Monday, November 22, 2010

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what is a cartouche?

The 3 Types of Hiroglyphs

There are 3 types of hiroglyphs logograms, phonograms, and determinatives. Logograms write out morphemes, which I'm not really sure what they are. Phonograms represnt one or more sounds. Determinatives donate neither morpheme or sound, but help with the meanings of the signs that procive them. Pretty complocated if you ask me that's for sure.
                                                        

Cartouches

A cartouche is is an oval with a name written in it. In the early days of Ancient Egypt cartouches were attached to coffins, so it's a name tag for dead people that got put on a coffin to put it simply. this was done because Ancient Egyptians believed that you had to have your name written down some were or when you died you would disappear. Now is that crazy or what?

                                                                              

The Rosetta Stone

What does the Rosetta stone have to do with hieroglyphics? It has every thing to do with them, because the Rosetta stone was the key to figuring out what they meant. Jean Francais Campollion used his knowledge of Coptic & the 13 characters he manage to decipher from the Rosetta stone to dechiper cartuces that he hadn't seen on the Rosetta stone. Now that's what I call a genius.
                                                       

How to Read Hieroglphs

A pretty confusing thing to master is reading hieroglyphs, because they can be read from right to left and left to right! The trick is to read it the dercetion the hieroglyphs are facing. For example if they were facing left  you wold read them right to left and viseversa for left to right. Now that's what I call confusing.


                                                         

Thursday, November 18, 2010

The 1st Hieroglyphs

The first hieroglyphs appeared 5,000 years ago! Back then the hieroglyphs looked like what they meant. For example a picture of a mat meant mat. Seems simple enough, but when this guy called Narmer became the 1st king of upper and lower Egypt every thing got a whole lot confusing. When that happened some of these little pics came to sand for the first sound of the original Egyptian word that they meant. This probably lead to some major confusion among the ancient Egyptian scribes, because they'd been writing the same way for a really long time before he showed up and threw the old writing rules out the window. I'd be pretty ticked if i were them.