Late Egyptian Stories

Translate to French
German

Translate to German
Italian

Translate to Italian

Translate to Portuguese
Spanish

Translate to Spanish

HP2: Late Egyptian Stories
by Sheldon Gosline
Contents __________________________________________ ....Acknowledgements ....Introduction ....1: ....2: ....3: ....4: ....5: ....6: ....7: ....Bibliography ....List of Figures ....Index ....Illustrations	ORDER NOW Unlocking the secrets of an ancient language system is like cracking a code. This is archaeo-cryptography! ISBN Not Assigned Cloth Bound Price $39.50 US Single Orders Volume Orders Excerpt Below
The Author Prof. Sheldon Lee Gosline is the founding director of the Hieratic Font Project of the Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations.

EXCERPTS

The invention of a script (by the late fourth millennium BC) marks a quantum leap forward in human cultural development. Time and space cease to be barriers to the transmission of knowledge and information. To grasp the magnitude of this advance, try to imagine our culture today without writing (for even today's visual media and high technology communications depend on written drafts and scripts). It is impossible to imagine any schools or universities, or scientists conducting and reporting research.  Governments could not govern nor could the civil service function without the written word.

Ancient Egyptians knew that writing was the mainstay of civilized life. A seated scribe holding a papyrus roll was one of the most popular subjects in their art, and even the highest officials chose to be depicted this way. Scribes was revered and honored, as a manifestion of the god of writing Thoth, for the early Egyptians recognized that writing was the foundation of ordered life and government and, to some extent, transcended death itself. With writing, ideas, discoveries, wisdom and experience no longer died with the individual, but could be transmitted through endless generations, right down to us.  Indeed, we still read the fine literature, religious and scientific texts of these early scribes.

Writing was not one, but two inventions. First, the script itself - a comprehensive series of signs made by a series of brush strokes, capable of representing all the words or sounds of human speech. Then a second remarkable invention was the technological development of materials (papyrus, pen, ink) to record, transmit and preserve the script along with an education system to pass the system on, from generation to generation.  Likely, the Egyptian school was called or located in "The House of Life" (Per-Ankh), for writing bestowed a kind of immortality. As one Egyptian scribe proclaimed, "(authors' names) are still preserved because of their books... and their memory lasts to the limits of eternity".  Hieratic is what Egyptian scribes were taught ... a series of brush strokes to express thoughts and reach eternity.

The cursive hieratic writing is at least as different from carved Egyptian hieroglyphs as cursive modern handwriting is from Roman block letters, and many times the ancient scribes used a sort of shorthand, especially for the most common signs.  This makes reading hieratic a challenge.  Simple individual signs can have many variations. These are only a few.  For example, the Hieratic Font Project has already identified about 350 variations of Gardiner sign A1, the seated man. Think how many different ways there are to write cursive English in comparison.

These three examples show some more complex single signs and ligatures or group writings. Many of the complex hieratic signs are closer to their hieroglyphic equivalents.  This is also similar to the concept of shorthand. At a very early date, by 3000 BC, Egyptians had already made extraordinary advances in writing. Egypt was that great center of early literacy, from whom we have learned to write with pens on paper in an alphabetic script, descended directly (if distantly) from Egyptian hieratic.

Click HERE to read about Prof. Gosline's most recent research on the famous Egyptian beauty, Queen Nefertiti, of the Amarna Period!