Gretchen Neal, age 15, of Concord, N.H., for her question:
WHAT IS HIEROGLYPHIC WRITING?
Hieroglyphic writing is a kind of picture writing. The word usually refers to the ancient writing of Egypt but it can also be used in connection with the writing of the Aztecs and early American Indians.
The Greek word "hieroglyphic" means "sacred carving" or "priestly carving." The Greeks believed that only Egyptian priests understood and used this artistic style of writing. They thought that hieroglyphics represented some secret, magical wisdom and that a person must understand the magic to understand the writing. Of course we now know that this ancient belief was a myth.
Hieroglyphic writing in Egypt started about 3000 B.C. Small, simple pictures were used to convey ideas. The pictures are known as "pictographs" or "ideograms."
If an Egyptian wanted to give others the idea of a man, he drew a picture of a man. Later, the pictures indicated words or syllables that were pronounced the same as the object drawn, but which might have an entirely different meaning.
This use of picture writing is called "syllabic." In syllabic writing, for example, a picture of ham (meat) might be used to mean the verb "meet." In hieroglyphic writing, a system of symbols representing sounds was developed.
The writing of many peoples has gone through the ideographic, syllabic and alphabetical stages. But the Egyptians continued to use the ideographic and syllabic systems even after they had worked out a system of 24 alphabetical symbols.
Hieroglyphic writing was used mainly for inscriptions on stone monuments in the early days of Egypt. As the knowledge of writing spread, the people came up with a good writing surface that was made from a reed plant called "papyrus." It was mashed into a flat paperlike sheet of pulp and then dried.
Soot mixed with water made an excellent inklike liquid and a sharpened reed served very well as a pen.
Knowledge of reading and writing hieroglyphics had been lost by about A.D. 500. In 1799, some of Napoleon's soldiers found a stone tablet near the Rosetta mouth of the Nile. Called the "Rosetta stone," the tablet has the same information written on it in three languages: Egyptian hieroglyphic, Egyptian demotic and Greek. Since knowledge of Greek had not been lost, the document could be deciphered.
In 1822, a Frenchman named Francois Champollion interpreted the entire hieroglyphic text of the Rosetta stone. Trained linguists can now read Egyptian hieroglyphics with little difficulty. Complete grammars and dictionaries of the writing are also available.
Ancient Egyptians, with papyrus writing surfaces available, developed a simplified cursive form of hieroglyphic called hieratic writing. It compares to the carved hieroglyphic in much the same was that longhand does to printing.