The writing of ancient Egypt was called hieroglyphic (comes from the Greek “hieroglyph”, which means sacred sign) and was originally pictographic, that is, each symbol represented an object. This script consisted of more than six hundred characters.
In addition to hieroglyphic writing, the Egyptians used two other writing systems. THE hieratic writing, which was organized in a cursive format and used for commercial purposes; and demotic writing, which was used in later periods as it was a simpler and more popular form of hieratic writing.
The french Jean-Francois Champollion (considered the father of Egyptology), professor of History at the University of Grenoble, in France, was the one who managed for the first time, in 1822, to translate a text in hieroglyphics, engraved in the famous rosette stone. The stone was found in the city of Rosetta, by chance, during an expedition by Napoleon Bonaparte, in 1799, to Egypt.
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THE rosette stone
possessed, in addition to writing hieroglyphic, one script in demotic characters and the other script in ancient Greek. On the stone was a decree of the King Ptolemy V and what made its interpretation possible was the comparison of the Greek script with the corresponding scripts in demotic and in hieroglyphics. Through this discovery, a new phase in the study of the history of Egypt began, from the 18th century on.
By Lilian Aguiar
Graduated in History
Brazil School Team
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
AGUIAR, Lilian Maria Martins de. "The writing of ancient Egypt"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/historiag/a-escrita-antigo-egito.htm. Accessed on June 27, 2021.