History of Arts and Design: Egyptian Hieroglyphics

Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics

Recently i am doing some research about the Egyptian Hieroglyphics for my History of Art and Design class. On my own opinion, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics are very similar to Chinese ancient scripts. Before the Chinese character form, people used logographic to representing each objects they want to wrote down. Chinese used to craved down into the bamboo scroll but ancient Egyptian used to wrote down to papyrus paper.

In my research, ancient Egyptian used hieroglyphics for almost 3500 years ago and also as the formal writing system used by the Egyptian that contained combination of pictogram, logogram, and alphabetic elements. Ancient Egyptian used a lot of hieroglyphic characters and each of them represents a common object in ancient Egyptian.

In between the hieroglyphic there are few writing system that are phonetic reading. Phonetic reading is the most non- determinative, sign are phonetic in nature, meaning the sign is read independent of its visual characteristics. Besides that, Egyptian hieroglyphic script contained of 24 uniliterals that symbolized it stood for a single consonants, much like letters in English. Moreover, phonetic complements in Egyptian writing is often exaggerate in fact, it happens very frequently that a word might follow several characters writing the same sounds, in order to guide the reader and for semantic reading, characters also can be read for their reading. For logograms, it is used to defines the object of which it is an image. Determinatives in ancient Egyptians hieroglyphics are placed at the end of a word.
In English words with the same spelling would be followed by an indicator which would not be read but which would fine-tune the meaning. For example: retort---> "rhetoric".

Nowadays we used to wrote or printed on papers that made by trees, but for ancient Egyptian era they invented the world's first paper that made by papyrus plant and produced it into papyrus paper. The way of papyrus was made by peeling the stem off papyrus reeds and slicing the inner core into thin pieces. After the wet strips of reed were placed in a wooden frame overlapping each other, another layer of wet strips was laid in the other direction. This created a sheet of paper. The method of producing papyrus paper was similar to Malaysia Malay traditional handmade called webbing/braid/plait in Malay known as "anyaman". For ancient Egyptians a substitute for a pencils was a brush that made of reeds. The reeds was softened and and shaped at the end. They mixed with soot and water to produced ink.