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.