Ancient Egyptian Writing and Hieroglyphs

The Egyptians began to form a pictographic written language about 5000 years
ago, which they continued to use for more than 3500 years, until about 400 AD.
Eventually, the pictures they used to represent words came to represent sounds.
These symbols, hieroglyphs, or "sacred inscriptions" were adapted for use in
everyday life, in addition to their important religious/mystical identity.

For many years, the earliest known hieroglyphic inscription was the Narmer
Palette, found during excavations at Hierakonpolis (modern Kawm al-Ahmar)
in the 1890s, which has been dated to c.3200 BC. However recent
archaeological findings reveal that symbols on Gerzean pottery, c.4000 BC,
resemble the traditional hieroglyph forms [citation needed]. Also in 1998 a
German archeological team under Gunter Dreyer excavating at Abydos
(modern Umm el-Qa'ab) uncovered tomb U-j, which belonged to a Predynastic
ruler, and they recovered three hundred clay labels inscribed with proto-
hieroglyphics dating to the Naqada IIIA period, circa 33rd century BC.
Egyptologists refer to Egyptian writing as hieroglyphs, today standing as the
world's earliest known writing system. The hieroglyphic script was partly
syllabic, partly ideographic. Hieratic is a cursive form of Egyptian hieroglyphs
and was first used during the First Dynasty (c. 2925 BC c. 2775 BC). The term
Demotic, in the context of Egypt, came to refer to both the script and the
language that followed the Late Ancient Egyptian stage, i.e. from the Nubian
25th dynasty until its marginalization by the Greek Koine in the early centuries
AD.

After the conquest of Amr ibn al-A'as in the 7th century AD, the [[ Egypt, as
evidenced by the Edwin Smith and Ebers papyri. The roots of the Scientific
method may be traced back to the ancient Egyptians. The ancient Egyptians are
also credited with devising the world's earliest known alphabet, decimal system
and complex mathematical formularizations, in the form of the Moscow and
Rhind Mathematical Papyri. An awareness of the golden ratio seems to be
reflected in many constructions, such as the Egyptian pyramids.

Overview

Most people refer to hieroglyphs when they speak about Egyptian writing. It is
a common misconception that the hieroglyphs are pictures that represent ideas
instead of the sounds of the language. While the shapes of the hieroglyphs are
indeed taken from real (or imaginary) objects, most of them are used for their
phonetic value. Take, e.g., the hieroglyph representing a house. It can be used
to write the word pr (vowels unknown) which means 'house'.

The same hieroglyph is used for the word prj 'to come out' due to the similarity
in pronunciation. To leave no doubt as to which word was actually meant, the
Egyptian scribe would add a pair of walking legs underneath the house to
clarify that prj and not pr was meant here.

To further clarify the pronunciation, the hieroglyph for mouth (ro) is typically
added in between the house and the walking legs, so that the whole
combination encodes the word prj like this: "Word that sounds like a word for
house which ends in an r and is related to walking => to come out".
Hieroglyphic writing is thus an intricate mixture of phonetic and semantic
components.Apart from the hieroglyphs, hieratic (a cursive version of
hieroglyphic writing) and demotic (even more cursive and abbreviated) were
employed in Egypt's 3,000-year history of hieroglyphic writing.

As Egypt became part of the Greek and (later) the Roman empire, the
hieroglyphic writing system was replaced by the Greek alphabet used first to
write magical and later Christian manuscripts (Coptic). A few extra characters
had to be added to represent sounds of the Egyptian language which did not
exist in the Greek pronunciation of the time (like, e.g. the "f"). These characters
were taken from demotic.

Hieroglyphic usage

Hieroglyphs were used for most of the surviving forms of written

communication during the Old and Middle Egyptian eras, at least for official
documents; hieratic was already being used for day-to-day administrative needs
during the Old Kingdom. Religious texts during the Demotic era were also
typically written in hieroglyphs when they were inscribed on temple walls and
stelae; hieratic was used for religious documents on papyrus. (Administrative
works were of course written in Demotic.) The last datable hieroglyphic text
was written in 394 AD.

Hieroglyphic syntax

As explained previously, the majority of hieroglyphs seen in any particular text

do not represent the objects they depict. They mostly represent sounds or were
used as "determinatives" to show what type of word was being used.
Hieroglyphic could be written in the following ways:

• horizontal, left-to-right
• horizontal, right-to-left
• vertical, facing left-to-right
• vertical, facing right-left

Written, cursive hieroglyphic is generally written in columns, top-to-bottom or

horizontally, right-to-left. In the latter stages of hieroglyphic cursive the only
surviving examples are written horizontally, right-to-left; vertical hieroglyphic
should be read from top-to-bottom.

