The Egypt Code Breakers: Part 1

 Hello everyone, it's been a while sorry for the delay in between the issues, due to some personal problems but now we will make sure that regular posts are here for you to enjoy. 
In today's blog we will get to know about the hieroglyphs and the people who played an important role in decoding it.  

So, let's begin by understanding about hieroglyphs and what they depict.

Hieroglyphs are the formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians.  They are composed of pictures, or glyphs, that represent words, sounds, and ideas
Unlike our alphabet, which uses letters to represent sounds, hieroglyphs could function in different ways:

1. Ideograms:  Some hieroglyphs are pictures that directly represent an object or idea. For example, a picture of a house represents the idea of a house.

2. Phonograms: Other hieroglyphs represent sounds. These can be single consonants or combinations of consonants.  Think of them like our letters, but instead of representing a single sound, they often represent a group of sounds.  For example, the hieroglyph of an owl represents the sound "m."

3. Determinatives: These hieroglyphs are added to the end of a word to clarify its meaning. For          instance, a determinative might be used to distinguish between the word for "sun" (as a celestial body) and "sun" (as a measure of time).

As you can see in the above images, hieroglyphs are than just pictures, but a language of its own different glyphs represent different words as sounds like some of them are phonetic and just represent sounds like an owl is associated with the letter m. 

But the role of others changes on how they are used. For example, from the images below you can see that, the open rectangle when used alone represents the idea of a house, but when combined with other hieroglyphics in this the mouth(oval) and the legs it becomes phonetic and represents the sound "Pair" in the formation of the word "Pairi" which in ancient Egyptian means "to go out" or "to go up".

The Power of Writing in Ancient Egypt

In ancient Egypt, writing was more than just communication; it held immense power. Literacy was associated with the gods, and scribes played a vital role in religious rituals, administration, and the preservation of knowledge. To read and write hieroglyphs was considered a high honor, often described as understanding the "Word of God."

 The difference between hieroglyphic and hieratic was the same as printing and handwriting. If you compare both, they look completely different but represent the same thing.  So, for thousands of years, Egyptians used not just one but two methods of writing: hieroglyphics and their cursive counterpart, hieratic. By the seventh century BCE, a third writing system, demotic, had emerged.

This concludes the first part of our series on hieroglyphs.  Next time, we'll explore the Rosetta Stone and meet the remarkable individuals who cracked the code, unlocking the secrets of ancient Egypt for the world to see.