We explain what hieroglyphs are, their differences with alphabetic writing and their evolution. Also, Egyptian hieroglyphs.
What are hieroglyphs?
Hieroglyph or hieroglyph is called each of the signs that make up the writing system of different ancient cultures, but especially the Egyptian.
Its name comes from the Greek word hieroglyphikos, composition of hieros ("Sacred") and glýphein ("Chisel"), since it is a way of writing that, above all, is carefully carved in stone, either by means of reliefs or bas-reliefs.
Alphabetic writing, like the one we know and use in our daily lives, is made up of a series of conventional signs, which are not at all like the sound that they evoke. On the contrary, hieroglyphs are figures or symbols of visual similarity with certain objects of everyday life, which can be verified (or assumed). For this reason, it is also called hieroglyphs to the ideograms, pictograms or logograms that generated the Mayan culture, the Hittite, or some others of antiquity.
Hieroglyphic writing was probably the oldest in the world. It was used mainly to leave official inscriptions in tombs and temples, or in the edicts of the king (or pharaoh).
In some cases, like the Egyptian, the hieroglyphs mutated to a simpler version, called hieratic, for painting on clay pots or plates. Much later, as a consequence of the Greek influence on the regionThey also mutated to demotic, where Greek writing signs already appear.
The Egyptian people wrote in hieroglyphics for nearly 3,600 years, whether on walls, vessels, or papyri.
Egyptian hieroglyphs
In the case of Ancient Egyptian writing, the organization of the ideograms (drawings that represent ideas) and phonograms (drawings that represent sounds) that compose it are given within imaginary blocks, distributed from top to bottom, from left to right or from right to left.
In other words, Egyptian writing could be read in any of these directions, depending on where the depicted figures were looking. In addition, within each block, the signs at the top should be read before those at the bottom, if any.
Ancient Egyptian writing was deciphered by the French father of Egyptology, Jean François Champolion (1790-1832).
This researcher was also fluent in Farsi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese and other Asian languages, thanks to the use of the Rosetta stone, a fragment of an ancient Egyptian stele that contains a message written in Egyptian hieroglyphs, demotic writing and ancient Greek. so it could serve as a dictionary.