It is generally an easy task to determine which way to read the hieroglyphs

even if you are unable to understand their meaning. Hieroglyphs with a definite
front and back (for example, a person) will generally:

• face the beginning of the sentence

• face the same direction as any person or large object in a picture they
describe
As an example, if a tableau contains a picture of a man seated and facing right,
then all the hieroglyphs with a definite front and back would face to the right as
well. The actual hieroglyphs would be read from right-to-left because these
images almost always face the beginning of the sentence.

Hieroglyphic texts that do not display this behaviour are said to be in

retrograde. Once one understands hieroglyphic it is easy to determine if one is
examining a retrograde text because it will simply make no sense at all!As an
aid to reading, and perhaps to the ancient Egyptian's sense of aesthetics,
hieroglyphs were also packed together into neat patterns. In general, two or
more short or thin (depending on which direction one was writing the
hieroglyphs) would be written in the same block as each other. Occasionally, a
tall or wide symbol would be made smaller and placed with another short or
thin hieroglyph.

Finally, hieroglyphic had no standard punctuation. Religious texts generally

have no punctuation at all, whilst texts from the latter part of the ancient
Egyptian language have full stops between important lines of thought.

How hieroglyphic writing was deciphered

Until recently, given the time span we are talking about, the decipherment of
hieroglyphic was hampered because those attempting to decipher the
hieroglyphs assigned emotional meanings to the actual symbols used. For
example, some people believed that the hieroglyph for son, a goose, was
chosen because geese love their sons above all other animals. This hieroglyph
was chosen, though, simply because the word for goose once had the same
sound as the word for son. A further impediment was the lack of
complementary material, that is to say material of the same work written in
close proximity to another translation.

Athanasius Kircher, a student of Coptic, developed the notion that this last
stage of Egyptian could be related to the earlier Egyptian stages. Because he
was not able to transliterate or translate hieroglyphic he could not prove this
notion.

However, in 1799 when the discovery of the Rosetta Stone occurred, scholars
finally had an example of hieroglyphic, demotic and Ancient Greek that they
were all reasonably certain were the translations of the same passage. In
hieroglyphic, the name of the King or Pharaoh and gods' names are often
placed within a circle called a cartouche.
 Jean-France Champollion

Jean-François Champollion, a young French scholar, demonstrated how the

name Kleopatra could be made in hieroglyphic. Furthermore, by using an
impressive knowledge of Coptic he surmised that a number of symbols
showing everyday objects could be pronounced as in Coptic.

Applying this knowledge to other, well-known hieroglyphic sources clearly

confirmed Champollion's work and linguistic scholars now had a way to work
with and delineate the language into nouns, verbs, prepositions and other
grammatical parts.

Modern-day Resources

Interest in the ancient Egyptian languages continues. For example, it is still

taught in several universities. Many resources are in French or German and not
just English so it can be useful to know one of these languages though not a
requirement.

For the film "Stargate", Egyptologist Stuart Tyson Smith was commissioned to
develop a constructed language to simulate the tongue of ancient Egyptians
living alone on another planet for millennia.

While Egyptian culture is one of the influences of Western civilization, few

words of Egyptian origin remain in English. Even those associated with ancient
Egypt were usually transmitted in Greek forms.

References and Links: Wikipedia

The Hieroglyphic Phonetic Alphabet

Symbol Meaning English Sound
vulture short A, as in cat

forearm long A, as in table

leg hard B, as in big

basket,hillside hard C (K), as in call

hobble rope CH, as in children
hand hard D, as in dog

two reed leaves long E, as in lead

vulture short E, as in met

horned viper F, as in flower

pot stand hard G, as in gap

cobra soft G, as in generous

shelter, rope H, as in he, who

reed leaf short & long I, as in him, I'm

cobra J, as in jelly

basket, hillside hard C or K, as in kind, Christmas, lack

mouth L, as in lisp, linger

owl M, as in milk, dumb

water N, as in none

quail chick long O, as in lose, moon

vulture short O, as in brought, got

 stool P, as in pretty

horned viper PH, as in pharaoh

basket + quail Q, as in queen

+
mouth R, as in red

folded linen S, (soft C), as in silly, peace

lake SH, as in shilling

loaf of bread T, as in talk
cow belly soft TH, as in moth

(not known) hard TH, as in there

quail chick short U, as in lull

reed + quail long U, as in rule

+
horned viper V, as in villain

quail chick W, as in will, where, when

basket + linen X, as in fox

+

reed leaf short Y, as in yes

two reed leaves long Y, as in tarry

door fastening Z sound, as in xylophone, zany