Egyptian Hieroglyphs Essay

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Decipherment of Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Ashish Verma
MS09029
1 The Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Egyptian hieroglyphs were a formal writing system employed by the ancient
Egyptians. The decipherment of Egyptian Hieroglyphs was a very important event for the advancement of Egyptology.
1.1 About Ancient Egypt
The Egyptian state was established in 3150 BC (more than 5,000 years ago).
It went through several stable kingdoms and followed by invasions from a series of foreign powers, until around 30 BC when it lost its independence and merged into the Roman Empire (and was no longer a distinct political entity). There was a period of more than 3,000 years when it was socially and culturally distinct. Ancient Egypt had its own unique architecture, art that resisted foreign in uence and cuisine that remained extraordinarily stable over time. People used to worship Egyptian Gods and speak distinct
Egyptian language.
Egypt witnessed Alexander's invasion in 332 BC and consequently Ptolemaic dynasty, a Greek speaking dynasty, was established by Ptolemy. He was one of Alexander's closest companions and Ptolemaic dynasty ruled
Egypt for nearly 300 years until Egypt's incorporation into Roman Empire in 30 BC. During Ptolemaic dynasty, the elite Ptolemies spoke Greek while the mass of people still used Egyptian language. This will become the reason for the ocial court documents (including the Rosetta stone) to be written in Greek as well as Egyptian languages, and will become a crucial element in the decipherment of Egyptian Hieroglyphs. After the Arab conquest in
AD 641, the Greek elite Ptolemies were displaced and the masses started to forsake their traditional language for Arabic which was the language of the new Muslim rulers.
1.2 Writing systems in Anc...

... middle of paper ...

...mbol, could represent sun. In Coptic language the word for sun is `ra´and using this as the sound value for the rst symbol makes the string `ra-?-s-s´. Clearly, the name of only Pharaoh that ts |Ramases˝.
Thus, the fundamental principles of hieroglyphs were found, it was almost decisively proved that the language was Egyptian and hieroglyphs script was atleast partially phonetic. Champollion used his knowledge of Coptic
5
language to decipher more symbols and was able to identify the phonetic values for most hieroglyphs
3 References
1. Penelope Wilson, Hieroglyphs: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford
University Press
2. Lesley and Roy Adkins, The Keys of Egypt : THE OBSESSION TO
DECIPHER EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHS, HarperCollinsPublishers
3. The Decipherment of Hieroglyphs By Simon Singh (Last updated
2011-02-17) on www.bbc.co.uk
4. Web: Egyptian hieroglyphs (Wikipedia)
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