Hieroglyphics
Hieroglyphics, commonly associated with ancient Egypt, are a system of written characters that convey ideas, objects, and words through pictorial symbols. Emerging around 3300–3200 BCE, they evolved over centuries, reflecting the rich cultural and spiritual life of ancient Egyptians, who believed these symbols were sacred gifts from the gods. The term "hieroglyphics" derives from Greek, meaning "sacred writing." This complex writing system included ideograms (representing ideas and objects), phonograms (indicating sounds), and determinatives (providing context). While initially reserved for religious texts, hieroglyphics expanded to serve administrative and commercial purposes as well.
The scripts transitioned through various forms, including hieratic and demotic, the latter of which moved towards a more simplified phonogram-based approach. Despite the decline of hieroglyphics after the rise of Christianity and the adoption of the Coptic alphabet, the writing system remained significant until the second century CE. The key to deciphering hieroglyphics came in the early 19th century with the work of Jean-Francois Champollion, who utilized the Rosetta Stone to unlock the meanings embedded in these ancient symbols. This breakthrough led to a deeper understanding of ancient Egyptian language and culture, highlighting the historical importance of hieroglyphics in human communication.
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Hieroglyphics
Hieroglyphics, or hieroglyphs, are written characters that represent ideas, objects, and words with pictures or signs. Although pictorial and symbolic writing systems were used in numerous ancient cultures, including civilizations in China, Mesopotamia, and the Americas, hieroglyphics are most commonly associated with ancient Egypt. In Egypt, hieroglyphics evolved over a period of many centuries, with the earliest known examples dating to approximately 3300–3200 BCE.
The term itself is a combination of the Greek word hiero, which means "holy" or "sacred," and glypho, which means "writing." Ancient Egyptians believed that hieroglyphics were created and passed down to them by the gods. Reflecting this belief, they were known as medu netjer, or "the words of the gods," in the Egyptian language. Egyptian hieroglyphics were highly complex, and only a very small, well-educated subset of the population could read or write them. They remained undeciphered for centuries, until the French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion finally managed to decode the system in 1822.
Background
Historians do not have a comprehensive understanding of how Egyptian hieroglyphics originated. One of the most widely accepted hypotheses is that the ancient Egyptians were inspired by the rock-based pictograms used by prehistoric hunting tribes native to the desert regions west of the Nile. Some of the visual themes found in the rock carvings created by these primitive tribes also appear in the earliest known Egyptian hieroglyphics. These hieroglyphics were found in tombs built in Egypt's late predynastic period, and date to about 3300–3200 BCE.
The Egyptians used a mythological allegory to explain the genesis of hieroglyphics. According to legend, Thoth, the Egyptian god of knowledge, created the system to enable the Egyptian people to enhance their wisdom by recording their history. However, the sun god Ra warned that this would weaken the memories of the Egyptian people and undermine their oral traditions. Despite Ra's interdiction, Thoth elected to pass the writing system on to a small, well-educated class of Egyptians: the scribes. The scribes became a highly respected group in Egyptian society, and were revered for their proficient use of the sacred writing system.
Egyptian hieroglyphics used three primary types of symbols. Words and ideas were represented using pictorial icons called ideograms (or logograms, when referring specifically to words and not ideas). Sounds were expressed with symbolic icons called phonograms. In some cases, scribes needed to use special characters to clarify the meaning of the written text. These determinatives allowed the intended meaning of the word or concept to be properly understood.
When Egyptian hieroglyphics first appeared, the system used more than 1,000 different logograms, phonograms, and determinatives. However, by the Middle Egyptian years (ca. 2200–ca. 1300 BCE), hieroglyphic writing standardized into a smaller set of approximately 750 characters. Hieroglyphics were initially reserved for religious purposes, appearing almost exclusively in monuments and tombs. Over time, they gradually came to be used for a wider range of administrative, commercial, and secular purposes.
Overview
Hieroglyphics, as used during the Old Egyptian (ca. 3000–ca. 2200 BCE) and Middle Egyptian periods, were written in long lines that ran either right to left or top to bottom. The script used neither punctuation nor spacing conventions to denote breaks, and instead relied on the use of determinatives to establish context. Words and concepts were typically composed using a combination of phonograms and ideograms. In most cases, phonograms appeared first, establishing the word or concept's initial consonant sound as a means of guiding the reader toward its intended meaning. Then, ideograms were placed to complete the representation of the word or concept, with determinatives linking these elements if further explanation or clarification was necessary. While vowel sounds were an essential element of the spoken Egyptian language, they were never represented in hieroglyphic writing.
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics evolved to take two main forms over the course of their active history, known as the hieratic and demotic scripts. The development of these scripts coincided with changes in the way the Egyptians used written language, with the hieratic script being the first of the two forms to appear. More stylized than early hieroglyphics, the simplified hieratic script used a reduced number of ideograms and uniformly followed a right-to-left orientation. It appeared on pottery, jewelry, and papyrus in addition to monuments and tombs. The adoption of the hieratic script form marked the expansion of Egypt's written language to applications beyond religious and funerary customs, introducing hieroglyphics to administrative and commercial contexts. Demotic script was a dramatic departure from the conventions of both early hieroglyphics and hieratic writing. It eliminated ideograms altogether, adopting an exclusively phonogram-based system that was used for a wide range of commercial, governmental, and secular purposes beginning around the seventh century BCE. However, hieratic scripts continued to be used for religious purposes.
From the fourth to the first centuries BCE, ancient Egypt came under the rule of foreign powers, first from Greece and then from Rome. These influences marked the beginning of the decline of hieroglyphic scripts, and hastened it once Christianity reached Egypt. The Coptic alphabet had effectively replaced hieroglyphics by the second century CE, but the traditional Egyptian scripts continued to be used in limited circles. The most recent example of an Egyptian hieroglyphic script with a firmly established date was created in 394 CE.
The meaning and conventions of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics remained a mystery to scholars and historians until the 1820s, when Jean-Francois Champollion famously used the Rosetta Stone to decipher them. The Rosetta Stone was recovered from Egypt by French scholars in 1799, and was unique because it contained three separate inscriptions of the same text, with one inscription appearing in Greek, the second in demotic script, and the third in early hieroglyphic script. While this enabled scholars to determine the meaning of the hieroglyphics on the stone, it was not until Champollion built on the earlier work of the English polymath Thomas Young that the writing system was finally fully understood.
In 1814, Young used a section of text engraved on the Rosetta Stone to establish the sounds tied to specific hieroglyphic phonograms, but it was not until 1822 that Champollion established the relationship between phonograms and ideograms. Champollion's breakthrough came when he focused on an isolated, marked segment of Rosetta Stone hieroglyphic text called a cartouche. Champollion deduced that the text in the cartouche represented the written form of the name "Rameses," which had been used by numerous Egyptian kings and pharaohs over the course of the ancient civilization's history. The breakthrough enabled scholars to establish the various ways hieroglyphic ideograms were combined with phonograms and determinatives to create specific meanings.
Bibliography
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