Hieroglyphs

IMG:file69.png: The hieroglyphic character employed by the Egyptians was originally pictorial, a form it retained more or le in the case of stone-cut inscriptions until a late date. The invention of this script was attributed to the god Thoth. By about 300 A.D. all knowledge of the meaning of the characters had died out, and it was not until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone (q.v.) in 1799 that any real progre was made in their decipherment. We now know that the signs are of two kinds, those representing sounds and those representing ideas—called phonetic and ideographic. Of the former, the phonetic characters, there are two kinds, the alphabetic and the syllabic. The ideographic signs are pictorial representations of the objects spoken of, which are placed after the phonetically written word to "determine" it, and hence they are determinatives. Determinatives are of two kinds, generic and specific, the former being determinative of a cla —as for instance the picture of the hide of an animal, indicating merely an animal—the latter of a particular object. The texts read either from right to left, or from left to right, or are arranged in columns, there being no rule. The text commences from the side towards which the bird and other animal characters are facing. There are about 500 characters in frequent use. Many of the syllabic signs are polyphonous. The cursive form of the hieroglyphic script is called hieratic (q.v.). In later times this cursive form degenerated into a much simpler character called demotic. (See Seten-hetep-ta .)