Fall Asleep While Learning About Egyptian Hieroglyphs

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Today's episode is from a Wikipedia article titled,

Egyptian Hieroglyphs.

Egyptian hieroglyphs were the formal writing system used in ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language.

Hieroglyphs combined logographic,

Syllabic,

And alphabetic elements with more than 100 distinct characters.

Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood.

The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from the hieroglyphic writing,

As was the proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet.

Through the Phoenician alphabet's major child systems,

The Greek and Aramaic scripts,

The Egyptian hieroglyphic script is ancestral to the majority of scripts in modern use,

Most prominently the Latin and Cyrillic scripts through Greek,

And the Arabic script,

And possibly the Brahmic family of scripts through Aramaic,

Phoenician,

And Greek.

The use of hieroglyphic writing arose from proto-literate symbol systems in the early Bronze Age,

Around the 33rd century BC,

With the first decipherable sentence written in the Egyptian language,

Dating to the second dynasty,

28th century BC.

Egyptian hieroglyphs developed into a mature writing system used for monumental inscription in the classical language of the Middle Kingdom period.

During this period,

The system used about 900 distinct signs.

The use of this writing system continued through the New Kingdom and Late Period,

And on into the Persian and Ptolemaic periods.

Late survivals of hieroglyphic use are found well into the Roman period,

Extending into the 4th century AD.

With the final closing of pagan temples in the 5th century,

Knowledge of hieroglyphic writing was lost.

Although attempts were made,

The script remained undeciphered throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period.

The decipherment of hieroglyphic writing was finally accomplished in the 1820s by Jean-François Champollion with the help of the Rosetta Stone.

The number of words contained in all ancient Egyptian,

I.

E.

Hieroglyphic and hieratic texts known today,

Is approximately 5 million,

And tends towards 10 million if counting duplicates,

Such as the Book of the Dead and the Coffin Texts separately.

The most complete compendium of ancient Egyptian,

Verte Buch der Egyptischen Sprache,

Contains 1.

5 to 1.

7 million words.

The word hieroglyph comes from the Greek adjective hieroglyphikos,

A compound of hieros,

Sacred,

And glypho,

Carve,

Engrave,

Meaning sacred carving.

The glyphs themselves,

Since the Ptolemaic period,

Were called ta hieroglyphik gramata,

The sacred engraved letters,

The Greek counterpart to the Egyptian expression of God's words.

Greek hieroglypho meant a carver of hieroglyphs.

In English,

Hieroglyph as a noun is recorded from 1590,

Originally short for normalized hieroglyphic.

1580s was a plural hieroglyphics,

From adjectival use hieroglyphic character.

The Nag Hammadi texts,

Written in Sahitic Coptic,

Call the hieroglyphs writings of the magicians,

Soothsayers.

Hieroglyphs may have emerged from the pre-literate artistic traditions of Egypt.

For example,

Symbols on Gersian pottery from circa 4000 BC have been argued to resemble hieroglyphic writing.

Proto-writing systems developed in the second half of the 4th millennium BC such as the clay labels of pre-dynastic ruler called Scorpion I,

Recovered at Abidas in 1998,

Or the Namur Palat,

Circa 31st century BC.

The first full sentence written in mature hieroglyphs so far discovered was found on a seal impression in the tomb of Seth Paribzin at Umm al-Khab,

Which dates from the 2nd dynasty,

28th or 27th century BC.

Around 800 hieroglyphs are known to date back to the Old Kingdom,

Middle Kingdom,

And New Kingdom eras.

By the Greco-Roman period,

There were more than 5,

000.

Scholars have long debated whether hieroglyphs were original,

Developed independently of any other script,

Or derivative.

Original scripts are very rare.

Previously,

Scholars like Jeffrey Sampson argued that Egyptian hieroglyphs came into existence a little after Sumerian script,

And probably were invented under the influence of the latter,

And that it is probable that the general idea of expressing words of a language in writing was brought to Egypt from Sumerian Mesopotamia.

