HIEROGLYPHICS -- THE "SACRED CARVINGS"

The Egyptians themselves claimed that the god Thoth and the goddess Seshat created hieroglyphics and then transmitted them to mankind.

Hieroglyphs were written to be read in long lines not only from left to right but from right to left, vertically and horizontally as well.

The hieroglyphic system used in ancient Egypt had 700 to 800 symbols called glyphs. The number started out smaller but grew in later periods as new concepts entered the language. Centuries of record-keeping and religious elaboration added to the number.

Hieroglyphs are divided into two separate groups known as phonograms and ideograms. Phonograms were glyphs that represent sounds. They were used purely for phonetic value and had no relationship with the words they were used to spell. The development of the "rebus principle" (a picture of an object that stood not only for that object but also for a word with the same sound but different meaning) made possible the writing of proper nouns, abstract ideas, and grammatical elements. Similarly phonograms could include the sounds of both single and combined constants.

Ideograms on the other hand represented objects or ideas or something closely related. For example, legs might represent movement.

Ideograms and phonograms were combined in hieroglyphic writing to produce ideas, meanings, or stories. In this way the Egyptians developed thousands of words with a limited amount of symbols. Phonograms were usually at the beginning of a word, followed by an ideogram, (called a determinative when used in this fashion). This specified a category to which the glyph belonged, such as 'motion words' or 'animal words', and clued the reader in to the intended meaning.

Egyptians did not use vowels. Instead they used determinatives that appeared to the left of the phonograms to specify each word's intended meaning.

Despite the ubiquity of hieroglyphs, few Egyptians could actually use them. For the most part only royalty, priests, and civil officials had the ability to understand and write them. Hieroglyphs were difficult to learn and time-consuming to create. In earlier periods perhaps only one percent of Egyptians could read or write. Later, as the royal administration grew, more scribes were needed. Eventually many non-scholars had at least a working knowledge of written Egyptian, including priests, nobles and sculptors.

Priests used hieroglyphics to write down prayers, magical texts, texts related to life after death, and texts related to worshipping the gods. Royalty used them to write autobiographies and as guides for use in the afterworld. These were written on the tomb walls and inside the coffins to guide the dead through the perils of the afterlife so that they could be reincarnated. In addition, civil officials used hieroglyphs to write royal documents of long-term significance, record historical events, and to document things of numerical importance such as crop yields or the depth of the water on a certain day of the year. Hieroglyphs can also be found on extravagant pieces of jewelry or other luxury items. The symbols on jewelry and other luxury items were found in either plain black ink or in bright colors as well.

After Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 B.C. and established the Ptolemaic Dynasty, the Greek alphabet was used for most purposes. Hieroglyphs were reserved for religious things that were "too holy" for ordinary Greek (hence "sacred carvings"). By 400 A.D., most Egyptians were Christian and there was no longer any religious use for hieroglyphs. Even though they remained everywhere on tombs and monuments, hieroglyphs went out of use and eventually forgotten altogether.

For information about the modern re-discovery of hieroglyphics, see:
http://www.

LANGUAGE
The ancient Egyptian language is classified as a member of the Afro-Asiatic language family, related to Semitic (Hebrew and Arabic), North African (Berber), Cushitic (Ethiopian) and other languages of the Sahara and Horn of Africa.

Naturally enough Egyptian evolved over the millenia. These changes are divided into five periods:

• Old Egyptian during the Predynastic, Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom Periods.
• Middle Egyptian during the Middle Kingdom Period. Considered "classic Egyptian" by later generations.
• Late Egyptian during the New Kingdom and Later Dynasties Periods.
• Demotic during the Greco-Roman Period.
• Coptic during the late Roman and Byzantine times until replaced by Arabic in the 7th century AD (but still spoken liturgically).

At the heart of Egyptian vocabulary were roots of two or three consonants. Vowels and other consonants were then added to this root to create the words, just as Arabic, Hebrew, and other Afro-Asiatic languages do today.

We do not know what these vowels were, since like other Afro-Asiatic languages, ancient Egyptian didn't write vowels. The name Tutankhamen, for example, was written in Egyptian as "twt 'nkh ymn" (the apostrophe represents a 'voiced pharyngeal fricative' as in the German "ch" in the name Bach). Scholars have put in assumed vowels as a matter of convenience, however this 'fake' pronunciation convention has often been mistaken for actual pronunciation. We do not know how ancient Egyptian actually sounded when spoken.

Phonologically, Egyptian contained the usual consonant sounds (labial, palatal, uvular, pharyngeal, glottal, etc) in a distribution similar to that of modern Arabic.

The basic word order of ancient Egyptian was Verb-Subject-Object. With the sentence "the man opens the door", the Egyptians would have said "opens the man the door".

With morphology, the early stages of Egyptian possessed no articles - no words for "the" or "a". Later Egyptian created words for this purpose. Like today's Romance languages, Egyptian used two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine. Like other Afro-Asiatic languages it used three grammatical numbers: singular, dual and plural forms.

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