Post by Helga Hufflepuff on Oct 14, 2004 10:35:14 GMT -5
You walk into the room and see the professor is no where to be seen. You take your seat and wait. The time draws closer to the start of class and you wonder what you are going to be taught today. The classroom bell starts to buzz indicating that class is goning to start.
At the end of the bell the classroom suddenly changes decorations. You look around wondering which student did it, but they all looked as confused as you.
A noise from the front of the classroom catches every ones attention. a second later Professor Shrimpy exits out of an ancient egyptian coffin wearing egyptian clothing.
As you can see by the classroom and the way i'm dressed we are learning something about egypt.
The real question is what are we learing? Why we are learning about their writing style of course.
Now, the Egyptians had a unique style of writing that i associate with runes. They indeed had symbols that stood for other things, but they didn't call them runes. They called them hieroglyphs.
The earliest hieroglyphs found date back to 3,000BC, but could've been around even before that.
The alphabet contains more than 750 different symbols which can be put together to make up words. words in Egyptian were made up of sounds, partly of consonants and partly of vowels. The Egyptian alphabet is hard to translate because they often ignored symbols or omitted vowels. For example go to: members.aol.com/egyptnew/glyph.html#a it's the second paragraph.
The way you pronunce the word is very important in fact it's more important than how it's spelled.
Hieroglyphs can be written from right to left; from left to right; or vertically, reading downwards. To determine which way to read a line of hieroglyphs, look for pictures of men or animals. See which way the pictures are facing, the text is read towards the faces. If they are facing to the left, the inscription is read from the left to the right. If they are facing right, the inscription is read from right to left.
Egyptians had three forms of writing:
Hieroglyphs:
. . . . From the greek meaning "sacred writing." this is the picture language that was used most often to decorate temples and monuments. It could be written with pen and ink on papyrus, painted or carved into stone. It was carefully drawn, to make the signs as accurate as possible.
Hieratic:
. . . . This was the cursive form of writing, as script is to printed letters. It was much quicker to write since the picture quality of the language was reduced to a pattern of lines and squiggles.
Demotic:
. . . . This was a shorthand version of the Hieratic script which was used during the Late Period. Demotic means "the people's writing." It got this name because many people could read it.
NOTE:
. . . . A very important language that was used during the Ptolemaic Period was called Coptic. This language was written using Greek letters, but it followed the basic structure of the Egyptian language. This has proved to be an invaluable tool for Egyptologists, enabling them to understand how a sentence was formed in the ancient Egyptian language. This was also the key to deciphering the Rosetta stone.
That's all for today. There will be NO HOMEWORK, but make sure to study
I took most of the information from the site aforementioned so okay.
At the end of the bell the classroom suddenly changes decorations. You look around wondering which student did it, but they all looked as confused as you.
A noise from the front of the classroom catches every ones attention. a second later Professor Shrimpy exits out of an ancient egyptian coffin wearing egyptian clothing.
As you can see by the classroom and the way i'm dressed we are learning something about egypt.
The real question is what are we learing? Why we are learning about their writing style of course.
Now, the Egyptians had a unique style of writing that i associate with runes. They indeed had symbols that stood for other things, but they didn't call them runes. They called them hieroglyphs.
The earliest hieroglyphs found date back to 3,000BC, but could've been around even before that.
The alphabet contains more than 750 different symbols which can be put together to make up words. words in Egyptian were made up of sounds, partly of consonants and partly of vowels. The Egyptian alphabet is hard to translate because they often ignored symbols or omitted vowels. For example go to: members.aol.com/egyptnew/glyph.html#a it's the second paragraph.
The way you pronunce the word is very important in fact it's more important than how it's spelled.
Hieroglyphs can be written from right to left; from left to right; or vertically, reading downwards. To determine which way to read a line of hieroglyphs, look for pictures of men or animals. See which way the pictures are facing, the text is read towards the faces. If they are facing to the left, the inscription is read from the left to the right. If they are facing right, the inscription is read from right to left.
Egyptians had three forms of writing:
Hieroglyphs:
. . . . From the greek meaning "sacred writing." this is the picture language that was used most often to decorate temples and monuments. It could be written with pen and ink on papyrus, painted or carved into stone. It was carefully drawn, to make the signs as accurate as possible.
Hieratic:
. . . . This was the cursive form of writing, as script is to printed letters. It was much quicker to write since the picture quality of the language was reduced to a pattern of lines and squiggles.
Demotic:
. . . . This was a shorthand version of the Hieratic script which was used during the Late Period. Demotic means "the people's writing." It got this name because many people could read it.
NOTE:
. . . . A very important language that was used during the Ptolemaic Period was called Coptic. This language was written using Greek letters, but it followed the basic structure of the Egyptian language. This has proved to be an invaluable tool for Egyptologists, enabling them to understand how a sentence was formed in the ancient Egyptian language. This was also the key to deciphering the Rosetta stone.
That's all for today. There will be NO HOMEWORK, but make sure to study
I took most of the information from the site aforementioned so okay.