Egyptian writing dates back to the 3rd millennium BC. Known as hieroglyphic writing, it has been in use for over 3,000 years.

Modern scholars have obtained thousands of samples of ancient Egyptian texts. Many noble Egyptians left stories of their lives on the walls of their tombs. On the walls of the tombs, spells from the Book of the Dead were carved, which contain funerary texts that help the pharaohs and high-ranking Egyptian officials to pass to another world. Wealthy Egyptians could afford to hire a scribe to write spells of their choice. Less wealthy people had to be content with the finished text.

The inscriptions on the walls of the tombs of the warrior Ahmose, the son of Ibana, who lived in the southern city of el-Kab around 1550 BC, tell of his adventures on the battlefields:

(... I was taken on board the ship "Northman" because I was brave. I followed the pharaoh on foot while he rode in a chariot. When the city of Avaris was under siege, I fought courageously on the side of His Majesty. Subsequently, I was transferred to the ship Ascending at Memphis. There was a battle on the water. I made a grab and lost my arm. When my actions were reported to the king's herald, I was awarded gold.)

The Egyptians mastered the art of hieroglyphic writing, numbering more than 700 different characters. Hieroglyphs were used to make inscriptions on monuments, walls of temples and tombs, and write down religious texts. They could write either from left to right or from right to left. For business contracts and letters, they used hieratic writing - cursive script with simplified writing of hieroglyphs, which was always written from right to left.

Despite the abundance of "material" that fell into the hands of scientists, Egyptologists for many years could not read the ancient inscriptions that adorned Egyptian temples and tombs. Only in 1882 the situation changed dramatically - the French philologist Jean-Francois Champollion, with the help of an ancient written monument, the Rosetta Stone (found in 1799), deciphered the lost language of the Egyptians.

The stone was found near the Egyptian city of Rosetta. Three texts were carved on it: one in ancient Greek and two ancient Egyptian texts - inscribed in hieroglyphs and Egyptian demotic writing. Comparing the three texts Champol suggested that they are the same in content. Considering that the ancient Greek language was well known to philologists at that time, deciphering the ancient Egyptian texts inscribed on stone was already a matter of technology.

Jean-Francois Champollion showed extraordinary abilities for languages ​​since childhood. At the age of 16, he already knew twelve languages. At the age of twenty, Champollion was fluent in French, Latin, ancient Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic, Zendi, Pahlavi, Syriac, Aramaic, Farsi, Amharic, Sanskrit and Chinese.

Egyptian writing

Type of: logophonetic

language family: Egyptian

Localization: Egypt, North Africa

Propagation time: 3100 don. e. - 400 AD

Hieroglyphs either directly “depicted” the word, for example, the image of a bull, meant the word “bull”, or indirectly hinted at the content of the word, for example, the image of a club - the weapon of neighboring tribes - meant the name of their country “Libya”.

First Egyptian writing- hieroglyphs were clearly pictorial in nature:

In total, up to 5000 different Egyptian hieroglyphs are known, but no more than 700-800 were used in each era.

Among the Egyptian hieroglyphs are distinguished:

1) one-consonant nye signs (about 30), denoting the consonant sounds of the Egyptian language;

2) two-three-consonant signs for the phonetic transmission of morphemes;

3) ideograms - to denote whole words;

4) determinatives - auxiliary (unpronounceable) ideographic signs that clarify the meanings of words.

Demotic

Hieroglyphics

Hieratic for many centuries it was used to write texts of various contents on papyrus. In the VIII-VII centuries. BC e. a new letter appears - demotic. Demotic writing differs from hieratic by much more cursiveness and an abundance of ligatures, which makes it difficult to read demotic texts. The last demotic texts date back to the 5th century. n. e.

Ultimately, most of the texts became demotic, losing any hint of their hieroglyphic origin. Demotic writing was preserved only for writing texts of a cult nature.

The latest demotic inscription found on the Rosetta Stone has lost all resemblance to hieroglyphics to the point of resembling ordinary Aramaic writing.

We will analyze the symbolism of the ancient Egyptian religion in a separate chapter, but already now it must be said that it is inseparable from the ancient Egyptian script, which is still difficult to call the alphabet in our understanding of the word. The fact is that the Egyptians addressed their gods in a special, sacred language - it, in fact, was the language of the first hieroglyphs.

