0
Hieroglyphics
Hieroglyphics is a formal system of writing used by the ancient Egyptians. It is generally figurative, representing real or illusionary elements in a perfectly recognizable form, though the same symbol can be interpreted in diverse ways, based on context.
764 Questions
Who would translate the hieroglyphics?
The person who inscribed the Rosetta Stone (which was used by Joan Francés Champolion in modern times to break the code for translating hieroglyphics) must be credited with the first documented proof for translating hieroglyphics.
The Rosetta Stone is a Ptolemaic era stele with carved text made up of three translations of a single passage: two in Egyptian language scripts (hieroglyphic and Demotic) and one in classical Greek. It was created in 196 BCE.
What is the entire hieroglyphic alphabet?
There is no such thing as a hieroglyphic alphabet. The Egyptians used about 700 hieroglyphs to represent the sounds and meaning of their language.
How do you write Sara in hieroglyphics?
Hieroglyphs did not write any vowel sounds (despite what some modern web pages claim). Naturally the ancient Egyptians knew how to say their words with the vowels included, but only the consonant sounds were written.
So in hieroglyphs you write srh, but you say Sarah. The direction of writing was normally right to left, but sometimes left to right; signs were always arranged neatly to fit inside an invisible rectangle or square.
There were several signs with the value s, but we shall use the "door-bolt" sign because it is long and thin (to fit neatly with the next sign). This is a horizontal line, thickening slightly at each end and with two very short vertical lines crossing it in the middle.
The sound r was represented by the mouth-sign, viewed from the front; this was simply two curved lines meeting at each end. We place this directly under the s.
The sign for h is the plan of a reed shelter, looking a bit like a spiral but made of 5 straight lines, starting with a downward stroke. This is paced on the left of the first two signs because we are reading from right to left. It is drawn almost as tall as the first two signs put together.
Last, to indicate that this is the name of a person, we draw the kneeling woman sign on the left of the others - she must face towards the right (towards the start of the line of writing). This sign is the same height as the first two signs put together, so the finished word looks neat and fits inside that invisible rectangle.
What artifact helped scholars decipher heiroglyphics?
that artifact is a black basalt stone found near the city of Rosetta. this stone is later called Rosetta-Stone.
A system of picture writing used by ancient egyptians?
The ancient Egyptians used a form of picture writing known as hieroglyphics.
How were Egyptian hieroglyphs decoded?
Hieroglyphics are a writing system made up of small pictures and characters. An early way to decode them was by using the Hieroglyphica, which dates back to the 5th century. The primary way to decode them now is with the Rosetta Stone, which was discovered in the 18th century by Napoleon Bonaparte's troops.
Where can I find a picture of Cleopatra VII's cartouche?
The only surviving contemporary images of Cleopatra may be on Ptolemaic coins. Some of these were two-headed coins minted after Marc Anthony's break with Rome and marriage to Cleopatra (with Tony on one side and Cleo on the other). If the coins are any indication, she was not the most beautiful of women, although artists from later centuries have used their imagination to make her so.
What is a ancient Egyptian number writing called?
This ancient writing is called hieroglyphics. Many different pictures represent words and numbers. Hieroglyphics are used today still... kinda. Picture icons are like hieroglyphics.
MUMMIFICATION
mummification is some thing Egyptians do to preserve dead body's. there are many steps in the mummification proses.
What about the mathematical skills of the Mayas?
The Mayas were very intelligent and had amazing minds. They intended to improve everything that could, or was possible. The Mayan calender is used by some still today. Many people study these things.
What inventions have been made in ancient times?
People tend to expose their prejudices and other biases when answering questions of this type.
Remember that we don't always know with certainty which culture invented a thing first.
Many cultures reinvented items that were invented earlier or at about the same time.
Numerous inventions are disputed. Here are some of the least controversial ones.
The Sumerians gave us time and angles. There are 60 seconds in a minute (not 10) and 60 minutes in an hour (not 10). A circle is 360 degrees (=60*60) (not 10*10) degrees. They gave us the first writing, the first types of laws, bread, biscuits and cakes, beer, bricks, the wheel, the chariot, the modern plough, the zodiac (of star constellations), sail boats and (probably also) glass.
Egyptians gave us pyramids and scary mummies. However they also invented wigs, the first locks, the first bellows, and the first large dam. They were very talented builders of monuments and they greatly advanced the skills of furniture-making, ship-building, jewellery-making and glass-making. In addition they made the first modern-style cosmetics.
Ancient Indians (Indus valley) offered us advances in mathematics, astrology, literature, medicine, dance and food technologies. They developed several irrigation and drainage systems. They gave us cotton. At about the same time as the Sumerians and Egyptians they gave us bricks, granarys and assembly halls.
The Greeks left us with democracy and the idea of freedom, justice including trial by jury, history as distinct from propaganda, the idea of proof, modern medicine, philosophy, sciences such as physics and biology and modern literature and theater. They provided great advances in poetry and art, architecture, and mathematics. They gave us the first real understanding of music and several popular sports as well as beginning the Olympic games.
