Egyptian writing

According to the ideas of the ancient Egyptians, the letter was under the special protection of the god Thoth , and the goddess of writing, Seshat , also existed in the Egyptian religion . The art of writing in Egypt was the prerogative of a conservative and tradition- oriented stratum of scribes , which limited the influence of colloquial speech on it. The Egyptian language has changed dramatically over many centuries of the history of this civilization, and the speech of the Egyptians from the era of Roman rule was little like the speech of the times of the Old Kingdom . Although periodically new forms of spoken language were almost not reflected in hieroglyphic inscriptions contemporary to him, nevertheless, writing also underwent changes and significantly varied over time ^[1] . The last inscriptions on the Egyptian hieroglyphics date back to 394 AD. e., in demotics - by the year 452.

Antique authors who wrote about ancient Egyptian writing ( Herodotus , Strabo , Diodorus , and especially Gorapollon ) exaggerated its symbolic character. According to them, Egyptian hieroglyphs meant whole words and even religious and philosophical concepts. True, some ancient writers can find very valuable observations. So, Plutarch , considering the whole Egyptian letter symbolic, reports that the Egyptians had an alphabet of 25 characters. Herodotus, who traveled to Egypt in the middle of the fifth century. BC e., notes that the Egyptians had two types of writing - "sacred" and "folk." Clement of Alexandria totaled three types of letters: 1. to the hieroglyphics, that is, a sacred letter carved in stone; 2. hieratic - the sacred letter of the priestly scrolls; 3. Epistolographic - a letter for everyday use.

The first known attempt to decipher Egyptian inscriptions belongs to Arab historians in the X-XI centuries. Ibn Vakhshiy achieved partial success thanks to his knowledge of the Coptic language .

European scholars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, relying on inaccurate and unclear statements by ancient authors, repeated their mistakes and therefore could not correctly approach the matter of deciphering Egyptian inscriptions. In the XVIII century. some scholars, such as de Guinj , Soega and others, correctly established that the Egyptian hieroglyphs partly denoted sounds and that cartouches (oval frames) contained their own, obviously, royal names. Further, Thomas Jung established the presence of phonetic signs in Egyptian writing, correctly determined the meaning of a number of hieroglyphs and made out several names. However, the honor of the final decoding of hieroglyphs belongs to the French scientist Francois Champollion . Critically using the achievements of his predecessors, Champollion carefully studied the numerous inscriptions obtained during the Napoleonic expedition and published in the Description of Egypt ; he paid particular attention to the Rosetta bilingual inscription written in Greek with Greek letters and in Egyptian with hieroglyphs and demotic (most cursive) signs. In 1822, Champollion achieved the correct reading of a number of words and names in this inscription, correctly assuming that the Egyptian hieroglyphs meant not only whole words, but also individual syllables and sounds. Champollion compared the Greek names Ptolemy and others, found in the Greco-Egyptian Rosetta inscription , with the corresponding inscriptions of these names in hieroglyphic inscriptions. Thus, Champollion was able to establish that some Egyptian hieroglyphs have a purely sound meaning, and, moreover, to determine almost all the signs of the Egyptian alphabet. However, Champollion did not stop at this first stage of decryption. Working hard on the study of the inscriptions known to him, he made an attempt to compile a grammar and dictionary of the Egyptian language. His scientific works gave a strong impetus to the development of Egyptology, mainly in the field of studying the language and writing of the ancient Egyptians.

In this regard, de Rouge, Shaba, Maspero , Lepsius , Brugsch, Erman , Zeta, Gardiner and the Russian scientist V.S. Golenishchev made a great contribution to Egyptology. The most successful deciphering of demotic inscriptions made by simplified cursive writing was done by Brugsch, Revia, Spigelberg, Griffith and Czechoslovak scientist F. Lex ^[2] .

• History of writing, chronology
• Egyptian number system
• Egyptian hieroglyphic writing
• Cartouche (Egypt)