Indeed, until the 1950s and 1960s, few Egyptologists showed much interest in those last centuries of ancient Egyptian history or in using Demotic to study them. The new script flourished only when Egypt found itself under the domination of foreign empires: Persians, Greeks and Romans. Demotic also suffered from its association with long centuries of Egyptian “decline,” originating some 400 years after the end of the mighty New Kingdom. Demotic acquired a reputation of being extremely difficult to learn, which discouraged students from tackling it. The first expert to unlock the mysteries of Demotic was the German, Heinrich Karl Brugsch, who published Egyptology’s first systematic grammar of Demotic in 1848 – a generation after Champollion’s 1822 breakthrough in deciphering hieroglyphic translations. In Egyptology, Demotic was traditionally a poor stepchild to the older scripts, appealing to only a handful of scholars. Heinrich Karl Brugsch (1827 – 1894), first real scholar of Demotic It was not long before Demotic had become the dominant script of everyday business in Egypt – never completely supplanting hieroglyphic and hieratic but, over time, relegating those older scripts to religious, ceremonial or emblematic functions. Those literary traditions continued until roughly 650 BCE, when hieratic began a rapid evolution that resulted in two new scripts: the short-lived “abnormal hieratic” of Upper Egypt and the more durable “Demotic” of Lower Egypt. Egypt’s literary tradition was born and soon to produce religious works such as the Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, and Book of the Dead great fictional tales like the Middle Kingdom Story of Sinuhe important autobiographies, like those of Weni and Harkhuf in the sixth dynasty and of Ahmose, the Son of Abana, in the 18th, and more. By the third dynasty (about 2686 to 2613 BCE), the scribal skills and traditions for hieroglyphic script were fully developed, allowing complete, continuous prose. This style adapted the essentials of hieroglyphic signs but was intended for more rapid writing with ink on surfaces such as pottery and, especially, papyrus.Īt first, hieroglyphs and hieratic were used mostly to write individual words, including names of persons, places or commodities. Along with these iconic hieroglyphs, Egyptian scribes also established a more cursive method – hieratic (priestly) script. The ancient Egyptians devised this “picture writing” in their predynastic period, with the earliest examples known found in an elite chamber in Abydos, Tomb U-J, which dates to around 3200 BCE. When most people think of ancient Egyptian scripts, they think immediately of hieroglyphic writing, the pictorial script that has fascinated non-Egyptians for thousands of years. Its discovery proved to be a crucial link in unlocking the mysteries of Egyptian hieroglyphs and in 1822, enabling Jean-François Champollion to re-decipher the hieroglyphic signs, thereby allowing the modern study of Egyptian language to begin.Worlds oldest writing tablets, Abydos, Egypt
The Rosetta Stone is a trilingual decree (written in hieroglyphs, Greek, and Demotic) dating to the time of Ptolemy V (205-180 B.C.). In 1799, the Rosetta Stone was discovered in Egypt by Napoleon’s troops. The last hieroglyphic inscription in Egypt was written in the 5th century A.D., some 3500 years later.įor almost 1500 years after that, the language was unable to be read. The hieroglyphic script originated shortly before 3100 B.C., at the very onset of pharaonic civilization. Altogether there are over 700 different hieroglyphs, some of which represent sounds or syllables others that serve as determinatives to clarify the meaning of a word. Hieroglyphs were written on papyrus, carved in stone on tomb and temple walls, and used to decorate many objects of cultic and daily life use.
The ancient Egyptians used the distinctive script known today as hieroglyphs (Greek for “sacred words”) for almost 4,000 years. Photo by Clio20, Louvre Museum, Wikimedia Commons
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