Hieroglyphs

Hieroglyphs
I | | INTRODUCTION |

Tomb of Queen Amonherkhepsef
In ancient Egypt, scribes used hieroglyphs to record state documents and important historical events. Hieroglyphs with religious purposes also were painted on tomb walls and wooden coffins, such as these hieroglyphs from the tomb of Queen Amonherkhepsef, located in the Valley of the Queens.
Wolfgang Kaehler/Corbis
Hieroglyphs,characters in any system of writing in which symbols represent objects (such as tools, animals, or boats) and ideas (such as motion, time, and joy). The word comes from a Greek term meaning 'sacred carving,' which the ancient Greeks used to describe decorative characters carved on Egyptian monuments. The term is now mainly used to refer to the system of writing used by the ancient Egyptians.Archaeological discoveries suggest that Egyptian hieroglyphs may be the oldest form of writing. The earliest evidence of an Egyptian hieroglyphic system is believed to be from about 3300 or 3200 bc, and the Egyptians used hieroglyphs for the next 3,500 years. They were most prevalent during a 1,700-year period when the Egyptians spoke and wrote Old Egyptian (3000 bc-2200 bc) and Middle Egyptian(about 2200 bc-1300 bc). Only a small portion of the Egyptian population, primarily royalty, priests, and civil officials, used hieroglyphs because they were difficult to learn and time consuming to create. Ancient cultures in China, Mesopotamia, and the Americas used similar writing systems, but these systems were not related to Egyptian hieroglyphs.
II | | GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS AND FORM |
Thehieroglyphic system used in ancient Egypt had between 700 and 800 basic symbols, called glyphs. This number grew in the last centuries of ancient Egyptian civilization, because of an increased interest in writing religious texts. Egyptians wrote hieroglyphs in long lines from right to left, and from top to bottom. They did not use spaces or punctuation.
Egyptian glyphs are divided into twogroups: phonograms, which are glyphs that represent sounds, and ideograms, which are glyphs that represent objects or ideas. The Egyptians constructed words by using a combination of the two types of glyphs. Readers must generally use both phonograms and ideograms to determine the significance of a word or phrase.
Phonograms represented the sounds of single consonants and combinations of consonants. Aphonogram that represents the two consonant sounds s (on the right) and r (on the left) is:
|
The Egyptians did not write vowels, so it is impossible to know exactly how they pronounced hieroglyphic texts. When speaking, they may have expressed vowel sounds to distinguish various words that, in writing, look identical.
Ideograms could represent either the specific object written or somethingclosely related to it. For example, the hieroglyphic symbol of a pair of legs might represent the noun movement. When combined with other glyphs, the symbol could represent the verb to approach, or the concept to give directions.
|
The Egyptians usually constructed their hieroglyphs by putting phonograms at the beginning of a word, followed by an ideogram, which is called a determinativewhen used in this fashion. The determinative specified the category to which the word belonged, such as motion words or animal words, and clued the reader in on the intended meaning. Following are several examples of hieroglyphs with the sounds s and r that combine phonograms and determinatives:
|
When speaking, the Egyptians might have differentiated between these words by adding vowelsounds—for example, by saying sor, ser, or sur. Because they did not write vowels, however, they used the determinatives that appeared to the left of the phonograms to specify each word’s meaning. Writing phonograms and determinatives in different combinations enabled the Egyptians to develop thousands of words without having to create a single distinct glyph for each thing, action, or concept.
III |...