the base of culture
by Ottar Vendel
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| Thot God of writing |
It is believed to have started in the Sumerian plains in the southern part of Eufrat and Tigris slightly before it appeared in the Nile Valley a couple of centuries prior to 3.000 BC.
Comparing the two ways of writing gives no evidence that they are related to each other. There are structural similarities, but nothing that points to a common root - the letters (signs) are too different. From the start the Egyptians simply called their writing system "pictures", later to be elevated to "writing of God's words".
Hieroglyphs are a mixture of picture symbols (ideograms) and phonetic characters (phonograms). Though some signs had a sound value they were not used as an alphabetic writing. The words could be made up of one single hieroglyphs or a combination of several. Hieroglyphs were pictures, though some were simplified and hard to recognise.
A hieroglyph as the picture of a sun would represent "sun", but also the verb shine. It could thus represent or imply a word with a meaning close to the direct (picture-) translation. The same sign for sun would be read as "day" or the sun god Ra. Since the vowels were not written a combination of consonants could be used for another word with similar backbone of consonants. The hieroglyph for "wood" had the consonants h and t. Therefore this hieroglyph could also be used for the word hti, meaning "retreat" or "carve". If there was room for misunderstandings, extra symbols were added to clarify.
Hieroglyphs could be used to represent single consonants or combinations of consonants in a specific order, regardless of the original meaning.
Royal names were written within a ring (or actually an oval), called cartouche.
Hieroglyphic writing could be both vertically and horizontally, and usually from right to left. It is easy to see the reading direction since the symbols always "meet" the reader. The signs snake and bird should thus be read from the head to tail and onwards.
Hieroglyphs were written on practically everything like temples, tombs, statues, coffins, vessels and tools. In stone, metal and ceramics they took the form of reliefs (both high and low) and on pottery and stone vessels they could be incised. All materials could be used for painting them.
The connection between hieroglyphic writing and fine arts was significant and the signs were pieces of art themselves. On papyrus Hieroglyphic writing was simpler and even had two variants for more common use for the moment: hieratic and demotic. Writing was taught in the temples and understood only by a very small part of the population: officials, doctors, priests and possibly by the craftsmen cutting and painting them.
During the Middle Kingdom at 2000 BC another form of hieroglyphs came in use. They are called HIERATIC (in Greek) and were simplified hieroglyphs used in other places than decorations in temples such as official documents, and temporaty notes on pieces of papyrus or cheramics.
3200 BC:
The first hieroglyphic writing occurs. Its origin is obscure since it appears in a systematic manner already from the first dynasty suggesting quite a period of development.
500 BC:
The number of signs grows from around 700 to 2.000 in the final stage.
200 BC:
The Greeks ruling Egypt makes an Egyptian alphabet by picking hieroglyps that correspond to their letters. These were important clues when the system was cracked.
394 AC:
The date of the last case of hieroglyphic writing made during the Roman era in Egypt.
1650:
In the mid 1600s the first scientific attempt to decipher hieroglyps was made (in vain) by Athanasius Kircher, a German Jesuit and mathematician working in Rome.
1799:
The Rosetta Stone is found in Egypt. It contained the same text in two languages (Egyptian and Greek), and in three writing systems (hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek). Now science have a base to work from to crack the code of the Egyptian writing system.
1802:
The names of Ptolemy and Alexander were translated from demotic to sounds by Frenchman deSacy, and the Swedish diplomat Johan Åkerblad (1763-1819) deciphered all the remaining Greek names written in demotic. He made reasearch in his spare time and had success by the fact that he mastered the Coptic language. This was a remnant of the old Egyptian language used by the Coptic christian church of Egypt. It was written with the Greek alphabet plus seven symbols from the demotic script. Based on his progress he constructed a "demotic alphabet" of 29 letters and almost half of them eventually proved to be correct. Using this alphabet, Åkerblad identified single words such as "him, his, temple, love" and "Greek". Thereby the demotic script was proven to be (at least partly) a phonetic alphabet.
Åkerblad also managed to correctly decipher the sound values of some hieroglyphs and so did the Englishman Thomas Young.
1822:
The French linguist Jean-Francsoise Champollion who mastered the Coptic language, finishes the the work by concentrating on breaking the phonetic values of the hieroglyphs. The first clue was when he traslated the names Ptolmiis and Kleopatra thereby getting the Greek alphabet made of Hieroglyphs. He then could complete the work cracking the code of the Egyptian writing system.