The ancient Chinese gave us paper, pasta and noodles, fast food, simple printing, silk, gunpowder, concrete, wheelbarrows, flame throwers, toilet roll, paper money and football (yes they invented a game very similar to modern soccer more than 2000 years ago).
The ancient people of South America and Central America gave us chocolate, vanilla, potatoes, popcorn, peanuts and many other foods. They gave us rubber, chewing gum, terrace farming, freeze-dried food, hydroponics, cable cars, suspension bridges and obsidian knives. They reinvented beer and concrete. They gave us many types of medicines (including the world's first contraceptive pills) and some dangerous drugs (such as cocaine). Also they were great architects, builders, artists and artisans.
What type of writing did people first used?
Sumerian cuneiform has been found and radiocarbon dated to 3500-3200 BCE.
This civilization, Sumer existed more or less where Iraq is now, and used to be called Mesopotamia. The writing is ideogramic. In 1998, people discovered what (appears to be) Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) script radiocarbon dated to 5500 BCE in South India and Sri Lanka. No one has ever successfully translated IVC script, nor accepted it to be writing, as opposed to proto-writing. Interestingly, IVC script has also been found in Mesopotamia. In 2008, people discovered carvings on tortoise shells radiocarbon dated to 8600-6600 BCE in Jiahu, China. The inscriptions resemble letters used during the Shang dynasty, but it is unlikely that these inscriptions will ever be considered as other than proto-writing. Interestingly, bone flutes were also found at the same site, which one can play Shang dynasty-era music with. So, to summarize, the current academic consensus is that Sumerian cuneiform is the oldest writing that has ever been found, but this could change. It might also be worth noting that Sumerian is a "language isolate", whereas, to quote Wikipedia: "Indic scripts are used by languages of several linguistic families.
Writing systems, specifically an early stage in the development an alphabetic writing system. i
How do you decode hieroglyphics?
Hieroglyphic writing is somewhat phonetic.
Symbols stand for certain sounds (unlike the English alphabet where some letters have many sounds or can be silent). Let's start out with an example, the word freight. While the F, R, and T sound the "normal" way, the G and H are silent and the E and I make one sound (long A). There are 7 letters in the word, but only 4 sounds (F, R, long A, and T) are heard. So to spell freight with hieroglyphs, you'd use the symbols for those 4 sounds: Four different sounds are used to say "freight," so four symbols-- no more, no less-- are needed to write it the Egyptian way.
Our spelling is more complicated than it needs to be. Like, why do we spell phone with a PH when we have a perfectly good F just going to waste? And why bother with C when we already have K and S? Why have double letters (like the M's in rummy) when we only pronounce it once? And then there are words like knight, technique, and phlegm! When you use hieroglyphs, you spell your words phonetically (the way it sounds), so you leave out silent letters: height the E,G, and second H are silent maybe A and E are long, the Y is silent hey the EY sounds like a long A Christmas the CH sounds like K, the T is pretty much silent, and the A sounds more like a short I rogue the U and E are silent saxophone the X is really a KS sound, the PH is an F sound, and the E is silent Alone or in pairs, vowels stand for lots of different sounds.
And sometimes they're silent. When any English letter (whether it's a vowel or a consonant) is silent, don't include a hieroglyph for it. Some English sounds weren't spoken in ancient Egypt... English and ancient Egyptian aren't from the same language family, so some of the sounds they said don't exist in our alphabet. And some of the sounds we make did not exist in Egyptian. For example, they didn't need a hieroglyph for the TH sound because they didn't say any words containing that sound. You'll notice in the chart at the bottom that some sounds (like F and V) that are different to us weren't distinguished by the ancient Egyptians, so we have to use the same hieroglyph. Why F and V? Because these two sounds are articulated in roughly the same place in your mouth. Try saying "ffffff" and then change it to "vvvvvv." See how changing the flow of air in your mouth makes a subtle difference in the sound? Vowels were often left out... The Egyptians often used only hieroglyphs for consonant sounds to write their words. Thus, you can spell freight like this: F-R-T.
What are some things that were done with the bodies of people in ancient Egypt after they died?
they buried the person with its posessions thinking that the person could take these things with it into the after life. and once it came back from the dead it would have its possesions and the rapped the person in cloth and sprayed some sort of perfume on the body and then put a emerald on the mummys head
Were hieroglyphics taught in ancient schools?
Schools did not exist until the Romans invaded and Cleopatra was on the throne. However those wealthy enough to pay those who could already read and write to teach their children would.
What were three things the Egyptians brought back from Nubia?
- boogers
- used toilet paper
- butt hole scratcher
Why do Egyptians write symbols on sarcophagus's?
Written in hieroglyphs on coffins, walls and canopic chests as well as papyrus theses spells were there to help the dead protect themselves against traps, snares and unearthly creatures. Many of these verses were later transfered to the book of the dead. Whist they are refereed to as spells they are not as we would expect of Harry Potter and the like. They were more like a prayer of protection.
