Posted By admin on July 20, 2009

Hieroglyphics Ancient

Hieroglyphics(Ancient Egypt)?

How do people(historians) know what the hieroglyphics mean?
Is there a document stating what each symbol's meaning is?
If so what is it called and where was it found.

Until The Rosetta Stone was deciphered by the determination of Taylor and Champollion in 1821.
It was thought that the heiroglyphs were not an actual written language, but pictographs.
Which had no literal meaning or way of translating into another language.Especially a modern one.
The term heiroglyph is Greek in its origin. Literally translated it means sacred carvings.
There are significant variations in heiroglyphs and the way of portrayal according to the era.
Beginging with and including:
Old Egyptian
Middle Egyptian
Late Kingdon
Demotic
The differance in between the early and later forms indicates the enormous growth of the Egyptians sophistication and abitily of abstact thought.
The first types of heiroglyphs appear in writings and decoration circa.2920BC.
The last hieroglphs known,were used as sacred carvings.They were written in the Christian era at Philae temple and have been dated at 369AD.
The Coptic form of hieroglphs is purely related to sacred writings, and is still in use by the present Christian Coptic church in Egypt.
Heiroglphs are written in vertical colomns or horizontal lines.Usually from the right hand side to the left.but in some cases are in the reverse. This can easily be determined by the way the representations of people and animals are facing.
Heiroglyphs are pronouced phonetically as the Egyptians found no use for vowels.
There are quite a few websites that have hieroglyphic alphabets.
But there is much more to understanding thier meaning than by alphabetic translation, and I would avoid these.
From experiance I have found that the web site of Jim Loy is one of the most comprehensive and correct lists of hieroglphs,and thier determining factors.
These factors are required for even the most simple of translations.
That is ofcourse mainly due to the mentioned lack of vowels.
It contains an extremly comprehensive list Such as you would expect to find at any University were Egyptology is studied.
It contains a wealth of correct knowledge and covers absolutly everything that is needed.
By doing a simple Google containing the key words you should find it with no problem.
Your problem will arise if you wish to print it off. As you will require endless ink and a lot of paper.
Other than that,there is no one book that I could even recommend that has so much information

Enjoy!

Category: Antiques
Tags: ancient, ancient_egypt, egypt, hieroglyphics ancient egypt, hieroglyphics ancient egyptian, history, language