In general, all known world cultures rely on the use of the symbolic meaning of letters - both in their graphic and phonetic meanings. Letter symbolism is based on the theory of cosmic correspondences. Blavatsky wrote that the letter is a symbol of the heavenly prototype of earthly realities.

In a number of alphabets, the letter was represented by the principle of similarity with objects and things, in the form of which its outline was guessed. Nowadays, children's alphabets are drawn this way, for clarity, depicting the letter A in the form of a watermelon, and the letter I, respectively, in the form of an apple. The study of the symbolism of letters allows one to recognize the connections underlying hieroglyphs, sacred traditions, and cosmogony.

Traditions of absolutely all peoples, which were characterized by their own letters, indicate that they were given to people by the gods.

The ancient Egyptians simply referred to their hieroglyphs as "the language of the gods". There are legends that the ancient Egyptian annates were written even before the Flood by the god of writing Dzhekhuti or Thoth, depicted either with the head of an ibis, or in the form of a dog-headed baboon monkey. He was also identified with the first scientist on our planet, the founder of philosophy and all the secret sciences - Hermes Trismegistus ("thrice the greatest"). If such a person does not exist in nature, then, in the words of Voltaire, "it would be necessary to invent him." The ancient Greeks believed that in the guise of Thoth the Egyptians represented the "messenger of the gods" Hermes, but in their pantheon Hermes never played such an important role as the god Thoth was assigned in Egypt.

Egyptian legend says that the god Thoth, long before the Flood, inscribed on a tablet in hieroglyphs, or sacred images, the principles of all knowledge. After the Flood, the second Thoth - Hermes Trismegistus, or "the first Hermes" (among the Romans - Mercury) translated the contents of these tables into vulgar language.

Marsilio Fikino wrote in his notes: Egyptian the priests, when they needed to point out divine truths, did not use letters, but drew the figures of plants, trees, and animals; they understood that the knowledge communicated by God does not involve discursive thinking, but is expressed in a simple and unshakable form. For example, your thought about time is multifaceted and fluid. She argues that time hastily and with the help of various transformations unites the beginning with the end. Time teaches discretion, brings objects and events into reality, and then destroys them. The Egyptians embodied this knowledge in one single image. They drew a winged snake holding its tail in its mouth. As Horus describes, the priests portrayed other things in a similar way.

Unlike alphabetic writing, aimed at maximum simplicity and accessibility for the widest strata of the population, symbolic writing is aimed at maximum sacredness, closeness, accessibility only for those initiated into the mysteries of this writing and the corresponding cult.

Below is a page from the Brockhaus-Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary with examples of ancient alphabets:

1. General information

1.1. Not only for geniuses Egyptian hieroglyphic writing in a certain period was owned by many people, among whom geniuses were found no more often than among our contemporaries. Of course,

The Egyptian writing system was, in a sense, more complex than ours. Our alphabet has thirty-three letters, while the Egyptian system of the Middle Kingdom period had about seven hundred hieroglyphs, some of which had more than one meaning. However, the situation is not as complicated as it might seem. Many of these signs are quite recognizable images with obvious and not requiring

learning values. Even professional Egyptologists do not need to remember all of them, since rare characters can be verified from reference books. Although there were many among the ancient Egyptians who could read and write, the complexity of the writing system ensured that there were many more who could not. Professional scribes were needed, and years were spent preparing the best of them. Many homework assignments and class exercises written by these diligent students are today carefully preserved in the museums of the world as the most valuable relics. The nature of the mistakes they made in their exercisesallows us to conclude that the teaching of Egyptian writing was carried out not by the phonetic method, but by the method of whole words. In one respect the Egyptiansit was easier to learn than our contemporaries: there were no strict spelling rules for Egyptian writing. The place of spelling here is occupied by aesthetics. If the prejudice about the special difficulty of the Egyptian language still scares you, read the story for children and adults about how the god Thoth created writing.

