This article attempts to answer the question: why did the Egyptian script keep a cumbersome and, in principle, unnecessary system of multi-determinatives for more than 3000 years? Almost every word in the script is followed by a few additional “mute” hieroglyphs (hieroglyphs that are not to be pronounced) that provided additional information about the word. As the Egyptian script is first and foremost a communication system, the question to be raised is: what are the “gains” brought by the use of these determinatives into this system that contributed to their retention and extensive usage for thousands of years on the “communication market.” We contend that the conservative answers given in Egyptology are insufficient. The answers to these questions can be found through redefining “determinatives” as “classifiers” that operate as a “classifier system” analogous to such systems in oral languages. Moreover, being of a different medium — script and not speech — the Egyptian multiclassifier word offers the reader a rich array of additional data, unavailable even to other classifier languages.