Ancient Egypt Writing.Paper and Ink, The Gift to your world

Ancient Egypt Writing

The student was allowed to use paper in the higher grades. One of the main items of Egyptian trade, plus one of the permanent gifts to the world is Ancient Egypt writing on paper.

The stem of this papyrus plant was cut into strips, other strips were placed crosswise upon these, the sheet was pressed, and paper, the very stuff (and nonsense) of civilization, was made.

How well they made it might be judged from the known proven fact that manuscripts authored by them five thousand years ago continue to be intact and legible.

Sheets were combined into books by gumming the proper edge of one sheet to your left edge of the that is next that way rolls were produced which were sometimes forty yards in total; these were seldom longer, for there were no verbose historians in Egypt.

Ink, black and indestructible, was made by mixing water with soot and vegetable gums on a wooden palette; the pen was an easy reed, fashioned during the tip into a brush that is tiny.

The egyptians wrote the most ancient of literatures with these modern instruments

The egyptians wrote the most ancient of literatures with these modern instruments.

Their language had probably are available in from Asia; the oldest specimens of it show many Semitic affinities.

The earliest writing was apparently pictographic and object was represented by drawing a picture from it: e.g. the word for house (Egyptian per) was indicated by a little rectangle with an opening on a single of the long sides.

As some ideas were too abstract to be literally pictured, pictography passed into ideography: certain pictures were by custom and convention used to represent not the objects pictured but the ideas suggested by them; and so the forepart of a lion meant supremacy (such as the Sphinx), a wasp meant royalty, and a tadpole stood for thousands.

As a further development along this line, abstract ideas, which had to start with resisted representation, were indicated by picturing objects whose names happened to resemble the spoken words that corresponded into the ideas; and so the picture of a lute came to mean not only lute, but good, because the Egyptian word-sound for lute—nefer— resembled the word-sound for good—nofer.

Queer rebus combinations grew out of these homonyms words of like sound but different meanings.

Considering that the verb to be was expressed in the spoken language by the sound khopiru, the scribe, being puzzled to get an image for so intangible a conception, split the term into parts, kho-pi-ru, expressed these by picturing in succession a sieve (called into the spoken language khau), a mat (pi), and a mouth (ru); use and wont, which sanctify so many absurdities, soon made this strange range of characters suggest the concept of being.

The Egyptian arrived at the syllable in this way

The Ancient Egypt writting arrived at the syllable, the syllabic sign, and the syllabary i.e., a collection of syllabic signs; and by dividing difficult words into syllables, finding homonyms for these, and drawing in combina¬tion the objects suggested by these syllabic sounds, he was able, in the course of time, to make the hieroglyphic signs convey almost any idea in this way.

Only one step remained to invent letters in ancient Egypt writing.

The sign for a homely house meant to write my paper for me start with your message for house per; then it meant the sound per, or p-r with any vowel in between, as a syllable in any word.

Then the picture was shortened, and used to represent the sound po, pa, pu, pe or pi in almost any word; and since vowels were never written, this was equal to having a character for P. By a like development the sign for a hand (Egyptian dot) came to mean do, da, etc., finally D; the sign for mouth (ro or ru) came to mean jR; the sign for snake (zt) became Z; the sign for lake (shy) became Sh. . . .

The end result was an alphabet of twenty-four consonants, which passed with Egyptian and Phoenician trade to all quarters of the Mediterranean, and came down, via Greece and Rome, among the most precious elements of our Oriental heritage.

In Ancient Egypt writing, Hieroglyphics are as old as the first dynasties; alphabetic characters appear first in inscriptions left by the Egyptians when you look at the mines of the Sinai’peninsula, variously dated at 2500 and 1500 B.c.

The Egyptians never adopted a writing that is completely alphabetic

Whether wisely or perhaps not, the Ancient Egypt writing never adopted a writing that is completely alphabetic like modern stenographers they mingled pictographs, ideographs and syllabic signs with their letters to your very end of the civilization.

It has made it hard for scholars to read Egyptian, however it is quite conceivable that such a medley of longhand and shorthand facilitated the business of writing for everyone Egyptians who could spare the full time to understand it.

The five hundred hieroglyphs, their secondary syllabic meanings, and their tertiary alphabetic uses since English speech is no honorable guide to English spelling, it is probably as difficult for a contemporary lad to learn the devious ways of English orthography as it was for the Egyptian scribe to memorize by use.

Sooner or later an even more rapid and sketchy kind of ancient Egypt writing was developed for manuscripts, as distinguished from the careful “sacred carvings” for the monuments.

Because this corruption of hieroglyphic was first created by the priests together with temple scribes, it was called because of the Greeks hieratic; but it soon passed into common use for public, commercial and private documents.

A still more abbreviated and careless type of this script was created because of the common people, and for that reason came into existence known as demotic.

In the monuments, however, the Egyptian insisted on having his lordly and lovely hieroglyphic egypt that is perhaps ancient was the absolute most picturesque type of writing ever made.