by Muriah Summer

Created on: December 07, 2008   Last Updated: July 20, 2010

Ancient Egyptian was a language with staying power. From its first appearance in about 3000 BCE, Egyptian was in continuous use for more than four thousand years. In fact, a form of Egyptian is still used by the Coptic Orthodox Church in some rituals. The Ancient Egyptians used four different writing systems; hieroglyphic, hieratic, demotic, and Coptic. Hieroglyphic is the first and longest lived of these, and it is the writing that many people picture when they think of Egypt.

-The History of Hieroglyphic-

Hieroglyph is a Greek word meaning "sacred carving". Each symbol is called a "hieroglyph", and the writing system is called "hieroglyphic"- not "hieroglyphics".   The first uses of hieroglyphic date to before 3000 BCE, as short inscriptions of names or labeling goods. Longer inscriptions appeared around 2600 BCE. There is no clear record of how hieroglyphic developed - it simply appears as a complete system. Some scholars believe the older inscriptions, that would have shown the developmental stages of hieroglyphic writing, were written on impermanent materials such as wood. Others suggest that the system may have been invented all at once.

Egyptian is an Afro-Asiatic language, related to the Semitic languages, such as Arabic, and North African languages such as Berber. The spoken language went through five stages - Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian, Demotic, and Coptic. Hieroglyphic writing was used to write Old and Middle Egyptian only. Middle Egyptian was no longer used as a spoken language after about 1600 BCE, but it was used to write inscriptions in hieroglyphic. The last known hieroglyphic inscription was carved in 394 CE.

Once it was no longer in use, hieroglyphic writing soon became incomprehensible to scholars. No one could remember how to read it. What made hieroglyphic so difficult for modern scholars to decipher is the combination of symbols representing sound, and those representing meaning. Chinese uses symbols representing meaning, while English uses only symbols representing sound. Scholars had thought that hieroglyphic writing was made up entirely of one or the other, and this mistaken belief hampered efforts to translate hieroglyphic inscriptions.

It took the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 to finally give the researchers the clue they needed - engraved on the stone was the same passage written in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek. Many scholars tried to decipher the inscriptions, but it was the French scholar Jean-Francois

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