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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.
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