Further,

Egyptian writing appeared suddenly,

While Mesopotamia had a long evolutionary history of the usage of signs,

For agricultural and accounting purposes,

In tokens dating as early back to circa 8,

000 BC.

However,

More recent scholars have held that the evidence for such direct influence remains flimsy,

And that a very credible argument can also be made for the independent development of writing in Egypt.

While there are many instances of early Egypt-Mesopotamia relations,

The lack of direct evidence for the transfer of writing means that no definitive determination has been made as to the origin of hieroglyphs in ancient Egypt.

Since the 1990s,

The above-mentioned discoveries of glyphs at Abydos,

Dated to between 3400 and 3200 BCE,

Have shed further doubt on the classical notion that the Mesopotamian symbols system predates the Egyptian one.

A date of circa 3400 BCE for the earliest Abydos glyphs challenges the hypothesis of diffusion from Mesopotamia to Egypt,

Pointing to an independent development of writing in Egypt.

Rosalie David has argued that the debate is moot,

Since if Egypt did adopt the idea of writing from elsewhere,

It was presumably only the concept which was taken over,

Since the forms of the hieroglyphs are entirely Egyptian in origin,

And reflect the distinctive flora,

Fauna,

And images of Egypt's own landscape.

Egyptian scholar Gamal Maktar argued further that the inventory of hieroglyphic symbols derived from fauna and flora used in the signs,

Which are essentially African,

And in regards to writing,

We have seen that a purely nihilotic,

Hence African origin,

Not only is not excluded,

But probably reflects the reality.

Hieroglyphs consist of three kinds of glyphs,

Phonetic glyphs,

Including single consonant characters that function like an alphabet,

Logoglyphs,

Representing morphemes,

And determinatives,

Which narrow down the meaning of logographic or phonetic words.

As writing developed and became more widespread among the Egyptian people,

Simplified glyph forms developed,

Resulting in the hieratic,

Priestly,

And demotic popular scripts.

These variants were also more suited than hieroglyphs for use on papyrus.

Hieroglyphic writing was not,

However,

Eclipsed,

But existed alongside the other forms,

Especially in monumental and other formal writing.

The Rosetta Stone contains three parallel scripts,

Hieroglyphic,

Demotic,

And Greek.

Hieroglyphs continued to be used under Persian rule,

Intermittent in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE,

And after Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt during the ensuing Ptolemaic and Roman periods.

It appears that the misleading qualities of commons from Greek and Roman writers about hieroglyphs came about at least in part as a response to the changed political situation.

Some believe that hieroglyphs may have functioned as a way to distinguish true Egyptians from some of the foreign conquerors.

Another reason may be the refusal to tackle a foreign culture on its own terms,

Which characterized Greco-Roman approaches to Egyptian culture generally.

Having learned that hieroglyphs were sacred writing,

Greco-Roman authors imagined the complex but rational system as an allegorical,

Even magical system transmitting secret mystical knowledge.

By the 4th century CE,

Few Egyptians were capable of reading hieroglyphs,

And the myth of allegorical hieroglyphs was ascendant.

Monumental use of hieroglyphs ceased at the closing of all non-Christian temples in 391 by the Roman emperor Theodosius I.

The last known inscription is from Vilae,

Known as the Graffito of Esmed-Achim from 394.

The Hieroglyphica of Heropolo,

Circa 5th century,

Appears to retain some genuine knowledge about the writing system.

It offers an explanation of close to 200 signs.

Some are identified correctly,

Such as the goose hieroglyph,

Representing the word for sun.

A half-dozen Demotic glyphs are still in use,

Added to the Greek alphabet when writing Coptic.

Knowledge of the hieroglyphs have been lost completely in the medieval period.

Early attempts at decipherment are due to Dhul-Nun al-Mizri and Ibn-Washiyya,

9th and 10th century respectively.

All medieval and early modern attempts were hampered by the fundamental assumption that hieroglyphs recorded ideas and not the sounds of the language.

As no bilingual texts were available,

Any such symbolic translation could be proposed without the possibility of verification.

It was not until Athanasius Kircher in the mid-17th century that scholars began to think the hieroglyphs might also represent sounds.

Kircher was familiar with Coptic and thought that it might be the key to deciphering the hieroglyphs,

But was held back by a belief in the mystical nature of the symbols.

