Eventually it came to be used for literary and religious texts as well. Coptic Late in Egyptian history, the language known as Coptic, the final phase of development of the ancient Egyptian language, came into being. Using grammar that was very similar to its Demotic predecessor, Coptic used the Greek alphabet plus a few signs derived from Demotic to form its alphabet. Like the earlier Egyptian scripts, Coptic did not show breaks between the words.
Although it is no longer spoken, a dialect of Coptic is still used in services of the Coptic church much in the same way Latin was long used by the Roman Catholic Church. Meroitic The writing system for the Meroitic language of Nubia appeared around the 2nd century B.
The alphabet consisted of a combination of hieroglyphic signs and cursive letters. Although the individual signs can be pronounced, the Meroitic language is still not fully understood and its texts are waiting to be deciphered and read. Part of a limestone lintel inscribed with hieroglyphs E , Dynasty 18 B. After the Ptolemies, who were of Macedonian descent, began to rule Egypt in the s B. About years later, in A. By the time that the last known hieroglyphic writing was carved into the Philae Temple in A.
The Rosetta Stone was discovered in and featured writing in three different scripts: hieroglyphic, demotic and ancient Greek. In , French soldiers serving under Napoleon in Egypt, who were repairing a fort in the town of Rashid also known as Rosetta , discovered a stone slab that became known as the Rosetta Stone.
It was covered with writing in three different scripts—hieroglyphic writing, demotic and ancient Greek.
The three languages engraved upon a single stone enabled researchers to decipher the hieroglyphic writing. British scientist Thomas Young, who began studying the stone in , first deduced that some of the symbols were phonetic spellings of royal names. Then, between and , French linguist Jean-Francois Champollion was able to show that hieroglyphics were a combination of phonetic and ideographic symbols.
He was able to decipher the text, which was a message from Egyptian priests to Ptolemy V written in B.
Figuring out the meaning of texts written in hieroglyphic writing remains a big challenge for scholars, and requires a certain amount of subjective interpretation. H ieroglyphs are written in columns or in horizontal lines. They are generally read from right to left and from top to bottom. Sometimes, the script is read from left to right. The reader can determine the orientation by looking at the animal and human figures -- they face towards the beginning of the text.
For example: if a figure faces right, the text should be read from right to left. W ords and names written in hieroglyphs were believed to have magical powers. For this reason, funeral texts and the names of the deceased were written on coffins and tomb walls. This meant that the gods would hear the prayers and the individuals would be protected from harm. A name written in hieroglyphs embodied a person's identity.
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