United States or Bulgaria ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
THE WRITING. Four distinct graphic systems were in use in ancient Egypt: the hieroglyphic, the hieratic, the demotic, and Coptic. The first expresses words partly by representation of the object and partly by signs indicating sounds, and was used chiefly for inscriptions.
Taking advantage and making use of the parts that had been revealed to him by demotic and hieroglyphic text, he succeeded, in a mechanical way, and by intelligent comparisons in deciphering the names Ptolemaios and Berenike, and in recognizing even the hieroglyphic signs for numbers. Still the true nature of the Egyptian writing was not revealed to him either.
The introduction contains an account of Egyptian notions of love and marriage, gathered from hieroglyphic and demotic sources, and a chapter is devoted to the forms of Egyptian verse, its rhythm and accent.
He mentions the three kinds of writing; first, the hieroglyphic; secondly, the hieratic, which is nearly the same, but written with a pen, and less ornamental than the carved figures; and thirdly, the demotic, or common alphabetic writing.
It seemed entirely reasonable to Dewforth that the writing on the older posters underneath was runic or demotic and the faces were ochre-stained skulls, but his impulse was to hurry past and not study them too closely. At last he found a long steep ladder running up the outside of one of the legs of the Control Tower.
There are also hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic texts of Persian Egypt; inscriptions of Semitic Syria and a few of archaic Greece; and much other miscellaneous archaeological material from various parts of the East, which, even if uninscribed, can inform us of local society and life. The Greek had been pushing eastward for a long time.
There they taught youth to draw plans of fields which were for the most part rectangular, also to take the elevation of land by means of two laths and a square. In this department also they explained the art of writing numbers no less involved in hieroglyphic or demotic characters. But pure arithmetical problems formed a higher course, and were solved by means of bullets.
The Literature of ancient Egypt is the product of a period of about four thousand years, and it was written in three kinds of writing, which are called hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic.
In the demotic, or people's writing, the characters are somewhat more curtailed, or abridged, than in the hieratic, or priestly, style. There were four methods of using the hieroglyphics in historical times. First, there were the primary, representational characters, the literal pictures. Secondly, the characters were used figuratively, as symbols.
The second sort of characters, the hieratic, and the third, the demotic, are curtailed pictures, which can thus be written more rapidly. They are seldom seen on the monuments, but are the writing generally found on the papyrus rolls or manuscripts. They are written from right to left. The hieroglyphs proper may be written either way, or in a perpendicular line.
Word Of The Day