For many centuries, the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs They were shrouded in mystery. Many experts of all times racked their brains trying to decipher them, but they never succeeded. It seemed like an impossible mission until something happened that changed everything.
Do you want to know what the key was? If you are curious, keep reading and you will find out many things about this exciting topic.
What are hieroglyphs?
Hieroglyphics are the writing system created by the ancient Egyptians. They began to be used around the year 3,000 before the birth of Jesus Christ, that is, about 5000 years It is one of the oldest forms of writing in the world!
The word “hieroglyph” comes from Greek and means “sacred carved words”.
The appearance of hieroglyphics
When human beings learned to write, they took one of the greatest steps in the history of humanity.
Primitive man was capable of painting images of the human figure, objects and animals that he hunted, but there came a time when this was not enough and he needed to develop a system by which his ideas, his knowledge or any important data of everyday life, will be recorded on a physical medium. In a word, he had to find a way to translate spoken language into a lasting system.
The Egyptians achieved it in a masterful way since they were able to invent a pictographic system, that is, beautiful writing through symbols. Each of them represents a real image of everyday life and nature.
There is nobody that understand this!
True… No matter how much I look at them, I don’t understand anything and I imagine the same thing happens to you. And despite being simple drawings and many easy to recognize, it is a very complex system to write and understand.
What did it consist of?… It is true that some words are real drawings, that is, if they wanted to write the word “bird”, they drew a bird, or if they wanted to write the word “eye”, they drew an eye.
At first glance it might seem easy, right?… But it didn’t stop there, because many times they combined them together in various ways to form a word. An example translated into Spanish, to understand us, would be to draw a sun and a dice to form the word “soldier.”
And now think… Can you draw abstract concepts like “soul”, “betrayal” or “affection”? And draw phrases like “The pharaoh gave a speech that moved his people” or “The brothers met to find a solution”? Of course not! That’s why they had no choice but to also invent a kind of alphabet in which each image no longer corresponded to an object, but to a sound: if they wanted to write the letter m, they painted an owl and if they wanted to paint the r, the symbol was a mouth. . If several letters together formed a new sound, in this case mr, they in turn had the corresponding symbol.
Nor was the way of writing like ours because they did it by forming vertical or horizontal rows that were read from left to right or from right to left. The result was a network of images grouped in multiple ways.
What I just told you is only a small part of how hieroglyphic writing worked. As you can imagine, only people who were experts on the subject could understand its meaning. Ordinary people only saw a hodgepodge of beautiful and very artistic drawings, but they were left wanting to know what they said.
Where were hieroglyphics used?
This type of writing was so complex that it was basically used on monuments, temple walls and tombs, to tell stories such as war exploits or the lives of the pharaohs. In these cases the symbols were sculpted on hard materials such as stone and often colored. The result was incredibly beautiful.
Hieroglyphs were also used to write, with brush and ink, on papyrus or wood. In this case the drawings were made simpler and more schematic to go faster.
How long do you think it could take a person to write a report, a science book or a literary work, drawing by drawing? Evidently it was so much that even the most patient person could end up victim of a nervous breakdown. Therefore, over time, new, simpler types of writing emerged for everyday use and the beautiful classic hieroglyphic writing was reserved for great religious monuments.
This tradition was maintained until the 4th century AD and then the Egyptians abandoned this artistic writing system forever.
Who wrote the hieroglyphics?
It is very important to keep in mind that, in ancient Egypt, almost no one knew how to read or write. It was a privilege that only powerful people had, such as royalty, priests, and scribes.
The scribes were very important in the Ancient Egypt, since they were in charge of writing government documents, classifying reports related to the country’s economy, etc. Since a lot of secret and valuable information passed through their hands, at first they could only be people trusted by the pharaoh.
The position of scribe was inherited by the children and they were taught the trade from a very young age. They learned history, grammar and many other subjects, as well as reading and writing. Thanks to this opportunity, they became cultured men who received a good salary.
Over time, children from humble origins were also allowed to prepare to be good scribes in the future, something that was an honor for their parents.
Scribes used color palettes and wrote on the papyrus with a brush made from a frayed reed at the tip. They worked sitting on the floor with their legs crossed. They had to be very precise so that the hieroglyphs were perfect. They were true artists!
The discovery of the enigma thanks to the Rosetta stone
When hieroglyphs stopped being written in the 4th century, they became a mystery because their meaning was lost in the mists of time. People were amazed at their beauty, but no one, not even the most cultured people, knew how to decipher them.
At the end of the century XVIIIthe French general Napoleon Bonaparte, commanding thousands of soldiers, invaded Egypt. In the town of Rosetta, during the summer of 1799, members of his army were digging a trench. Suddenly, a soldier tripped over a strange stone that caught his attention. They unearthed it and discovered that it was a polished rock of dark granite, more than a meter high, with a text engraved on it, divided into three parts. Each part was written in a different language: the first was made up of hieroglyphs, the second was in demotic Egyptian, and luckily, the third was in Greek.
Why do I say luckily? Well, because ancient Greek was a known language that could be translated without problem. A group of wise men realized that the rosetta stone It was a very important discovery and that, in reality, it was the same text written in three different languages.
Jean – François Champolliona French historian specialized in Egyptian culture, dedicated more than twenty years of his life to comparing the three texts and in the end, he managed to decipher the meaning of the hieroglyphs that had remained hidden for so many years.
It was in 1822 and it is said that the moment he got it, he ran to his brother’s house, told him: “I already have it!”, and fainted. He was so exhausted and emotional, that apparently he stayed in bed for five days until he recovered from the shock.
A curiosity: Champollion never saw the Rosetta Stone in person, as it was taken to London in 1802 and kept in the British Museum. In order to unravel the hieroglyphics, he had to settle for a paper copy that was made by smearing ink on the stone, as a tracing.
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