Egyptian hieroglyphs
Also called: Hieroglyphic script · Topic: Bronze Age Civilisations: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China · NCERT: Class 9, Ch 4 "Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation"
Meaning
Egyptian hieroglyphs are the picture-based writing of ancient Egypt. They developed in the period 3000–2000 BCE. Hieroglyphs were carved on monuments and written on papyrus, a paper-like sheet made from a river plant. For a long time no one could read them. Scholars finally understood them in 1822, with the help of the Rosetta Stone.
Example
The Rosetta Stone, found in 1799, carried the same text in three scripts, and one of them was Greek. Scholars could already read the Greek, so they could compare it with the other two. Using it, Jean-François Champollion worked out how to read hieroglyphs in 1822.
Don't confuse with
- Cuneiform: this was the wedge-shaped Mesopotamian script, pressed into clay tablets. It was deciphered in the 1850s.
- Sindhu lipi (Harappan script): unlike hieroglyphs, it has still not been deciphered.