The breakthrough in decipherment came only with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon's troops in 1799,

During Napoleon's Egyptian invasion.

As the stone presented a hieroglyphic and a Demotic version of the same text in parallel with a Greek translation,

Plenty of material for falsifiable studies in translation was suddenly available.

In the early 19th century,

Scholars such as Sylvester de Stacy,

Johann David Ackerblad,

And Thomas Young studied the inscriptions on the stone and were able to make some headway.

Finally,

Jean-Francois Champollion made the complete decipherment by the 1820s.

He wrote,

Visually,

Hieroglyphs are all more or less figurative.

They represent real or abstract elements,

Sometimes stylized and simplified,

But all generally perfectly recognizable in form.

However,

The same sign can,

According to context,

Be interpreted in diverse ways,

As a phonogram,

Phonetic reading,

As a logogram,

Or as an ideogram,

Semagram,

Determinative,

Semantic reading.

The determinative was not read as a phonetic constituent,

But facilitated understanding by differentiating the word from its homophones.

Most non-determinative hieroglyphic signs are phonograms,

Whose meaning is determined by pronunciation,

Independent of its visual characteristics.

This follows the rebus principle,

Where,

For example,

The picture of an eye could stand not only for the English word eye,

But also for its phonetic equivalent,

The first person pronoun eye.

Phonograms formed with one consonant are called uniliteral signs,

With two consonants biliteral signs,

With three triliteral signs.

24 uniliteral signs make up the so-called hieroglyphic alphabet.

Egyptian hieroglyphic writing does not normally indicate vowels,

Unlike cuneiform,

And for what reason has been labeled by some as abjed,

I.

E.

An alphabet without vowels.

The Egyptian hieroglyphic script contained 24 uniliterals,

Symbols that stood for single consonants,

Much like letters in English.

It would have been possible to write all Egyptian words in the manner of these signs,

But the Egyptians never did so,

And never simplified their complex writing into a true alphabet.

Each uniliteral glyph once had a unique reading,

But several of these fell together as Old Egyptian developed into Middle Egyptian.

Besides the uniliteral glyphs,

There are also the biliteral and triliteral signs,

To represent a specific sequence of two or three consonants,

Consonants and vowels,

And a few as vowel combinations only in the language.

Egyptian writing is often redundant.

In fact,

It happens very frequently that a word is followed by several characters writing the same sounds,

In order to guide the reader.

Redundant characters accompanying biliteral or triliteral signs are called phonetic complements,

Or complementaries.

They can be placed in front of the sign,

Rarely,

After the sign,

As a general rule,

Or even framing it,

Appearing both before and after.

Ancient Egyptian scribes consistently avoided leaving large areas of blank space in their writing,

And might add additional phonetic complements,

Or sometimes even invert the order of signs if this would result in a more aesthetically pleasing appearance.

Good scribes attended to the artistic and even religious aspects of the hieroglyphs,

And would not simply view them as a communication tool.

Notably,

Phonetic complements were also used to allow the reader to differentiate between signs that are homophones,

Or which do not always have a unique reading.

Finally,

It sometimes happens that the pronunciation of words might be changed because of their connection to ancient Egyptian.

In this case,

It is not rare for writing to adopt a compromise in notation,

The two readings being indicated jointly.

Besides a phonetic interpretation,

Characters can also be read for their meaning.

In this instance,

Logograms are being spoken,

Or ideograms and semigrams,

The latter,

Are also called determinatives.

A hieroglyph used as a logogram defines the object of which it is an image.

Logograms are therefore the most frequently used common nouns.

They are always accompanied by a mute vertical stroke indicating their status as a logogram.

In theory,

All hieroglyphs would have the ability to be used as logograms.

Logograms can be accompanied by phonetic complements.

Determinatives,

Or semigrams,

Semantic symbols specifying meaning,

Are placed at the end of a word.

These mute characters serve to clarify what the word is about,

As homophonic glyphs are common.

If a similar procedure existed in English,

Words with the same spelling would be followed by an indicator that would not be read,

But which would fine-tune the meaning.

