Egyptian Hieroglyphs for Everyone: An Introduction to the Writing of Ancient Egypt

From the DJ: In this book you will learn how hieroglyphic writing can be read. This is not a mere "do-it-yourself" guide to language learning, but rather a careful and engrossing explanation at how the written language of Egyptian hieroglyphs developed. It covers the uses and techniques of this ancient form of communication. Hieroglyphs go back in Egyptian history to at least 3100 B.C.E. "Ancient Egyptians believed that when a person's name was written or carved in stone, the spirit could reside there forever after the individual had died. It was the pathway to life eternal. Destroy a person's name wherever it appeared, and he would no longer exist. His memory, and chance for eternal life, were obliterated. Even gods were subject to the same rule. Some odd twists occurred in Egyptian history pursuing this belief."

"This book... is an excellent introduction to the fascinating realm of Egyptian Hyroglyphs. ... As Egyptologists know, and this book points out, hieroglyphs may be readily interpreted by persons who take the time and make the effort to study them." Curator, Egyptian Museum Egyptian Hieroglyphs: Generally called Hieroglyphics was a writing system used by the Ancient Egyptians, that contained a combination of logographic and alphabetic elements. The variety of brush-painted hieroglyphs used on papyrus and (sometimes) on wood for religious literature is known as cursive hieroglyphs; Cartouches were also used by the Egyptian scribes. The word hieroglyph comes from words such as (hieroglyphos 'one who writes hieroglyphs', (hierós 'sacred') and (glýphein 'to carve' or 'to write',In typography, a glyph is the shape given in a particular typeface to a specific grapheme or symbol. Hieroglyphs developed from pictorial representations of gods, people and objects encountered by the ancient Egyptians in every day life. Later on, developed pictographs, then came to have specific meanings, and were used to convey distinctive symbolic graphics to express a spoken language, of words or sentences, in a written form, and the the Egyptians thus used a system that combined phonograms (sound-signs), spelling out the word in an alphabetic system, and ideograms (sense-signs), that when added to the spelled-out word depicted its meaning. Hieroglyphic language had its precise syntax, vocabulary and grammar. Words of the gods: Hieroglyphs were called by the ancient Egyptians, "the words of the gods," and were used for religious and formal secular purposes, mainly by the priests and scribes. These painstakingly drawn symbols were great for decorating the walls of temples. This was a handwriting in which the picture signs were abbreviated to the point of abstraction. This script is today known as hieratic and was widely used until about 800 BCE for business, literary and religious texts. By about 700 BCE another script today called demotic had evolved from the hieratic. Business, legal and literary inscriptions were written in demotic. By the end of the fifth century ACE, knowledge of how to read and write the old scripts was extinct. The hieroglyphs were fully surrendered to the larger myth of ancient Egypt, the land of strange customs ad esoteric wisdom nurtured in belief by classical writers. The belief that the hieroglyphs were somehow symbolic and imbued with secret meaning had become well-rooted before Diodorus Siculus visited Egypt in the first centiry BCE. Coptic deciphers hieroglyphs: The ancient Egyptian language could not have been understood without knowledge of Coptic, which was written using Greek letters and a few signs derived from demotic, and was used in translations of the Bible, liturgies and other writings of Christianity. In the 17th century AD, Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit linguist made a break through when he recognized the linguistic derivatio