Ancient Egyptian Writing

1. Ancient Egyptian Writing • By around 3000 B.C., Egyptians began to use a form of writing called Hieroglyphs • It comes from the Greek “hieros” meaning sacred and “glyphe” meaning carving • The development of hieroglyphics first began as simple pictograms(pictures that represent the object that it actually depicted) • Later, pictures came to represent ideas, so that if you saw a sun in a scene, it might symbolize not only the sun, but also daytime, warmth, or light. These were known as ideograms.

2. The problem with ideograms was that they could be hard to interpret. In some cases it could be hard to tell if the writer meant daytime or the sun. • Finally, the pictures began to represent not only the appearance of an object and related ideas, but also the sound of a spoken word used to it describe it. Sun, then, might also mean son. • _______ __________ ________ ______ ___________

3. So each picture took on a unique sound that could be used to form thoughts and ideas. • Egyptian hieroglyphs were a combination of sound-signs, pictograms, and ideograms. This made them extremely difficult for archaeologists to decode. Early Egyptians used more than 1000 signs, pictures, or symbols to indicate words or sounds • Scribes learned to use this language at a young age and were employed to keep record of business transactions, law codes, inventories, etc. • Some scribes even worked for the Pharaoh recording architectural plans, and even writing religious spells on the walls of their tombs • Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics was not able to be translated into modern language until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone