Egyptian hieroglyphs
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined ideographic, logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system. Moreover, owing in large part to the Greek and Aramaic scripts that descended from Phoenician, the majority of the world's living writing systems are descendants of Egyptian hieroglyphs—most prominently the Latin and Cyrillic scripts through Greek, and the Arabic and Brahmic scripts through Aramaic. Hieroglyphs are thought to be one of four writing systems developed without outside influence, the others being Cuneiforms, Chinese characters, and Mayan script.
The use of hieroglyphic writing derived from proto-literate symbol systems in the Early Bronze Age , with the first decipherable sentence written in the Egyptian language dating to the 28th century BC. Ancient 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.
During the 5th century, the permanent closing of pagan temples across Roman Egypt ultimately resulted in the loss of fluent readers and writers in hieroglyphs. Despite attempts at decipherment, the nature of the script remained unknown throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Regardless, mixture of medieval Arab and Egyptian people kept the fascination of hieroglyphics alive. Scholars, spiritualists and treasure hunters collected highly sought-after artifacts in attempts to decode the language based on the phonetic and alphabetical similarities between Coptic and Hieroglyphs. The decipherment of hieroglyphic writing was finally accomplished in the 1820s by Jean-François Champollion, with the help of the Rosetta Stone.
The entire Ancient Egyptian corpus, including both hieroglyphic and hieratic texts, is approximately 5 million words in length; if counting duplicates as separate, this figure is closer to 10 million. The most complete compendium of Ancient Egyptian, the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache, contains 1.5–1.7 million words.
Etymology
The word hieroglyph comes from the Ancient Greek , meaning 'sacred carving'a compound of 'sacred' and 'Ι carve, engrave'.From the Ptolemaic period, the glyphs themselves were called 'the sacred engraved letters', the Greek counterpart to the Egyptian term 'words of gods'. Greek meant 'a carver of hieroglyphs'.
In English, hieroglyph as a noun is recorded from 1590, originally short for nominalized hieroglyphic, from adjectival use.
History and evolution
Origin
Hieroglyphs may have emerged from the preliterate artistic traditions of Egypt. For example, symbols on Gerzean pottery from have been argued to resemble hieroglyphic writing.File:Design of the Abydos token glyphs dated to 3400-3200 BCE.jpg|thumb|left|Designs on tokens from Abydos, carbon dated to. They are similar to contemporary tags from Uruk.
Proto-writing systems developed in the second half of the 4th millennium BC, such as the clay labels of a Predynastic ruler called "Scorpion I" recovered at Abydos in 1998 or the Narmer Palette.
The first full sentence written in mature hieroglyphs so far discovered was found on a seal impression in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen at Umm el-Qa'ab, which dates from the Second Dynasty. 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 developed independently of any other script, or derived from cuneiform, the earliest writing system in human history that developed to write Sumerian in southern Mesopotamia during the late 4th millennium BC. Scholars like Geoffrey Sampson argued that Egyptian hieroglyphs "came into existence a little after Sumerian script, and, probably, 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, with antecedent signs used in tokens for agricultural and accounting purposes as early as.
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 hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt". Since the 1990s, the above-mentioned discoveries of glyphs at Abydos, dated between 3400 and 3200 BC, have shed further doubt on the classical notion that the Mesopotamian symbol system predates the Egyptian one. A date of 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 Mokhtar argued further that the inventory of hieroglyphic symbols derived from "fauna and flora used in the signs are essentially African" and in "regards to writing, we have seen that a purely Nilotic, hence African origin not only is not excluded, but probably reflects the reality."
Mature writing system
Hieroglyphs consist of three kinds of glyphs: phonetic glyphs, including single-consonant characters that function like an alphabet; logographs, representing morphemes; and determinatives, which narrow down the meaning of logographic or phonetic words.Late period
As writing developed and became more widespread among the Egyptian people, simplified glyph forms developed, resulting in the hieratic and demotic 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 scriptshieroglyphs, demotic, and the Greek alphabet.Late survival
Hieroglyphs continued to be used intermittently under Persian rule in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, as well as during the ensuing Ptolemaic and Roman periods that followed after Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt. It appears that the misleading quality of comments from Greek and Roman writers about hieroglyphs came about, at least in part, as a response to the changed political situation. Some believed 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 AD, few Egyptians were capable of reading hieroglyphs, and the "myth of allegorical hieroglyphs" was ascendant. Monumental use of hieroglyphs ceased after the closing of all non-Christian temples in 391 by the Roman Emperor Theodosius I; the last known inscription is from Philae, known as the Graffito of Esmet-Akhom, from 394.
The Hieroglyphica of Horapollo 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 'son'.
A half-dozen Demotic glyphs are still in use, added to the Greek alphabet when writing Coptic.
Decipherment
Knowledge of the hieroglyphs had been lost completely in the medieval period.Early attempts at decipherment were made by some such as Dhul-Nun al-Misri and pseudo-Ibn Wahshiyya.
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.
File:rosetta stone.jpg|thumb|upright=1.1|The Rosetta Stone in the British Museum
The breakthrough in decipherment came only with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon's troops in 1799.
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 Silvestre de Sacy, Johan David Åkerblad, and Thomas Young studied the inscriptions on the stone, and were able to make some headway. Finally, Jean-François Champollion made the complete decipherment by the 1820s. In his Lettre à M. Dacier, he wrote:
It is a complex system, writing figurative, symbolic, and phonetic all at once, in the same text, the same phrase, I would almost say in the same word.