Muhammad atef ismeil
A researcher in Egyptology
Cairo University
Faculty of archaeology
In the temple of goddess isis on the island of
Philae , one wall bear a brief
hieroglyphic inscription , it was written on 24 august ad 294 , and as
far as we know it was the last time that the hieroglyphic script was used. The
language of ancient Egypt survived considerably longer, and in a sense it still
exists in fossilized form in the liturgical texts of the modern Coptic church.
Nevertheless , it was around the end of the 4th century ad that the
knowledge and use of hieroglyphic
effectively vanished until the decipherment of hieroglyphs by jean francois
Champollion in 1822.
The ancient Egyptian language divided into
linguistic phases and scribal phases.
Throughout its three thousand-year history, the ancient Egyptian language
envolved from old Egyptian to middle Egyptian to late Egyptian , and later to
demotic and Coptic. As for the scribal phases , beside the hieroglyphic script
, the ancient Egyptian lanhuage written in the cursive hieratic and later the
demotic and Coptic.
From all its scripts , the hieroglyphic is the
most famous script of the ancient Egyptian language. The ancient Egyptians
believed that writing was invented by the god thoth and called their hieroglyphic script mdwt ntr
( gods words ) . the word hieroglyphic cames from the greek hieros ( sacred )
plus glypho ( inscriptions ) , which meaning sacred inscriptions .
Hieroglyphic are pictures of humans , animals ,
birds or parts of these pictures etc that were used to write the first script
of the ancient Egyptian language . these signs divided into ideograms and
phonograms. The ideograms means the sign itself , as for the phonograms which
indicate to the pronunciation of the ideograms , it is the use of the ideogram
as phonetic element in a words or any other linguistic combinations.
There are also the determinatives which are
symbols that help us to define the meaning of the words.
The phonograms divided into signs that make the
sound of one letter which known as the alphabet , signs that make the sound of
two letters and signs that make the sound of three letters. These sounds are
written in Latin letters which known as the transliteration .
Hieroglyphic
script re written in rows or columns and can be read from left to right or from
right to left. We can distinguish the direction of the text according to the directions of the signs with
face or back such as the humans , animals or birds etc.
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