Retort,

But which would fine-tune the meaning.

Retort,

Chemistry,

And retort,

Rhetoric,

Would thus be distinguished.

A number of determinatives exist.

Divinities,

Humans,

Parts of the human body,

Animals,

Plants,

Etc.

Certain determinatives possess a literal and a figurative meaning.

For example,

A roll of papyrus is used to define books,

But also abstract ideas.

The determinative of the plural is a shortcut to signal three occurrences of the word.

That is to say,

It's plural since the Egyptian language had a dual,

Sometimes indicated by two strokes.

Rarely,

The names of gods are placed within a cartouche.

The two last names of the sitting king are always placed within a cartouche.

A filling stroke is a character indicating the end of a quadrat that would otherwise be incomplete.

Some signs are the contraction of several others.

These signs have,

However,

A function and existence of their own.

For example,

A forearm where the hand holds a scepter is used as a determinative for words meaning to direct,

To drive,

And their derivatives.

The doubling of a sign indicates it's dual.

The tripling of a sign indicates it's plural.

Standard orthography,

Correct spelling,

In Egyptian is much looser than in modern languages.

In fact,

One or several variants exist for almost every word.

One finds redundancies,

Omissions of graphemes,

Which are ignored whether or not they are intentional,

Substitutions of one grapheme for another,

Such that it is impossible to distinguish a mistake from an alternate spelling,

Errors of omission in the drawing of signs,

Which are much more problematic when the writing is cursive,

Hieratic writing,

But especially demotic,

Where this hematization of the signs is extreme.

However,

Many of these apparent spelling errors constitute an issue of chronology.

Spelling and standards varied over time,

So the writing of a word during the Old Kingdom might be considerably different during the New Kingdom.

Furthermore,

The Egyptians were perfectly content to include older orthographic historical spelling alongside newer practices,

As though it were acceptable in English to use archaic spellings in modern texts.

Most often,

Ancient spelling errors are simply misinterpretations of context.

Today,

Hieroglyphicists use numerous cataloguing systems to clarify the presence of determinatives,

Ideograms,

And other ambiguous signs and transliteration.

Egyptian hieroglyphs were added to the Unicode Standard in October 2009,

With the release of version 5.

2,

Which introduced the Egyptian hieroglyphs block,

U plus one three zero zero zero dash U plus one three four two F.

As of July 2013,

Four fonts,

Egyptus,

New Gardener,

Noto Sans Egyptian hieroglyphs,

And Jsej font support this range.

Another font,

Sago UI Historic,

Comes bundled with Windows 10 and also contains glyphs for the Egyptian hieroglyphs block.

Sago UI Historic excludes three glyphs depicting Phallus,

Gardeners,

D52,

D52A,

D53,

Unicode code points U plus one three zero B8 minus U plus one three zero B8.

Ancient Egypt was a civilization of ancient northeast Africa.

It was concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River,

Situated in the place that is now the country Egypt.

Ancient Egyptian civilization followed prehistoric Egypt and coalesced around 3100 BC,

According to conventional Egyptian chronology,

With the political unification of upper and lower Egypt under Menes,

Often identified with Narmer.

The history of ancient Egypt unfolded as a series of stable kingdoms interspersed by periods of relative instability,

Known as intermediate periods.

The various kingdoms fall into one of three categories,

The Old Kingdom of the Early Bronze Age,

The Middle Kingdom of the Middle Bronze Age,

Or the New Kingdom of the Late Bronze Age.

Ancient Egypt reached the pinnacle of its power during the New Kingdom,

Ruling much of Nubia and a sizable portion of the Levant.

After this period,

It entered an era of slow decline.

During the course of its history,

Ancient Egypt was invaded or conquered by a number of foreign powers,

Including the Hyksos,

The Nubians,

The Assyrians,

The Achaemenid Persians,

And the Macedonians under Alexander the Great.

The Greek Ptolemaic Kingdom,

Formed in the aftermath of Alexander's death,

Ruled until 30 B.

C.

,

When under Cleopatra it fell to the Roman Empire and became a Roman province.

Egypt remained under Roman control until the 640s A.