How do you make a fake pyramid?
Shortly after ascending the throne in 2589BC, Pharaoh Khufu commands his nephew Hemiunu the royal overseer of works, to prepare a burial place in keeping with his status as a god-king, a pyramid tomb far grander than anything that had been built before or since. A site was chosen on the Giza plateau west of the Nile not far from his capital at Memphis. Great care was taken in orientating the site to the four points of the compass and in levelling the site to provide a foundation for Khufu's Great Pyramid. When the slaves had cleared away the sand and cut the site roughly to shape highly skilled masons were called in to level the foundations. This was done by cutting a grid of channels and filling them with water. The rock was then cut back to the water level to make it perfectly flat. Finally the water was drained away and the channels filled with rubble.
At any one time as many as 20,000 workers may have been involved on this massive project. Some of them were free men doing particular tasks such as masons, tool makers, carpenters, scribes and slave overseers. The remainder and by far the majority were slaves, naked slaves too low in status to wear clothes.
Through Khufu's reign, the construction site teemed with workers of all kinds hard pressed to complete the monument before the king's death. Day after day, year after year, the quarries buzzed with activity. Through the dust the sun baked bodies of the quarry slaves stand out dark against the yellow limestone. Gangs of slaves bore holes using primitive drill bits and sand which acted as an abrasive. After they had drilled cores deep enough to define a block on one side, they packed the holes with pieces of porous wood and then doused it with water. The wood expands so fast that the block splits out with a crack. After the stone blocks are extracted from the quarry face they are strapped onto sledges. A mark is made on the stone by a scribe. This aided them to place the blocks in the pyramid just as they came out of the quarry ensuring a good fit without further finishing.
From dawn to dusk, gangs drag the sledges loaded with stones each weighing about 2.5 tons to staging areas at the base of the pyramid. Most of the stone blocks proceed up the ramp without future handling. Only a fraction of the stone blocks needed to be cut to precise dimensions by the masons. The slaves begin hauling the loaded sledges slowly up the clay and rubble ramp that spiralled around the emerging structure. The noise here is one of chanting slaves and the rumble of heavy sledges. Naked under the burning sun and streaming with sweat, the slaves bend to their thankless task.
At the working level teams of slaves called setters, using nothing more than primitive levers, brute force and experience from hard labour, shift the blocks from the sledges into their designated positions. Once the stones are delivered the hauling gang would make their way down the ramp carrying their sledge, in order to make the same back breaking journey up as they would several times a day. Toiling below were the support workers and guards under the watchful eyes of the Pharaoh's project managers, the scribes.
Other slaves are employed in maintaining and extending the ramps as the pyramid grew. These ramps are made of rubble, bound together with desert tafla (a type of clay) and laid with planks to ease the passage of the ramps. Rows of slave labourers are seen breaking up waste material from the quarries, mixing them with the desert tafla clay and loading the finished mixture into baskets. Individual baskets are loaded onto the shoulders of slaves for delivery to the ramp builders on the pyramid.
Boats made from reeds deliver brilliant white limestone from Tura just across the river. Here the slaves, in light provided by primitive lamps, toil in manmade caves to obtain the best stone. This stone will be used for the outer case of the pyramid. Once put in place and polished the effect will be awe inspiring.
Giant reed barges brought granite from Aswan over 400 miles upriver. Some of the granite stones from Aswan weigh 70 tons. Copper chisels used for quarrying limestone could not be used, a harder material was required. Balls of dolerite, a hard, black igneous rock, are used in the quarries of Aswan to extract the hard granite. These dolerite "pounders" were used to pulverize the stone around the edge of the granite block that needed to be extracted. To achieve this, a team of naked slaves would pound out the stone over a period of several days. At the bottom, they ram wooden pegs into slots they have cut, and fill the slots with water. The pegs will expand and split the rock with a resounding crack much more impressive than anything heard with the softer limestone. Then with hundreds of slaves hauling on ropes the great blocks are lowered onto long sledges. Long lines slaves, their bodies gleaming with sweat; drag the blocks to the river where they are loaded onto the barges.
When did Jean-Francois Champollion discover the hieroglyphics?
He didn't "discover hieroglyphs", since they were all over Egypt on monuments and tombs and people had known about them for thousands of years before he was born. He helped to translate hieroglyphs, which is not the same thing.
Hieroglyphics became extinct because no one could understand it. Also Egypt was taken over by Rome so they lost their hieroglyphic language and spoke what the romans did.
+++
The Romans spoke Latin.
How do you say yes in ancient Egypt?
We know how it was written, but not how it was said.
In the ancient Egyptian language the word "yes" appears in hieroglyphs as tiw (where the i is not a vowel but a guttural consonant not found in English). We can never know how Egyptian words were pronounced, since vowels sounds were not written - although the Egyptians obviously knew what vowels to say.