1.2. Beauty as a criterion of correctness

Aesthetic considerations were the most essential rules andrestrictions in the choice of the way in which hieroglyphic texts were written, including even the direction of writing. Hieroglyphs could be written and read from right to left and from left to right, depending on where they were used. Separate signswritten in such a way as to be facing towards the reader. This rule applies to all hieroglyphs, but it is more obvious in the case of signs depicting people and animals. For example, if the inscription was placed on the portal, its individual signs were turned towards the middle of the door. This allowed the person entering the door to easily read the symbols, for each textbegan with signs located at the nearest distance from him, and none of the signs turned out to be so "impolite" to the reader as to show his back to him. The same principles can be seen when the speech of two interlocutors is addressed to each other. The location of some hieroglyphs relative to others also obeyed aesthetic laws. The Egyptians always tried to group hieroglyphs into rectangles. For example, the word "health" was written with three consonants s-n-b. The Egyptians would not writefor such an arrangement looked ugly to them and would have been regarded as wrong. Should have placed the signs in a rectangle

The hieroglyphic inscriptions are examples of the craftsmanship with which the Egyptians made these rectangles. Such work was facilitated by the fact that individual hieroglyphs could be enlarged or reduced to suit the composition, and some signs were placed both vertically and horizontally. The scribes were even ready to slightly change the order of the signs if the result of their new arrangement was a more balanced rectangle. Therefore, many Egyptian words had two or more different spellings. Each of these spellings was good if the aesthetic canons were observed. If the Egyptians did not have a question in choosing a direction, they wrote from right to left. In our time, when studying the hieroglyphic language, for ease of perception and for ease of inclusion of hieroglyphic inscriptions in texts in European languages ​​(including computer typing), all inscriptions usually go from left to right.

1.3. Drawings, but not pictorial writing Charming ornamentation of hieroglyphs is given by the fact that each isolated sign is a drawing, often filled with the greatest details. Most of the hieroglyphs are represented by images of people, plants, animals or tools. In many cases, they are easy to recognize. Since these signs are not just abstract geometric shapes, they are easy to remember. True, most of them are not easy to write. But this is just a matter of practice. Although hieroglyphic signs are pictures, hieroglyphic writing was not pictorial in the true sense of the word, because in pictorial writing the image and the meaning expressed by it coincide. So the hieroglyph is usually deprived of its ideographic meaning "owl" in texts, but endowed with a phonetic meaning, conveying the sound [m]. There is no fundamental difference between a drawn sign and a geometrically abstract letter "M". Both the drawing and the letter conditionally express the sound [m]. However, the situation with the Egyptian script is somewhat more complicated, since many hieroglyphs in one context can have a phonetic meaning, while in another case the same signs are ideograms. In the event that the hieroglyph denoted what it depicted (that is, when the hieroglyph expressed its ideographic meaning), a short line, called determinative, was added to it. For example, the character usually reads [r]. With a determinative feature, the same hieroglyph denotes mouth, speech. Hieroglyphic writing can only in a very limited sense be considered pictorial writing, where the drawing is consistent with its meaning. This fact is fundamental to understanding the system. Before the brilliant discovery of this principle by Champollion in 1822, early researchers worked for decades under the erroneous assumption that each character had to have a symbolic meaning. The consequence of this delusion was that all their attempts to decipher were in vain. You can read more about the history of deciphering ancient Egyptian writing here.

Egyptian hieroglyphs: "alphabetic" characters As such, the Egyptian alphabet did not exist. The ordering of Egyptian hieroglyphs into the alphabet has already been done by modern Egyptologists. They identified the 27 most commonly used hieroglyphs and put them together. These hieroglyphs are given in all textbooks on Egyptian writing. Near each hieroglyph, its reading is given - the so-calledtransliteration. The transliteration signs are read as follows (the so-called "school reading"): A - a; a - a; i - and; j - and; w - in, at or about; S - w; D - j; the rest are almost the same as the Latin ones. For this, the last column is given - a conditional reading.

The list below is based on a table from the book by N.S. Petrovsky. Egyptian language. - L., 1958. S. 38-40.

2. Writing system.

The Egyptian alphabet consists of twenty-four consonants. Egyptian hieroglyphs: "alphabetic" characters Egyptian hieroglyphs: "alphabetic" characters Some alternative forms: Egyptian hieroglyphs: "alphabetic" characters These characters are among the most common, so knowing them will be very useful. By practicing writing hieroglyphs, you will facilitate the process of memorizing them. Exercises should not be started "in alphabetical order", but moving from graphically simple signs to more complex ones.

