Hieroglyphic Essay

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is one the oldest and most interesting forms of written language developed. There is evidence of its use from before 3200 BCE and Egyptian hieroglyphs remained in use for over 3,500 years. The Egyptian name for hieroglyphs translates to “language of the gods,” although the term hieroglyph actually came from Greek words meaning “sacred carving,” which the Greeks used to define the writing found on Egyptian monuments and temples (Ancient Egypt, Hieroglyphics, n.d.). The Egyptians saw hieroglyphic writing as a way to communicate between themselves and their gods. Because of this, hieroglyphs were written in temples and anywhere connected to the gods or the afterlife, such as in tombs and cemeteries. The

When writing, hieroglyphs are separated into three main groups: ideograms, phonograms, and determinatives. The ideograms were hieroglyphs used either to directly represent the object pictured, such as a picture of a building representing a building, or they were used to represent something closely related to the symbol, such as a picture of walking legs representing movement. The second type, phonograms, were used to phonetically sound out words. This is similar to a language such as English where each symbol represents a sound instead of an object, and multiple hieroglyphs would be used to together to form words which could be completely unrelated to the pictures drawn. This could lead to a lot of confusion as most hieroglyphs could be used as ideograms or as phonograms. This is why there was a third type, determinatives. Determinatives were generally hieroglyphs that were added after a set of phonograms to show that they should be read phonetically instead of as ideograms. The determinative itself was not sounded out when read, but they were used to show where a word ended and also help with the meaning of the word. For example a symbol of walking legs used as the determinative would show the word had something to do with movement or travel (Allen,

This was an extremely labor intensive and time consuming process to complete. Because of the amount of work necessary to inscribe the hieroglyphs, the Egyptians developed a simpler form of writing called hieratic. It made use of less detailed and easier to write cursive versions of the hieroglyphs which could be written much more quickly. It was primarily written on papyrus and with a reed brush and ink. Hieroglyphs remained in use in tombs, temples, monuments, and other areas where wall inscriptions or more permanent writing was required, but hieratic became the standard for most other things, such as texts, letters, and everyday uses (Hieroglyphic writing, 2015). An even more streamlined version of the hieratic was developed in the 7th century BCE called demotic. At that point religious scripts were still written in hieratic, but demotic took over the majority of other writing and the knowledge of hieroglyphic writing became limited to only priests (Ancient Egypt, Hieroglyphics,