%D 2015 %T Chinese Approaches to Egyptian Hieroglyphs: liushu and bushou %! Chinese Approaches to Egyptian Hieroglyphs: liushu and bushou %X This paper introduces the achievements of Chinese scholars' studies on Egyptian hieroglyphs by adopting liushu (Six Categories of Writing) since the 1920s. These comparative studies, showing some similarities in structure and in form between ancient Egyptian writing and Chinese writing, helped to shed some new light on understanding Egyptian hieroglyphs. Meanwhile, due to their un-methodical knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphs, some Chinese scholars only mechanically applied liushu and inevitably made some mistakes during their analysis of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Liushu, as a theory to analyze the structure of Chinese characters, is not suitable to be adopted for an analysis of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Instead, the most important achievement of Xu Shen is the classification of Chinese characters in his book Shuowen Jiezi, a major conceptual innovation in the understanding of the Chinese writing system. He is the first to analyze the structure of the characters and to give the rationale behind them, as well as the first to use the principle of organization by sections with shared components called bushou (radicals). Egyptologists should borrow this idea to classify the hieroglyphs and compare the similarities or differences between the Egyptian determinatives/classifiers and Chinese bushou. This study would do much help to understand the development of Egyptian hieroglyphs and the ancient Egyptian world view. %U https://doi.org/10.13173/zeitdeutmorggese.165.2.0279 %0 Journal Article %R 10.13173/zeitdeutmorggese.165.2.0279 %J Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft %V 165 %N 2