Deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

There were over 5,000 ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Only about 700-800 were used in writing. The proportions of use are about the same as in the Chinese script. But what do we know about this ancient writing system?

I'll start with the official part of the historical interpretation of this process and what modern history generally knows about deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Penetration into the history of Ancient Egypt for a long time was hindered by the barrier of Egyptian writing. Scientists have tried to read Egyptian hieroglyphs for a long time. They even had at their disposal the ancient textbook "Hieroglyphics", written in the 2nd century. n. e. Gorapollo, a native of Upper Egypt, and since the time of Herodotus it was known that the Egyptians used three types of writing: hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic. However, all attempts to overcome the "Egyptian letter" with the help of the works of ancient authors remained in vain.

In the study of this writing and in deciphering the hieroglyphs, Jean François Champollion (1790-1832) achieved the most outstanding results. The Rosetta Stone became the key to unraveling the Egyptian hieroglyphic and demotic writing.

The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite slab found in 1799 in Egypt near the small town of Rosetta (now Rashid), not far from Alexandria, with three texts that are identical in meaning carved on it, including two in the ancient Egyptian language - inscribed with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Egyptian demotic a letter, which is an abbreviated cursive script of the era of late Egypt, and one in ancient Greek. Ancient Greek was well known to linguists, and a comparison of the three texts served as a starting point for deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. The text of the stone is a gratitude inscription, which in 196 BC. e. Egyptian priests addressed Ptolemy V to Epiphanes, the next monarch from the Ptolemaic dynasty. The beginning of the text: "To the new king who received the kingdom from his father" … In the Hellenistic period, many similar documents within the Greek oecumene were distributed in the form of bi- or trilingual texts, which subsequently served linguists well. The stone was discovered on July 15, 1799 by the captain of the French troops in Egypt Pierre-Francois Bouchard during the construction of Fort Saint-Julien near Rosetta on the western arm of the Nile delta during the campaign of Napoleon's army in Egypt.

The main obstacle in deciphering was the lack of understanding of the Egyptian writing system as a whole, so all private successes did not give any "strategic" result. For example, the Englishman Thomas Jung (1773–1829) was able to establish the sound meaning of the five hieroglyphic signs of the Rosetta stone, but this did not bring science one iota closer to deciphering the Egyptian writing. This unsolvable, as it seemed then, problem could be solved only by Champollion. First of all, Champollion investigated and completely rejected Gorapollo's "Hieroglyphics" and all attempts at deciphering based on his concept. Gorapollo argued that Egyptian hieroglyphs are not sound, but only semantic signs, signs-symbols. But Champollion, even before Jung's discovery, came to the conclusion that among the hieroglyphs there were signs that convey sounds. Already in 1810, he expressed the opinion that the Egyptians could write foreign names with such phonetic signs. And in 1813 Champollion suggested that alphabetic characters were also used to convey the suffixes and prefixes of the Egyptian language. He examines the royal name "Ptolemy" on the Rosetta stone and singles out 7 hieroglyphs-letters in it. Studying a copy of the hieroglyphic inscription on the obelisk originating from the Temple of Isis on the island of Philae, he reads the name of Queen Cleopatra. As a result, Champollion determined the sound meaning of five more hieroglyphs, and after reading the names of other Greco-Macedonian and Roman rulers of Egypt, he increased the hieroglyphic alphabet to nineteen characters. He established in the course of his research and concluded that the Egyptians had a semi-alphabetic writing system, since they, like some other peoples of the East, did not use vowels in writing. And in 1824 Champollion published his main work - "An Outline of the Hieroglyphic System of the Ancient Egyptians." She became the cornerstone of modern Egyptology.

Look at these hieroglyphs and their phonemes:

Doesn't it seem strange to you that certain images are passed off as phonemes? It's not even a syllabic letter! Why is it so hard to depict sounds? You can depict a simple symbol and associate sound with it, as is the case with other peoples and cultures. But in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, it is precisely pictures, images. Translation, decryption, and in my opinion a deep delusion or even delusion of Egyptologists can look here

And from this not a step in the direction of Egyptologists can not be done! After all, all this is based on the authority of Champollion himself!

Take a look at this. This is a whole series of meaning, figurative writing. You can probably even say - this is a universal language that can be understood by any carrier of the mind. Then the conclusion is - are we reasonable that we still cannot read it? It's my opinion. And this is a doubt about the method, where everything is based on phonetic comparisons of the figurativeness of hieroglyphs from the early 19th century. I had it for a long time. Only now I decided to express it in this article.

It is possible that something technical is shown here.

Probably only the lazy did not hear about these technical hieroglyphs on the ceiling in one of the Egyptian temples

There are symbols here that look like flying machines, and more than one type of them, probably.

Stones will probably be thrown at me once again, that I am talking nonsense and everything has long been translated. Or maybe the codebreakers were pulling an owl onto the globe, working off their bread? I do not want to completely incline everyone towards absolute forgery and delusions based on the works of Champollion. But it is worth considering whether everything is once again the way the Egyptologists tell us. After all, Napoleon did not just go to Egypt and it is possible that the Rosetta stone is a simple fake. Moreover, the quality and size of the inscriptions on it does not correspond to the size of the hieroglyphs of the early kingdoms of Ancient Egypt.

As an addition:

Decryption of the Festkiy disk. Also phonetic translation. Although it still has the same symbols, pictures, images

In deciphering the Maya hieroglyphs, the situation is the same:

But in reality, understanding these Mayan images is even more difficult than the ancient Egyptian ones.

Phonetics of Aztec hieroglyphs