Hieroglyphs are logograms used to record language, with examples surviving from ancient cultures such as the Egyptians and Mayans. The word “hieroglyphics” comes from the Greek for sacred writing. Hieroglyphs can represent language as an ideogram, determiner, or phonogram. The Rosetta Stone allowed for the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphs in the mid-1800s, revealing much about ancient Egyptian culture. Maya hieroglyphs were used to represent a syllabary and were translated in the mid-20th century, providing insight into Mayan society and culture.
Hieroglyphs are a writing system that uses logograms, rather than an alphabet, to record a language. Logograms are single characters that can represent an idea, a subject or a word; several modern languages use logograms including Chinese and Japanese. In the ancient world, both the Egyptians and the Mayans used extensive hieroglyphic languages, as did several Mediterranean cultures, such as Crete and Anatolia. Numerous examples survive on tomb walls, in scrolls, and on well-preserved paper artifacts and stone tablets. Once translated, the ancient hieroglyphics provided valuable clues about the lives of the people who lived in those cultures.
The word “hieroglyphics” is very old and was used by the Greeks to describe the Egyptian writing system in the ancient world. It is a compound of two Greek words, hieros, for sacred, and glyphein, for writing. Priests probably had better knowledge of this type of writing than other members of society, who might have understood hieratic writing, but not hieroglyphics, especially as the library of characters expanded and began to be used only on formal occasions. Hieratic writing is related to hieroglyphs; priests originally used it for quick note-taking, as it took much less time to write and became widespread. The hieratic script then evolved into Demotic and Coptic script.
In hieroglyphics, a large family of characters are used to represent a language. A hieroglyph can represent language in several ways. The most common is as an ideogram or pictograph or a representation of a subject or idea. For example, many Chinese characters are ideograms. A hieroglyph can also be used as a determiner, placed near another character to clarify its meaning and context. Hieroglyphs also appear as phonograms, representations of sounds in a language; in Maya hieroglyphics, which were used to represent a syllabary, most of the characters are phonograms as well as logograms, which represent a single word.
Egyptian hieroglyphics are probably the best known ancient example of this writing technique and were used for several thousand years before the common era before being supplanted by other writing systems and languages. Their significance was lost until 1799, when the Rosetta Stone was discovered by Napoleon’s army. The Rosetta Stone had the same decree in three languages: Ancient Greek, Coptic, and hieroglyphics. Numerous translators worked on the Rosetta Stone, and Jean-Francois Champollion was finally able to translate it in the mid-1800s, building on the work of others. This translation has allowed archaeologists to learn much more about ancient Egyptian culture and has fascinated the Western world, as hieroglyphics are difficult for people accustomed to alphabets to understand.
The Maya also used hieroglyphs to represent a syllabary or set of sounds in a language. Most logograms in Maya are linked to a sound and a word, and how hieroglyphs are read depends on the context. The Maya are suspected to have developed the first writing system in Central America, with examples dating back to the 3rd century BC. Maya hieroglyphs continued to be used until the arrival of the Conquistadores, at which point the writing system quickly fell out of use. In the mid-20th century, archaeologists began translating them, learning much about Mayan society and culture in the process.
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