Egyptian hieroglyphics (c. -3200 to +394) was one of four ways to write the Egyptian language in ancient times. It is by far the best known because it was the preferred way to write in stone, and stone lasts way longer than paper, even in a dry place like Egypt.
Four ways to write ancient Egyptian:
hieroglyphics (c. -3200 to +394) – the preferred way to write in stone. Looks like picture writing but most of the pictures stand for sounds. There are over 600 signs, but only 150 are regularly used.
hieratic (c. -3200 to +200s) – started as a handwritten form of hieroglyphics but took on a life of its own. By far the most common way to write Egyptian before Greek and Roman times, but because it was written on paper (papyrus), most of it has long since disappeared. In time it gave rise to:
Demotic (c. -650 to +533) – an easier-to-write form of hieratic, common in Greek and Roman times.
Coptic (c. +200 to present) – based on the Greek alphabet with four Demotic characters added for sounds not found in Greek. Preferred by Christians.
The Egyptian language itself had changed through all that time. By Roman times what was being written in hieroglyphics was a dead language. What was written in Coptic was the living language, as different from the dead language as French is from Latin.
The last hieroglyphs were written in 394 (pictured above). Knowledge of how to read them died out by the 600s.
In 1419 “Hieroglyphica” (400s) by Horapollo was discovered, a book about hieroglyphics written a thousand years before, back when people could still read hieroglyphics. Unfortunately, Horapollo was not one of them! For 400 years Western scholars came up with all kinds of wild ideas, but none could be tested till:
In 1799 the Rosetta Stone was found in Egypt by Napoleon’s army while building a fort at a mouth of the Nile. It had the same piece of writing in hieroglyphics, Demotic and Ancient Greek.
Enter Champollion: Even with the Rosetta Stone it still took a genius like Champollion (who also knew Coptic) to see that hieroglyphics were not picture writing. By looking at the names of kings and queens he discovered that most hieroglyphs stood for sounds. At the heart of hieroglyphics was an alphabet!
But the alphabet had no vowels. To make up for that it did use picture writing to provide hints. The word for walk, masha, for example, was written as M + SH + a picture of legs.
Hieroglyphics are messier than that, but that was the basic idea, which Champollion worked out. Scholars after him worked out most of the rest.
By the 1850s scholars could read hieroglyphics for themselves. But even today hieroglyphics are still not perfectly understood.
What became the Roman alphabet, what I am writing in now, started out as a poor man’s hieroglyphics back in -2000. Its inventor seems to have understood that many of the hieroglyphs stood for sounds, but did not know which pictures went with which sounds. So he picked 24 hieroglyphs and gave them sounds according to what they looked like.
– Abagond, 2017.
Sources: mainly Google Images (images); “The Hieroglyphs of Ancient Egypt” (2003) by Aidan Dodson.
See also:
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Reblogged this on Project ENGAGE.
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So you’re saying Hollywood’s portrayal of archaeologists being able to interpret or even read hieroglyphics from up to 5,000 years ago is a bunch of bullshit?
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Yep.
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@TeddyBearDaddy
Since at least the 1920s there have been courses you can take to learn hieroglyphics as a foreign language. I do not know, though, how many archaeologist can read them at sight like the Sunday funnies. Probably few to none. And, since its native speakers died out long ago, not all the ins and outs are completely understood. Hieroglyphics were designed for people who already knew the spoken language inside out.
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abagond, can you give us examples of sentences or whole texts that have not been adequately translated because: “But even today hieroglyphics are still not perfectly understood.”?
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I would like to see more posts about how people learn to reconstruct languages, or even resurrect languages which have no more living native speakers, especially those with no or little written record.
I recently joined a group that is interested in reconstructing the lost Algonquian languages in Maryland and I want to learn more about how they do this. They are using the Lenape languages as the starting point as they are supposed to be related.
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@ Jefe
I can’t remember what thread it was on, but some time back you’d mentioned that you would be meeting with some Native educators during your visit. Did you ever post an update here on how that went?
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I was originally planning to visit the Pamunkey reservation in Virginia. I did not. But I did have a meeting with one of the educational consultants at the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). His tribal affiliation is with Plains Indians. That was an interesting meeting. That was my 3rd visit to the one in Washington, DC. I have also previously visited the one in New York twice.