D.

,

When it was conquered by the Rashidun Caliphate.

The success of ancient Egyptian civilization came partly from its ability to adapt the conditions of the Nile River Valley for agriculture.

The predictable flooding and controlled irrigation of the fertile valley produced surplus crops,

Which supported a more dense population and social development and culture.

With resources to spare,

The administration sponsored mineral exploitation of the valley and surrounding desert regions,

The early development of an independent writing system,

The organization of collective construction and agricultural projects,

Trade with surrounding regions,

And a military intended to assert Egyptian dominance.

Motivating and organizing these activities was a bureaucracy of elite scribes,

Religious leaders,

And administrators under the control of a pharaoh,

Who ensured the cooperation and unity of the Egyptian people in the context of an elaborate system of religious beliefs.

The many achievements of the ancient Egyptians,

Including the quarrying,

Surveying,

And construction techniques that supported the building of monumental pyramids,

Temples,

And obelisks,

A system of mathematics,

A practical and effective system of medicine,

Irrigation systems,

And agricultural production techniques,

The first known plank boats,

Egyptian faience and glass technology,

New forms of literature,

And the earliest known peace treaty made with Hittites.

Ancient Egypt has left a lasting legacy.

Its art and architecture were widely copied,

And its antiquities were carried off to far corners of the world.

Its monumental ruins have inspired the imaginations of travelers and writers for millennia.

A newfound respect for antiquities and excavations in the early modern period by Europeans and Egyptians has led to the scientific investigation of Egyptian civilization,

And a greater appreciation of its cultural legacy.

The Egyptian language or ancient Egyptian is an extinct branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages that was spoken in ancient Egypt.

It is known today from a large corpus of surviving texts,

Which were made accessible to the modern world following the decipherment of the ancient Egyptian scripts in the early 19th century.

Egyptian is one of the earliest known written Egyptian is one of the earliest known written languages,

First recorded in the hieroglyphic script in the late 4th millennium BC.

It is also the longest attested human language,

With a written record spanning over 4,

000 years.

Its classical form,

Known as Middle Egyptian,

Served as the vernacular of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt,

And remained the literary language of Egypt until the Roman period.

By the time of classical antiquity,

The spoken language had evolved into Demotic,

And by the Roman era,

Diversified into various Coptic dialects.

These were eventually supplanted by Arabic after the Muslim conquest of Egypt,

Although Boheric Coptic remains in use as the liturgical language of the Coptic Church.

The Egyptian language branch belongs to the Afro-Asiatic language family.

Among the typological features of Egyptian that are typically Afro-Asiatic are its fusional morphology,

Non-concatenative morphology,

A series of emphatic consonants,

A three-vowel system,

A-i-u,

A nominal feminine suffix,

At,

A nominal prefix,

M,

An adjectival suffix,

I,

And characteristic personal verbal affixes.

Of the other Afro-Asiatic branches,

Linguists have variously suggested that the Egyptian language shares its greatest affinities with Berber and Semitic languages,

Particularly Arabic,

Which is spoken in Egypt today,

And Hebrew.

However,

Other scholars have argued that the Egyptian language shared closer linguistic ties with northeastern African regions.

There are two theories that seek to establish the cognate sets between Egyptian and Afro-Asiatic,

The traditional theory and the Neuere Komparativstik,

Founded by Semiticist Otto Rössler.

The Egyptian language has many biradical and perhaps monoradical roots,

In contrast to the Semitic preference for triradical roots.

Egyptian is probably more conservative,

And Semitic likely underwent later regulations,

Converting roots into the triradical pattern.

Although Egyptian is the oldest Afro-Asiatic language documented in written form,

Its morphological repertoire is very different from that of the rest of the Afro-Asiatic languages in general,

And Semitic languages in particular.

There are multiple possibilities.

Perhaps Egyptian had already undergone radical changes from Proto-Afro-Asiatic before it was recorded,

Or the Afro-Asiatic family has so far been studied with an excessively Semitocentric approach,

Or,

As G.

W.

Seredly suggests,

Afro-Asiatic is an allogenetic rather than a genetic group of languages.

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