THE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN LANGUAGE: NOT JUST HIEROGLYPHS

The ancient Egyptian language, a member of the Afro-Asiatic language family, was written in four scripts – hieroglyphic, hieratic, demotic, and Coptic – and evolved through numerous grammatical phases: Old Egyptian, Middle (classical) Egyptian, Late Egyptian, Demotic, and Coptic. The earliest attestations of Hieroglyphic Egyptian are the ivory tags used to label burial goods in tomb U-j at Abydos ca. 3200 BCE.

Egyptian hieroglyphs can be read as logograms, glyphs that represent the word for the image depicted (e.g. a sun disk glyph is the written word for “sun”), as phonograms, in which a glyph represents one, two or three sounds (e.g. the owl glyph represents the sound “m”), or as ideograms, also called determinatives. Determinatives are glyphs that do not have sound values, but which serve to illustrate the meaning of the preceding logo- and/or phonograms. Thus, a “seated man” determinative will follow the glyphs spelling out a male personal name in order to indicate that the preceding signs relate to the semantic category “man.” Altogether, there are more than 700 hieroglyphs.