attempts to then create art I can allocate a satisfactory purpose for. This birthed attempts of creating a visual novel. Unfortunately, with the over-ambitious scope of this project, several writer blocks, and being inexperienced in making this sort of media on top of receiving close to no help, I decided to shelve the project indefinitely.
The informative aspect of art came to my interest. This was something I had some exposure and experience to, as well as being relevant to my professional career in some aspects. At first I had the idea to start a project something related to my profession, but I turned that idea down as I did not want to burn out from its constant exposure, especially when I needed time to switch off after work.
This inspired me to look into my other non-professional interests for inspiration and see what sort of infographic project I could produce without burning myself out, while serving me leisurely. What immediately came to mind were languages and history. The greatest inspirations were the numerous charts of the Indo-European language family tree. As this was extremely over-done, focused on writing systems as they are so integral to languages. My attention was drawn to Egyptian hieroglyphs upon knowing the myriad of modern writing scripts being derived from it and also being an enthusiast of the Egyptian culture.
I then began to work on two items that would form the backbone of this project: a diagram that portrays the phylogenetic relationship of Egyptian hieroglyphs and its descendant scripts, and a spreadsheet to document the comparison of each letter's lineage. The subsequent roadblock was my lack of programming skills to make this visually appealing. These two pieces of media also lacked the capacity to further inform viewers of its context. It was shelved I finally had help to develop this site.
The main page is the result of combining the two aforementioned media together as soon as I was kindly provided with the necessary support. This was then I decided to christen this project with the name of "maˈtʼuww", which is middle Egyptian for "writing scripts". At this point, while I could have called it a day and decide that this project was complete, I decided to boost the project's informative capacity by aiming to create an information page for each individual writing script, as well as backing it up with citations from sources as credible as possible. I took the opportunity to inlude artistic elements such as maps of areas where the scripts are being used and portraits of the people who use the scripts.
As much as I want to dedicate all my time to this project, real life stands in my way. While the road to completing this project is a long and tedious one, we are slowly reaching our goal.
Jeremy