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What are hieroglyphics? Ancient Egyptians started using pictures to make a written language called hieroglyphics. It was one of the very first writing systems in the world! They wrote hieroglyphics on temples and monuments. Write like an Egyptian Scribes had to go to school and work hard to learn how to read and write the 750 pictures used in hieroglyphics! We only have to learn 26 letters in our alphabet! Egyptians made up a drawing for each letter sound. They used pictures of things from their everyday lives. Scribes Scribes would write on papyrus which is a paperlike material They wrote on pieces of pottery, stones, and tomb walls too! Only scribes and rich men and women could read hieroglyphics Reading Hieroglyphics We read from left to right. But Ancient Egyptians read from right to left, left to right or from top to bottom. To figure out which way to read a line, Ancient Egyptians had to look for pictures of animals and see which way they were facing. If the animals were facing the right, they would start reading from the right. Cartouches Cartouches are oval boxes that were drawn around people’s names Usually, only the pharaoh would have a cartouche. The Rosetta Stone A piece of granodiorite rock weighing about 770 kg It was discovered by Napoleon’s army in 1799 near the town of elRashid (Rosetta), Egypt At the end of the 4th century CE, when hieroglyphs were no longer used, the knowledge of how to read and write them disappeared The Rosetta Stone held the key to unlocking the mystery of this ancient text The Rosetta stone described Egyptian life in 200 BCE The same story is written both in Egyptian and Greek and features 14 lines of hieroglyphs, 32 lines of cursive Demotic, and 54 lines of ancient Greek By carefully comparing the 3 different texts, the Stone was deciphered in 1822 Deciphering the Stone Found by Napoleon and his French troops in the town of Rosetta in the Nile Delta (1799). Contained hieroglyphics, demotic (faster & less formal), and Greek. Jean-François Champollion is credited for decoding the Rosetta Stone. He was fluent in Coptic (a language spoken by Ancient Egyptians). The hieroglyphics represented sounds in Coptic. He then matched Greek words with their Egyptian equivalents. Cartouches: circled Egyptian sections on the stone representing kings’ names. Decoding Hieroglyphics Recognized king Ptolemis in Greek text = cartouche circled representing Ptolemis = Stage 1 decoding of hieroglyphics Decoding - Rameses Final symbols represented “s-s” based on previous information. ?-?–s–s Guessed that the first symbol represented the sun, which was “ra” in Coptic. Ra - ? – s – s Only one pharaoh’s name seemed to fit: Rameses. *Egyptians broke long words into sound bits (“ra” , etc.) which were also represented by symbols* - had to speak Coptic to figure out what sounds the symbols were representing *Egyptians had to speak Coptic because sun-meses or soleil-meses didn’t match with the pharaoh’s name: Ra-Meses* Jean Francois Champollion He summarized the principle of the hieroglyphic phonetical system: “One imagines, then, that the Egyptians, wanting to express, be it a vowel, be it a consonant, be it a syllable of a foreign word, would use a hieroglyphic sign expressing or representing some object, whose name, in the spoken language, contained in its entirety or in its first part, the sound of the vowel, consonant or syllable that they wanted to write.” (Lettre, p. 51) Thus, the sign of a sparrow-hawk (which also symbolizes life, the soul) is called “ahe” or “ahi” in Egyptian, and stands for the letter A. In Coptic, the word for mouth is “ro,” so this sign stands for the letter R, and so forth. Jean Francois Champollion Champollion illustrated, in full, the decipherment of grammatical words, the names of Egyptian kings, the names of private persons (from papyri on mummies), titles, names of pharoahs, and so on. He presented a full alphabet, with signs, their names, and corresponding letters. In each case, he demonstrated the multifaceted nature of the alphabet; a name could be indicated by a symbol (an obelisk for Amman, for instance); or the same name could be represented figuratively (with an image representing the god); or it could be rendered phonetically. He summed it up: “The hieroglyphic writing is a complex system, a script at the same time figurative, symbolic, and phonetical, in the same text, in the same phrase, I would almost say, in the same word.” (Précis, p. 375) Now let’s write in hieroglyphics!