اللغة الإنجليزية

Lessons 4,5,6,7,8 

 

How the Egyptians wrote

Before you start

Look at the photos

               

a scribe                                                          hieroglyphics alphabets

 

Before reading

The key words

The word	The meaning	The part of speech
Temple	a building used for the worship of a god or gods in some religions	Noun
Scribe	A person in the past who copied out documents	Noun
To represent	To be a symbol of something	Verb
Combination	The act of joining two or more things	Noun
Figure	the symbol for a number or an amount expressed in numbers	Noun

 

 

While reading

The Egyptians developed writing about 6,000 years ago. Scribes were among the few people who could read and write. They decorated their temples with hieroglyphics, which Egyptians called ‘the words of God’. The Egyptians developed hieroglyphic writing at the same time as Sumerian writing was developed on soft clay. However, the Egyptians didn’t write on clay; they wrote on papyrus, wood and rock walls.

The Egyptians were the first to use writing in everyday life. That is how they found that hieroglyphics were great for decorating temple walls, but not very useful in daily business. For these more common activities, people used a simpler script, called ‘hieratic’.

Hieroglyphic writing used symbols or pictures to represent objects. People wrote hieroglyphics in rows or columns. In the case of rows, you can read them from left to right or from right to left. You must look at the human or animal figures to work out which direction to read. (They always face towards the beginning of the line.) In the case of a column, you must read from top to bottom.

Hieroglyphic symbols are divided into alphabetical signs that represent a single sound, and signs that represent a combination of two or three consonants. There were also ‘wordsigns’. These are pictures of objects. There were at least 700 symbols, and each symbol had up to three meanings. Also, a symbol could represent just one sound or it could represent the picture it showed. Our writing system today is much simpler!

The main ideas:

The text talks about

• • Hieroglyphic writing (its history, the inventors, its meaning, and its materials).
  • A simpler script, called ‘hieratic’ for more common activities.
  • The way of reading hieroglyphics.
  • How complicated is this writing system.

Pictures of some key words to make them clearer

 

   

A temple                                                                                           Scribes

 

 

After reading

What are hieroglyphic symbols divided into?

Hieroglyphic symbols are divided into

- alphabetical signs that represent a single sound,

- and signs that represent a combination of two or three consonants.