EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHS
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| The ancient Egyptian language is one of the very oldest languages of the world. Egyptian was spoken from about 4,000 BC until the 11th century AD. The Egyptian language has almost 5000 more years of recorded history than any other human language. During the Middle Ages, it was replaced by Arabic and expired as a spoken tongue. Now the ancient Egyptian language is a dead language, and only continues as a fossilized form in liturgical usage by the Coptic (Christian) church in Egypt. | |||
WRITING SCRIPTS |
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| The hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic are the three scripts that used in ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphic (about 3100BC-about AD400) was the earliest script form of Egyptian. It was a recognizable form that to represent a person, an object, or an idea. They could be combined with different signs to spell out the words of the spoken language. However, the hieroglyphic indicates consonants only. Hieroglyphic was used for formal inscriptions, and mainly found on stone, pottery, and ivory. Hieratic(up to about 650BC) was a more simplified style of writing that at about the same contemporaneity as hieroglyphic. It was adapted from hieroglyphic script for a quicker record of non-monumental context. The early hieratic has a more fluent form than hieroglyphs, and the individual signs had become more abbreviated by the time of Old Kingdom. Hieratic was the script for administration and business use that to record the literature, scientific | and religious documents. The hieratic inscriptions were usually written in black ink with a brush made of reed. Demotic (about 650BC-about AD450) is another more simplified script that generally uses for daily purposes. The script form of demotic is an almost independent form that is distinct from hiertic. It is a very cursive script that with no more icon or pictures. The writing tradition of demotic was maintained in horizontal lines and written rightward. At about the beginning of the Christian period, the old scripts were finally declined and disappeared. Coptic(about AD100-about AD640), the language spoke the Egyptian Christians took the place to write, and as the final phase of the Egyptian language. Coptic was consisted with borrowings from Greek and different Semitic languages. The coptic script form consists twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet, and each of the letters represented a single sound. It also adapts six signs from demotic for the sound that is not represented in Greek. Coptic had become a fully alphabetic script, and represent vowels and consonants. | ||
THE EGYPTIAN ALPHABET |
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The decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs
was made possible by discovery of the Rosetta Stone, found in 1799 by Napoleonic
troops fighting in Egypt. Although the stone was first the possession of a
French officer, the victorious British demanded (and utltimately got) it,
and it currently resides in the British Museum. The Rosetta Stone itself is written in three languages: At the top, with much of the writing broken off, is the text in Egyptian hieroglphic. In the center is the complete text written in the Egyptian demotic script. At the bottom is the text written in koine Greek, the Greek which evolved during the Hellenistic period (c. 323 BC - 31 BC) as the standard form of Greek spoken throughout the Greek diaspora (area of dispersion) along the Eastern Mediterranean. Both the Greek and demotic Egyptian were known to the 19th century Egyptologists who worked upon the stone. Because the text was indentical in both languages, it stood to reason that the Egyptian hieroglyphs also contained the same. A brief and excellent description of the decipherment process is given by E. A. Wallis Budge, "The Rosetta Stone." |
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This page was last updated on Thursday, February 21, 1997
