This chapter presents practices of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing that differ from regular hieroglyphic writing by their difficulty and their visual otherness. In a variety of settings, hieroglyphic writing that is altered visually or made deliberately difficult to read is exposed, designed to entice through its otherness and virtuosity, and often boldly affirmative. In other settings, altered writing is additionally withdrawn from view: even without a beholder or reader, altered writing here establishes, through its very otherness, an indexical contiguity with another world. Combined, these practices illustrate how Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was conceived of, and played with, by some of its most proficient ancient users on two defining levels: visually and in its orientation to reading. As implicit metadiscourses, they tell of native Egyptian conceptions of the functions and nature of hieroglyphic writing: not along ideologies of a transparency of writing to meaning or direct access to information, but instead of a writing carrying denser significations and with inherent performative potential. In the inscriptions presented here, writing obfuscates but does notconceal. It entices, it dazzles, it absorbs. Through such delays, significations beyond the words are made experienceable, in and through writing itself, and writing itself is made transformative.

Over a span of a millennium or more, Maya scribes and sculptors in the Maya lowlands used a writing system notable for its formal complexity and close links to imagery. At times, in so-called full-figure writing, glyphic elaboration erupts into a welter of massed bodies, imparting a misleading impression of narrative pictures. Wit and fun seem to abound, along with hints of an exuberant, scribal personality behind certain inscriptions. The stress on physicality ‒ things with interiors, exteriors, and defining edges in between ‒ is thoroughgoing. Efficiencies of graphic presentation lead logically to a design choice, whether to show a full thing-in-the-world, or to abbreviate that display by exhibiting a recognizable feature. As a deliberate category error ‒ is it picture, is it text? ‒ full-figure signs heighten the pleasure of being puzzled. They build in part on the cognitive frissons of the Stroop Effect, in which one set of information collides with another. The pictorial interaction of such signs ranges along one of two extremes: sociable contact that is decorous, restrained, respectful, and an indecorous, emotive striving that might lead to uncertain outcomes. In the most extreme cases, Maya writing oscillates between controllability and a bare containment of feral will in the glyphs.