Sterling’s Blog

Hieroglyphics were the Ancient Egyptians’ form of writing.  The word  ”Hieroglyphics” means “sacred engraved letters.”  There are three types of Egyptian writing.  First there was hieroglyphics which was difficult to write.  Then as writing became more common they developed two more types of writing, demonics (common) and hieratic (priestly).

There were 800 hieroglyphics in the Old, Middle and New Kingdom but by the Greco-Roman period there were over 5,000!!  That sounds very confusing! When one hieroglyphic is combined with another it makes a totally different hieroglyphic.  What also makes it more confusing is that you can read hieroglyphics from left to right, right to left, and up to down!  The way to tell whether to read it right to left or left to right is to determine which way the hieroglyphic bird is facing.  if the bird is facing left, start left, if facing right, start right.  Confused ?!?!

In the 5th century the Hieroglyphica of Hora (a stone with two languages, hieroglyphics and another language that the Egyptologists  knew) was discovered.  That explained 200 hieroglyphics.  Then Napoleon’s army discovered the  Rosetta Stone (similar to Hieroglyphica of Hora) in 1799 but nobody deciphered it until Champollion in the 1820’s.  Both of those stones were not enough to complete the Egyptian alphabet though so they used cartouches (in photo on left, along the bottom).  Cartouches are ovals with king, queens, and sometimes gods names in them.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 8:32 am and is filed under Africa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.