Hand

Try writing your name in hieroglyphs. Use the following instead of vowels:

Unstressed vowels may be omitted or replaced with similar ones. Instead of put f, and instead of l - sign (ideogram lion). By doing this exercise, you are actually transliterating your own name into Egyptian hieroglyphs. Like any transliteration, your version only approximately corresponds to the original. At the end of male names, draw a figure of a seated man, and at the end of female names, draw a figure of a woman. Both of these signs are among the determinants (determinants). After selecting the desired hieroglyphs, try to arrange them into a rectangle, as in the examples below:

The last name in the left column is taken from ancient texts. This shows that our technique of writing names in hieroglyphs is not new and is not purely educational in nature: it is borrowed from the Egyptians themselves, who used it to reflect foreign names in writing, such as the Greek rulers Cleopatra, Ptolemy or Alexander. In principle, it would be possible to write any Egyptian word using this limited number of alphabetic characters. Unfortunately for those who want to learn the language as soon as possible, the Egyptians did not limit themselves to using only the indicated characters. However, some of the most commonly used words were written with just such alphabetic characters.

2.2. Biconsonant signs

The question naturally arises as to why the Egyptians developed such a complex writing system, including several hundred hieroglyphs, when the alphabet they invented could well have made their language easy to read and write. This mysterious fact probably has a historical explanation: monosonant signs and the principle of the alphabet were "discovered" later than the bulk of hieroglyphs appeared. After the invention of a more perfect script, the old system was not denied existence for special religious reasons. Hieroglyphs were considered a precious gift from Thoth, the god of wisdom. To abandon the use of many signs and change the perfect system of writing would be regarded as sacrilege and an irreparable loss, not to mention the fact that such a change would make it impossible to read all the ancient texts overnight. Realizing the religious importance of this issue, it becomes more understandable why, after the adoption of Christianity, the Egyptians abandoned complex hieroglyphic writing. In addition to the alphabetic characters, each of which represents one sound, there were four other categories of hieroglyphs in the Egyptian writing system. The first of these includes two-consonant signs, the name of which indicates that they conveyed two consonant sounds. Of the nearly three hundred existing hieroglyphs of this category, about thirty of the most important are presented below. They also need to be remembered over time.

Like alphabetic characters, biconsonant hieroglyphs can be used in words completely unrelated to their own pictographic (ideographic) meaning. For example:

sut - sedge (heraldic plant of Upper Egypt). The determinative feature shows that in this case the hieroglyph expresses its ideographic meaning, that is, the drawing represents itself. In transliteration.t is the ending of feminine words. The ending is separated from the stem of the word with a dot.

Khonsu (moon god)

carry - the king of Upper Egypt. The signs are read in this sequence, despite the fact that their real location is sw-t-n. In the examples below of the use of the two-consonant mark, each word ends with an unreadable character, similar to the case described above with the signs "seated man" and "seated woman". These symbols are called determinants.

Many biconsonant signs, being written with or without a determinative feature, can also be independent words:

Good afternoon, dear readers, guests, friends. Today I will continue my story about our games in Ancient Egypt, because we returned home and are full of strength and energy. Yesterday Dasha screamed from the threshold: “And when will we present ourselves as ancient Egyptians?” Barely persuaded her to go to sleep. And today we mastered hieroglyphic writing in full combat readiness.

The pharaoh in the service consisted of pizzas who could read, write and count. They recorded the decisions of the pharaohs, counted the taxes paid by the peasants, noted the levels of the Nile floods, the products produced by the artisans. Scribes carried a writing instrument with them, consisting of a wooden palette with paints and kalams (reed sticks for writing) and a vessel of water for diluting paints. Powdered charcoal and ocher were used to make paints. Recorded on scrolls of papyrus (this plant). They wrote in hieroglyphs - written characters resembling pictures. These pictures could denote both whole objects and concepts, and individual sounds. Hieroglyphs were often located from right to left, and not vice versa, as we are used to. Sometimes the symbols were arranged in columns and they had to be read from top to bottom.

We took out cards with hieroglyphs and a pyramid, on one of the walls of which I drew hieroglyphs, and began to study them. I told Dasha about how they changed letters and how they read them. Then I invited her to look at the hieroglyphs on the pyramid and guess from their image what they mean. She guessed 2/3 with ease, the rest with a hint.

Then we considered the meaning of hieroglyphs as letters and decided to try to write Dasha's name on an easel. They wrote, deciphered, jumped for joy. And away we go. We made our papyrus by aging ordinary sheets of paper with the help of tea, and I began to write a message to Dasha, and she to me. Since it was difficult for her to write many symbols, she showed me the symbol and asked me to help draw it, and also asked me not to read it, so that there would be a surprise later.