I will try to visit the Pamunkey reservation in a future trip to DC/MD/VA.
I did not get to go to the Museum of African-American history this past time. There are very strict rules for booking reservations, and I simply did not have enough time. I will try to go next time.
I did stop to have a talk with the Asian Pacific American office of the Smithsonian, and they invited me to keep in touch, and even make guest posts on their blog if I want.
I did go to see the Museum of American history again. I think it should be renamed the Museum of white Anglo-American history.
They have already made separate museums for the American Indian and for African-American (as though they are somehow not part of “regular” American history). But there is no permanent gallery on Asian Americans in the Smithsonian. I think that should change. They told me that all they need is a $20million donation to get started.
I also was going to meet with one of the Piscataway elders who is interested in resurrecting the Piscataway language of Maryland, but again, I ran out of time. If I spend more time in the region, I will definitely try to get involved in that. I have always wanted to know about the language and culture of the people from where I grew up and hope to spur the interest there too. But it looks like they are trying to do it comparing it to Lenape (the language of the Delaware and Hudson river valleys) with which it is allegedly related.
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@ Jefe
Thanks! It sounds like you had some informative discussions even if you didn’t have time for everything.
“But there is no permanent gallery on Asian Americans in the Smithsonian. I think that should change. They told me that all they need is a $20million donation to get started.”
If only I had some spare change lying around…
“But it looks like they are trying to do it comparing it to Lenape”
I think this is a fairly common approach. For instance, if I remember correctly, Egyptologists have leant heavily on Coptic in their efforts to surmise what Ancient Egyptian may have sounded like. Same thing with Old English (of Beowulf’s time) and modern Icelandic.
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@ Jefe
“But I did have a meeting with one of the educational consultants at the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). His tribal affiliation is with Plains Indians. That was an interesting meeting.”
Anything of particular interest to share?
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@Solitaire
After you said that it made me think of something.
As I told you before, my Aunt is the one launched the campaign in the 1970s that eventually became Asian Pacific American Heritage month. Maybe it is my turn to take up the baton and find a way to set up a permanent gallery for Asian American history somewhere on the National Mall. Now that I am getting to know the persons in the NMAI and maybe can also start to liaise with the Smithsonian’s APA office, maybe one day I can figure it out.
I have felt very disenfranchised in HK (after the person I voted to be my representative was dislodged from his office and later thrown in jail) and started to wonder if I should work my way back to DC. And after seeing the depiction in the National Museum of American History, something really needs to be done.
This means I need to study more about how people reconstruct dead languages – where archaeology meets linguistics.
I was told 2 years ago that no one was interested in resurrecting the Piscataway language, but now that there is a new discussion group, it looks like there is a keen interest at least among some persons. I find that exciting.
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@ Jefe
It would be worth a try. I wonder if any existing Asian American organizations would be willing to help with fundraising?
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I ask a serious question and I’m ignored! Again, which sentences have been deemed obscure due to the fact that “…even today hieroglyphics are still not perfectly understood.”?
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@ gro jo
Maybe because it’s information found primarily in academic journals and books. The scholarly debates over word meanings don’t often trickle down into works written for the average layperson. It isn’t easy to just Google it and pull examples up right away.
For instance, there are medical, scientific, and technical terms the meanings of which are unclear or the subject of ongoing debate.
A couple of examples:
Go to Google Books and look up “Writings of Early Scholars in the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Rome, and Greece: Translating Ancient Scientific Texts” edited by Annette Imhausen and Tanja Pommerening (2011).
Page 3 of the introduction has a brief discussion concerning the Ancient Egyptian word often translated as stomach.
The essay that begins on p. 241 contains a discussion of whether a particular term was a scribal error and if not, how it should be properly translated and understood.
If you then look up the book “Translating Writings of Early Scholars in the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Greece and Rome: Methodological Aspects with Examples” (2016) by the same editors, and go to the essay entitled “Challenges of Interpreting Egyptian Astronomical Texts,” you will find additional discussion of words that scholars have differing opinions about.
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Thank you Solitaire.
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Another example. The link is for the full article (scroll down past the abstract), which discusses a mathematical problem written in hieroglyphics. Part of the difficulty in translation is due to missing text, but there is also the question of how certain hieroglyphs (like “basket”) should be read or interpreted in the context of mathematics.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0315086009000305
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