MDaines Wrote:
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> The Mercer quote was found on sacredtexts.com.
> I’ll leave you all to the apparently huge task
> of clarifying the groundwork that led to
> transliterating Egyptian hieroglyphs into the
> current understanding of them. If I thought there
> was a straight and simple answer out there
> somewhere, I might ask why there is such certainty
> that the images represented sounds that could be
> linked to an alphabet rather than entire words.
> I’m curious but the earliest Sumerian symbols
> (pre-cuneiform) are my subject, so I’ll leave it
> at that. Note that I don’t refer to them as
> proto-cuneiform because this is the study of a
> pre-existing symbolic (pictographic) language that
> degenerated into abstraction (cuneiform), not the
> usual understanding of it as the beginning of
> intelligent communication - that led to our
> current sad state of bickering, obfuscation and
> misinterpretation.
> I wish you good progress!
> Madeleine

Hello Madeleine,

"I might ask why there is such certainty
> that the images represented sounds that could be
> linked to an alphabet rather than entire words."

You are absolutely correct and this is not the case. The images represent both sounds and words and that is what Champollion discovered. I posted an example on my thread on Gardiner F31 and how he discovered that. The upshot is that as far as the current model of understanding goes, an Upper Egyptian phonetic script fused with a Lower Egyptian pictographic script upon unification in 3000 BC. Some of the pictographs were adopted others were phased out by the time of Den in the First Dynasty (Helck). So there is a phonetic alphabet, phonograms, and there are logograms. The logograms act both as words and can also be determinatives, context symbols. This may give you some added perspective on the lioness-bent-rod symbol. That is one of those examples, where no phonetic assignment has ever been discovered. The symbol was inappropriately, so we think, co-mingled with the mooring post symbols. You can obviously disagree with out interpretation of the meaning. Helck thought this is one of those remnants from the Buto linguistic zone and that language may, after all, have proto-cuneiform Mesopotamian or Levantine origins. Excavation in Lower Egypt will hopefully reveal what may be hidden under thousands of years of mud.


Addendum: More accurately, I should have written "ideograms" instead of "logograms". Ideograms, the broader functional category term, in Egyptian can either complete words, in which they are also logograms, or they can be determinatives, context symbols in Egyptian. You have a similar siutation in Lewian script, the original Hittite hieroglyphic language before cuneiform entered that zone.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 01-Dec-18 16:02 by Manu.