The egyptian hieroglyphs
Egyptian writing appeared more than 5,000 years ago, around 3100 BC. Scholars disagree about its origin: some argue that it came to Egypt from Mesopotamia, where writing had been invented a few centuries earlier; others, on the other hand, consider it autochthonous to Egypt, since signs almost identical to ideograms were already used in the Predynastic Period.
Hieroglyphic writing, based on a mixed ideograph-phonetic system, remained unchanged for 3500 years until the fourth century AD, and gave rise to a cursive writing from the beginning of the Old Kingdom: hieratic writing. This was a synthetic version of the hieroglyphic signs, used to write everyday documents on the papyrus (the hieroglyphs, in fact, were reserved for monumental uses).
As for the other languages, also for the Egyptian one the first step towards writing was to graphically represent what was seen. Thus the ideograms were born. Soon, however, a problem arose: how to write words that referred to abstract ideas or concepts? In this regard, the Egyptians had an intuition: to empty most of the ideograms of meaning to give them an exclusively phonetic value. If "mouth" was said "r" this sign did not represent the mouth but the sound "r"; if "water" was said "n", this sign did not represent water but the sound "n". Phonograms were born, that is, the signs that represented sounds. Egyptian writing provides more than 800 signs of different genres. The simplest are called monoconsonatics and are equivalent to a single sound. It is not known for sure how the idea of assigning a concrete value to a certain sign came about, but it is likely that this value is simply the first sound of some words.
The monoconsonatic signs are in all 24 and constitute what we call the "alphabet". It must be taken into account that the Egyptian writing did not foresee the use of vowels. Another type of phonograms are the biconsonant ones, which are equivalent to two sounds; some of these are ideograms. They are more numerous than mono-consonant ones, although many could be written using only single-consonant phonograms. Finally there are the phonograms, which are not very numerous, which are equivalent to three sounds: the triconsonants, most of the time accompanied by phonetic complements (monoconsonant phonograms). Their function is to ensure the correct pronunciation of words by repeating the last sound. They also allow you to read more easily avoiding errors. In addition to phonograms and phonetic complements, there was another kind of signs called determinative, which were not pronounced and, therefore, had no phonetic value.
Many words were homophones, that is, they could be read in the same way despite having different meanings, so the Egyptians, in order to distinguish them, devised a complex of signs to put at the end of the word. In this way, if the ideogram of ship was placed after the phonograms representing the word "ship", the result was much more explicit and did not give rise to errors.
Egyptologists have developed a system for transcribing the signs in our alphabet to be able to read them; since there are no vowels, a vowel sound is interposed between the consonants to respect the sound of the words, which have come down to us through Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language.
