Hieroglyphics

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Hieroglyphics
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Scribes

• Scribes could read and write and were sons of
  powerful people.
• They went to school to learn how to write.
• Scribes kept records of the royal family and high
  priest.

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Scribes

• When scribes were working on documents such as
  letters, livestock registers, and ledgers they
  wrote very fast.
• They wrote on limestone fragments or pieces of
  broken pottery.
• They were written with ink using a reed. The
  scribes wrote reports and detailed accounts
  according to the king's orders.

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Scribes

• Scribes worked in the temples to re-copy
  religious text.
• They also wrote instructions to guide the dead in
  the afterlife.
• They wrote magical spells on amulets to protect
  the living from sickness.
• Scribes wrote stories, poems, and fables.

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Scribes

• Scribes also drew the night sky.
  They drew maps locating the
• constellations of stars.
• They used these drawings to design a 365 day
  calendar.
• Scribes divided it into twelve months with thirty
  days in each. They added five extra days at the
  end of the year.

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Papyrus

• is an early form of thick paper-like material
  produced from the the papyrus plant, also used
  in Egyptian writing

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Characters

• English is based on 26 characters--letters.
  Letters that are combined into words, and then
  into sentences which tell a story.

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More than 2,000 hieroglyphic characters.

• Each represent a common object in ancient Egypt.
• Hieroglyphs could represent the sound of the
  object or they could represent an idea associated
  with the object.

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Rebus

• A modern type of hieroglyphic writings would be a
  rebus. A rebus is a picture puzzle that can be
  "sounded out" by reading the sounds symbolized by
  the pictures. When these sounds are read aloud
  together, the statements often becomes obvious.
  Try solving the rebus below

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Alphabet

• The alphabet characters are read as the sound of
  the object they represented.
• Although vowels were used in the spoken language,
  they were not usually written unless a word
  begins with a vowel or where it might be
  confusing if left out?like with names.
• EXAMPLE- In English, words are often abbreviated
  by leaving out vowels.
• mtn mountain blvd boulevard. When these
  abbreviations are read aloud, they are spoken
  using vowels.

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Alphabet

• t

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Biliterals

• Biliterals are glyphs with 2 consonants.?Some of
  them are
• ?? sA??
• kA
• Aw

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Reading Hieroglyphics

• Hieroglyphs could be written left to right.
• But they were usually written right to left.
• Which ever way the characters were facing is the
  may you would read them

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Reading Hieroglyphics

• Columns were read
• down as we would read lines down a page. The
  Egyptians liked symmetry. If hieroglyphs were
  inscribed in a column, they would often inscribe
  the same text in the opposite column, except with
  the writing reversed.

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Rosetta Stone

• Found in 1799 by a French soldier in Rosetta,
  Egypt
• It was inscribed with three languages
• 1. Greek - used by the rulers?
• 2. Hieroglyphics - used for important and
  religious documents?
• 3.Egyptian writing - used by most people in
  Egypt at that time.
• It took scholars 20 years to decipher

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a

• a