The
Language of Ancient
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Ancient Egyptian civilization, which many regard as one of the
fountainheads of Western culture, was one of the greatest in the history of the
world. Describing the development of Egyptian civilization, like attempts to
identify its intellectual foundations, is largely a process of conjecture based
on archaeological discoveries of enduring ruins, tombs, and monuments, many of
which contain invaluable specimens of ancient Egyptian culture. Inscriptions in
hieroglyphics, for instance, have
provided priceless data. The key to unlocking this data was found in the Rosetta Stone.
HIEROGLYPHICS
Hieroglyphs are ancient Egyptian characters
of writing in which the characters are pictorial, that is, they represent
recognizable objects. The term hieroglyph is most generally associated with the
script in which the ancient Egyptian language was written; the ancient Greeks
first applied the term (meaning “sacred carving”) to the decorative characters
carved on Egyptian standing monuments.
Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions are composed of two basic types
of signs: ideograms and phonograms. Ideograms signify either the specific
object drawn or something closely related to it; for example, a picture of the
sun may mean “sun” or “day”; phonograms, or sound signs, were
used purely for their phonetic value and have no relationship to the word they
are used to spell. The development of the rebus principle, by which the picture
of an object could stand not only for that object but also for a word with the
same sound but a different meaning, made possible the writing of proper nouns,
abstract ideas, and grammatical elements. Phonograms could represent one
consonant or the combination of two or three consonants in a specific order;
vowels were not written. A sign might serve as an ideogram in one word and as a
phonogram in another. Most words were written with a combination of phonetic
and ideographic signs; a picture of the floor plan of a house meant “house,”
but the same sign followed by a phonetic complement and a picture of a pair of
walking legs was used to write the homophonous verb meaning “to go out.”
Ideograms written at the end of a word, indicating the category to which the
word belongs and thus signifying the meaning intended (which was not always
clear from the context), are called determinatives. A representation of a
papyrus scroll, used as a determinative, indicates that an abstract meaning was
intended.
Hieroglyphic inscriptions could be written either vertically
or horizontally, usually from right to left. The direction for any
given inscription is indicated by the individual signs, which normally face the
beginning of the inscription. The inscriptions are composed of nouns, verbs,
prepositions, and other parts of speech organized by strict rules of word
order. The signs spelling individual words were arranged in groups, and blank
spaces were avoided in an inscription. Words referring to the king and gods
were often honorifically transposed, that is, moved forward in writing. The
king's two most common names were inscribed in cartouches or “royal rings,”
stylized representations of loops formed by a double thickness of rope with the
ends tied at the bottom.
The Egyptians continued to use hieroglyphs from the time of the
development of the system, about 3000 BC, until the time of the
ROSETTA STONE
The key to
unlocking the hieroglyphic code was found in the Rosetta Stone
in 1822. The stone allowed for the comparative study of the ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphics with the known Greek writing.
The Rosetta Stone, a black basalt slab bearing an inscription that was
the key to the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics and thus to the foundation
of modern Egyptology, was unearthed in 1799 by Napoleon's army in
THOTH
Originally, Thoth was a god of creation,
but was later thought to be the one who civilized men, teaching them civic and
religious practices, writing, medicine, music and was a master magician. He
took on many of the roles of Seshat, until she became
a dual, female version of Thoth. Thoth
was believed to be the inventor of astronomy, astrology, engineering, botany,
geometry, land surveying.
The magical
powers of Thoth were so great, that the Egyptians had
tales of a 'Book of Thoth', which would allow a
person who read the sacred book to become the most powerful magician in the
world. The Book which "the god of wisdom wrote with his own hand"
was, though, a deadly book that brought nothing but pain and tragedy to those
that read it, despite finding out about the "secrets of the gods
themselves" and "all that is hidden in the stars".
He was one of
the earlier Egyptian gods, thought to be scribe to the gods, who kept a great
library of scrolls, over which one of his wives, Seshat
(the goddess of writing) was thought to be mistress. He was associated by the
Egyptians with speech, literature, arts, learning. He, too, was a measurer and
recorder of time, as was Seshat. Believed to be the
author of the spells in the Book of the Dead, he was a helper (and punisher) of
the deceased as they try to enter the underworld. In this role, his wife was Ma'at, the personification of order, who was weighed
against the heart of the dead to see if they followed ma'at
during their life.
SUMERIANS
By 3200 B.C., the Sumerians had invented the
earliest known form of writing called cuneiform,
a system of writing about as old as Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Sumerians
employed a sharp-pointed instrument- called a stylus - to inscribe wedge-shaped characters on soft clay
tablets, which were then hardened by baking.
SOURCES
http://home.echo-on.net/~smithda/hieroglyphics.html
http://greatscott.com/hiero/hiero_stan.html
http://www.crystalinks.com/thoth.html