The history of Egyptian hieroglyphics
At the banks of the Nile in northeast Africa was where it all begun. The Nile was the heart and source of most ancient Egypt’s wealth. Main Egyptian cities grew along the Nile since Egyptians became experts in irrigation using water from the Nile to practice agriculture. The Nile was a source of food, transport, water, and soil to the Egyptians (Allen, 2017). Frequent floods annually came with rich soils from the highlands and provided Egyptians with fertile grounds to excel in farming. Famous ancient Egypt was divided into three kingdoms, namely the old, middle, and new kingdom. Those were the golden times that Egypt stood at its strongest during the intermediate times, thus creating a fertile ground for the innovation of hieroglyphs.
Ancient Egypt was a pool of riches in terms of culture, including government, religion, arts, and writing. Government and religion fell under the same category because the pharaoh held the position of the leader in both religion and government (Dodsan, 2001). Writing was a significant consideration in running the government in which scribes had reviews of influential people since they were the only people who could read and write. The pharaohs of the great nation were buried inside giant pyramids or in secret tombs. They believed in being buried with their treasure to help them in their afterlife. This ideology gives archaeologists lots of work in examining the well-preserved artefacts and tombs to find out how ancient Egypt lived.
Hieroglyphics is a system of writing using ancient Egyptian symbols. It is a Greek word meaning god’s word, which involved a series of picture words consisting of several hundred words. It was complicated and labour-intensive, was used on buildings and tombs because the Egyptians believed the hieroglyph was sacred (Allen, 2017). The hieroglyphs fell under three different classes, which include: phonograms, ideograms, and determinatives. Phonograms represented a specific sound; ideograms represented ideas, while determinatives were hieroglyphs that were unspoken or translated. The Egyptian language had no written vowels, thus making the pronunciation of ancient Egypt unknown. The signs distinguished male and female names by placing a sign of a man or woman at the end of the name discussed. Hieroglyphs are readable vertically, horizontally, from right-to-left or left-to-right with the help of the signs (Allen, 2017). If the signs face right, the hieroglyphs should be read right to left and vice versa. An excellent example of a hieroglyph in today’s world is the alphabet chart for kids.
hieroglyphs were used by priests to write down prayers and messages related to life after death and worship of the gods. On temples walls and other monuments, hieroglyphic inscriptions came in handy for sacred purposes. Hieratic scripts came into being around 2700 BC. It was a form of writing more akin to alphabet letters. Hieratic script later became widely used as a faster and more functional form of writing (gliddon, 1847). It was used in monumental inscriptions and remained the Egyptian script until the demotic script was introduced in the 7th-century BC. It is debatable whether the ancient Greeks understood hieroglyphs. The Greeks mst likely did not, since, from their viewpoint, hieroglyphics were not phonetic signs but symbols of more complex and symbolic nature. The humanist revival of the European Ages gave no further insight into the original Egyptian ones.
Encouraged by priests and temple scribes, hieroglyphs became gradually stylized and derived into the hieratic ‘priestly’ script. Its contemplated that hieratic was invented with the hieroglyphic script. Several of the hieroglyphs found in graves dated to the c. 3200-3000 BCE period were in the form of royal serekhs. . Hieratic was always written from right to left, mostly on ostraca (pottery sherds) and papyrus, and it was used for both religious,public, commercial and private documents.
The demotic script was developed from hieratic and was considered more straightforward, and a more readable script and that saw it favoured throughout Egypt. it served several purposes; some of them include administrative purposes, literary texts, scientific treatises, legal documents, and business contracts (Dodsan, 2001). It marked a new development in language mainly because it was a kind of dialect with its grammar. During the Greco-Roman period, demotic became the script of daily life, while the older hieratic was reserved for sacred writings.
After the demotic script was the Coptic script, which became the commonly used script in Egypt, it comprised of a series of dialects in which at least six had the status of written language. The script didn’t last forever but went out of fashion around the 14th century, a time when the Arabs took over Egypt and Arabic became the native language. The Coptic script and the language it represents were limited to liturgical purposes in the Coptic Orthodox Church. In today’s world, Hieroglyphics can be pictures of living creatures, objects used in daily life or symbols. Some are easy to identify, some confusing and some impossible
Just like any other ancient kingdom, the empire began to weaken in 700bc and got conquered by several different civilizations. It was defeated by a series of empires, starting with the Assyrian empire afterwards by Persian Empire, later in 332 BC by alexander the great, and finally, the Romans Empire in 30 BC when Egypt became a province of Rome. Some fun facts stand out about ancient Egypt: both ladies and gentlemen used makeups in the belief that ihealing powers and protected their skin from the sun (gliddon, 1847). Mouldy bread was their remedy for infections. They invented writing and used ink to write on papyrus. Ancient Egyptians had numerous inventions, including toothpaste, musical devices, the plough for farming, medicine, cosmetics, calendars, and ways to build buildings. Ancient Egypt also plays a significant role in the bible because it was in Egypt, where Israelites were captives for years on end until Moses rescued them and led them to the Promised Land. Pharaoh kept his hair covered from the eyes of ordinary citizens, and surprisingly, cats were considered sacred compared to today when a cat is just a cat.
A significant reminder of the hieroglyph was the Rosetta stone. The discovery of the Rosetta stone was to provide the lead to the final unlocking of the mystery. The stone waswritten with three different scripts: hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek. The stone contained a text written by a group of priests in Egypt in honour of the Egyptian pharaoh. It was represented in three languages, including Egyptian hieroglyphics symbolizing the script used for religious documents, Greek, which represented the language of the rulers of Egypt at that time, and demotic (Dodsan, 2001). The Rosetta Stone was discovered and deciphered during Napoleon’s Egyptian invasion.
It was after the Roman Empire began its rule of the Egyptian nation that hieroglyphics started to fade from widespread use and in the minds of the Egyptians. By the fourth century AD, Egypt had been converted to Christianity and ultimately adopted the Greek alphabet and Coptic script, whereby the country’s traditional forms of writing became irrelevant (Dodsan, 2001). The last dated inscription in hieroglyphs was made on the gate post of a temple at Philae in 396 AD. Examples of the full 32-letter Coptic alphabet are recorded as early as the 2nd century CE. Its use not only reflects the expansion of Christianity in Egypt, but it also represents a major cultural breakup: Coptic was the first alphabetic script used in the Egyptian language. Eventually, Egyptian hieroglyphs were replaced by the Coptic script. Only a few signs from the demotic script survived in the Coptic alphabet. The written language of the old gods plunged into oblivion for nearly two millennia, until Champollion’s great discovery.
Conclusively, hieroglyphs were part and parcel of ancient Egypt and significant contributors to its wealth. Since old is gold, it would be such a refreshing feeling to walk into our modern-day museums and look at original hieroglyphs, preserved from the good old days for future generation to see and learn from them. It would promote not only the American culture but also serve a reminder that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The Egyptians set the pace; the world followed suit, and today the world is a better place to live in, with advanced technologies beyond human imagination simply because someone somewhere in the past laid a solid foundation.