Ancient egypt glyphs2/14/2024 ![]() As a group, make up some short sentences. Hand out copies you have previously printed of the Egyptian alphabet to each child as well as blank sheets of paper and pencils.Explain that b is a foot (did you have one in your list?) and r is a mouth. (The environment of Egypt is desert/river valley.) Point out that birds (there are three - a chick, a vulture, and an owl, as well as feathers) seem to have been important to the Egyptians. The students will be happily surprised to see that the Egyptians used symbols similar to those they chose, although some are different, given the differences in environment.Show them the Egyptian alphabet on the EDSITEment-reviewed website Nova: Pyramids. Point out that the Egyptian system was the same as the one they've just invented themselves. Tell the students about Egyptian hieroglyphs, referring to the information in the Introduction.Now that you have your alphabet, work together to figure out how to write the sentence ("The silly rabbit lost its carrot and had to go to sleep hungry.") using the symbols.It's what you hear that counts.) Make certain you have included the following letter sounds: a, aw, b, d, ee, g (hard), h, i, k (for hard c), l, n, oh, p, r, s, t, th, oo, and uh. (You might mention that a fun part of this activity is that spelling doesn't matter. Using the list you've already written on the board, assign a sound to each one. ![]() For example, a picture of a tree could represent the sound (or letter) b. Then explain the system of using pictures to represent sounds rather than specific images. Explain that they can actually make a written language using these pictures to express more complicated actions, such as: "The silly rabbit lost its carrot and had to go to sleep hungry." Ask for their ideas of how this can be done. Now ask how the following message could be depicted with pictures: "The tree is split in two." One would simply draw a tree broken in two.Make copies of the ideograms for later use. You can view some ideograms at the EDSITEment-reviewed Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to the glyphs representing sounds (called phonograms), there were a small number that represent entire words or concepts (ideograms). (Hieroglyph means "sacred carved writing.") They were also written with pen and colored ink on sheets of papyrus. Later, they were carved (and then painted) on the walls of tombs and temples, on obelisks, and on sculpture. Hieroglyphs were used at first by a small group of scribes to keep records. Print out copies of the list of "letters" for later use. The hieroglyphic alphabet can be viewed at the EDSITEment-reviewed website Nova: Pyramids. They include vowels sounds, although in Egyptian the sound would have been that of a vowel linked with a consonant, such as ahhhhh or uhhhhhh. Although there are thousands of symbols, the most commonly occurring are a set of 24, which modern archaeologists use as a working alphabet. The names of royalty were surrounded with an oval, known as a cartouche. (They all faced in the same direction.) There was no punctuation, and to save space, two small symbols often occupied the space of one larger one. To read a horizontal line, one moved toward the faces of the animal symbols. Hieroglyphs were written vertically (top to bottom) or horizontally (left to right or right to left). For this reason, we don't know exactly what ancient Egyptian sounded like. Vowels were not written, but were added (usually eh or ah) by the reader. This is the closest the Egyptians ever came to creating an alphabet. Several symbols were written together to make a word. (A rebus is a representation of a word or phrase that uses pictures that sound like the word or phrase, or its syllables.) An English example of a rebus is a bee and a leaf drawn side by side when read aloud, they sound like the word "belief." But this approach to writing could become cumbersome and confusing.Įventually, a system evolved in which a symbol was drawn to represent a specific sound (a consonant). This was the ancient Egyptian version of a rebus. So they resorted to a system of drawing symbols of things that sounded like what they were trying to convey. But certain objects, and more particularly ideas, were difficult to represent with a single drawing. A simple drawing of the sun represented the sun, a drawing of a vulture signified a vulture, a drawing of a rope indicated a rope, and so on. Each picture was a symbol representing something they observed in their surroundings. The ancient Egyptians created a form of picture-writing known as hieroglyphs around 3100 BCE.
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