As a result, the messages were ready, we exchanged them and began to decipher.

Dasha wrote to me that she loves me (it was insanely nice to read such a message from her baby), and I wrote to her to obey her parents. She deciphered everything herself and read it herself.

We made some tasks from the book with games and tasks about Ancient Egypt, and then we started to create a papyrus with a whole story. Helped us in this "Egyptologist's Workbook". We cut out all the elements to create the papyrus. We colored the drawings, glued it together and read a story about two brothers with Dasha.

Dasha was so impressed that she decided to draw her own story. She got the Nile River, on the left the Egyptian pyramids, along the river the Egyptians and animals came to the river for water.

Then I told Dasha that not only letters (words) were written as symbols, but also numbers. We looked at how the ancient Egyptians wrote them and began to solve examples and write them down, as they did in ancient Egypt. First, I dictated examples to Dasha, she wrote down and solved, then she told me, then we wrote examples for each other, exchanged and solved. Dashulka liked this the most.

Finally, we listened to the audio encyclopedia of Uncle Kuzi and Chevostik about Ancient Egypt to refresh our knowledge (due to a forced break in classes)

Ancient Egyptian writing is the most famous hieroglyphic writing system.

The deciphering of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, carried out in the 19th century by Jean-Francois Champollion, made it possible to lift the veil of secrets over the history of ancient Egyptian society.

From pictography to consonantism

The ancient Egyptian writing system appeared at the end of the 4th millennium BC. In a tomb dating back to the 33rd century BC, scientists in 1998 discovered as many as three hundred tablets covered with primitive hieroglyphs. This find is today considered the oldest example of Egyptian writing.

The very first hieroglyphs were just visual images of simple objects and concepts: the sun, a bull, mountains, etc. Later, these same drawings began to depict abstract concepts, the spectrum of which was very wide.

hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt photo

Thus, the sign of the sun could mean "day", since the sun shines only during the day; the sign of the mountains denoted a foreign state, because it was located behind the mountains. Such a system is called ideography and is a step forward from simple drawings.

Even later, the hieroglyphs underwent another semantic transformation. This time they began to denote not the ideas associated with the image, but the consonants included in the name of the subject. Some hieroglyphs denoted the first consonant in a word, others two or three consonants.

It is curious that the development of ancient Egyptian writing follows the same logic as the writing of languages ​​related to Egyptian - Semitic: only consonants were subject to designation, the main ones between them were not transmitted in any way. The Arabic, Hebrew, Ethiopian and Phoenician alphabets are built on the same principle.

Rules for writing hieroglyphs

As in other areas of art and culture, the Egyptians developed a system of strict canons in writing.

• With linear writing of hieroglyphs, the line most often went from left to right (for comparison, in other Semitic languages, words and sentences are written from right to left);
• Images of people and animals are always turned to face the beginning of the line;
• They tried to fit a group of hieroglyphs into a square, while at first it was necessary to read the upper signs, and then the lower ones;
• Determinatives (signs denoting grammatical categories) were placed after the main hieroglyph or before it, depending on this, the meaning of the written changed.

Hieratic and Demotic

Classical hieroglyphs played a decorative role in many respects. They covered the walls of buildings, sculptures and columns. Also, classical hieroglyphs were used to record sacred texts on papyrus. For everyday needs, a different, simpler script was required, and the Egyptians subsequently developed such. This is a hieratic letter.

hieratic letter photo

Initially, it was a form of cursive writing, but then features of the use of signs appeared: some were combined into ligatures, others were omitted for simplicity. Demotic, an even more simplified and convenient writing system, later grew out of this system.

Deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs

As already mentioned, the honor of unraveling the mystery of hieroglyphs belongs to Jean-Francois Champollion, a French researcher. This work was not easy. We can say that Champollion was lucky: he fell into the hands of the Rosetta Stone, containing the same text in Egyptian and Greek; the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra were, according to tradition, encircled by a cartouche.

The reading of Greek and Egyptian words in cartouches laid the foundation for the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Egyptian signs in this case denoted consonants (phonetic notation). The Rosetta Stone contained a text from the late Hellenistic era.

Rosetta stone photo

Later, Champollion discovered the names of the pharaohs Ramses and Thutmose, written according to the same phonetic principle. Thanks to this, it became clear that the phonetic principle was used by the Egyptians long before the conquest of Egypt by the Greeks.