Ancient Egypt utilized multiple scripts beyond hieroglyphs, with literacy being rare, and these scripts evolved to serve different purposes from monumental inscriptions to everyday documents and astrological records.
Most people think about hieroglyphs as the main form of writing in ancient
Egypt, but many other scripts existed. It might also come as a shock, as well, to
know that not many people could read and write in ancient Egypt, perhaps as many
as one in a hundred.
Throughout this gallery there's
different examples of scripts that were used in ancient Egypt, on a wide variety
of medium, from stone through to metalwork, right through to papyrus and coffins.
Hieroglyphs was the most ornate script and it
was used for monumental inscriptions, such as those found in temples and tombs,
like this granite stela here, which is a tablet carved of hieroglyphs made about
4000 years ago in a period of time called the Middle Kingdom.
At the bottom we have a scene here of three men, but at the top, this really interesting
symmetrical arrangement of the hieroglyphs and it demonstrates how hieroglyphs
can read in two directions. So, the top part of the stela gives us the name
of the two men that it's dedicated for. If we start with this owl here we're
reading in this direction and it says 'the estate manager Khonsu'. The second
name begins here with this owl facing in the other direction, so read along here
and he has the same title 'the estate manager' but his name is Hotep, we can see
Hotep and Khonsu down here at the bottom of the stela with some other man that
we presume is their grandfather.
Hieroglyphs were pretty and decorative on the
walls of temples and tombs, but they were slow to carve or paint, so a more
joined up form of writing called 'heiratic' was developed for more everyday
documents, like letters and contracts, but also extraordinary inscriptions,
such as this one we have here on display in the gallery, which records the
confession of a thief - a thief who robbed the tomb of Ramesses the 6th in the Valley of
the Kings.This is during a time of civil unrest and what you can see is his
confession and it's put into this script this heiratic script, by a scribe in a
courthouse, using a reed pen on a sheet of papyrus. This is actually a really
important object, it's of great historical importance because it's
unique, it's the only documents that we have that records a robbery in the
Valley of the Kings.
Around the seventh century BC a later
phase of script developed called 'demotic' is developed from heiratic but
was closer to the spoken language of the time.
Initially it was used for less formal documents but later expands into use for
religious and texts and works of literature. In our gallery we have four
amazing little pages from a book, they're made from thin pieces of wood.
Each column recalls the observations of planets for a period of 62 years, this
painstakingly accurate information about the movements of the planets was used by
astrologers, using little books just like this to cast horoscopes. The modern
Western zodiac we still use today is based on the Egyptian view of the night sky.
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