The Fonts of The Ancient Egyptian Language

The Fonts of The Ancient Egyptian Language

Have you ever visited an ancient Egyptian temple, Did the beauty of the inscriptions and murals marvels you? Everyone who saw these engraved inscriptions was dazzled by the artistic miracle and wondered, what the artist intended by this inscriptions, but it is more than symbols and inscriptions...

The Ancient Egyptian Language

It is one of the oldest languages ​​of the world and is almost the oldest of them all. It is considered the first written appearance of the Egyptian language in pre-dynastic ages, which is, before 3200 BC.

This takes us to another question, which is how this language was written and what is its nature?

The ancient Egyptian language was written in four fonts: Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, Demotic and Coptic.

The four fonts did not appear simultaneously, but rather formed in the framework of a temporal sequence expressing the long time span experienced by the ancient Egyptian civilization while expressing at the same time the stages of maturity of the thinking and awareness of the ancient Egyptian, And because of increasing of his experiences and needs, which requires finding an expressive language tool for blogging, which is writing. Thus, it is imperative for the Egyptians to develop and find writing fonts that are easier to write and more accurate in expression. This is what caused the creation of the four previously mentioned fonts, but they are all fonts for the same Egyptian language.

The Hieroglyphic font is the oldest, longest-lived and most widely used Egyptian font, Then the Egyptians needed to simplifying it in other stages of time, so the second font created the Hieratic font, Then they needed a another simplification in a third stage, so they found the Demotic font, We clearly see a clear relation between the first three fonts, and this is where the fourth and the last font differs, which is the Coptic font.
In the Coptic font, the Egyptian language alphabet were written in Greek letters plus seven letters of the Demotic font, because of the lack of phoneme pronunciation in Greek letters.

The Hieroglyphic Font:

It is the oldest font which the Egyptians wrote their language, and the word "Hieroglyphic" was derived from two Greek words, "Hieros" which means sacred and "Glophos " which means inscription so "Hieroglyphic" The Sacred Inscription, As it was used to write on the walls of holy places such as temples and tombs.

It was also inscripted with two styles, the prominent and the hollow on the walls, the statues and the palettes

Hieroglyphs consist of a group of inscriptions drawn from everyday life. They were pictorial inscriptions, In addition to the presence of audible signs; The signs in hieroglyphs are divided into three groups.

The first group: mono signs (monophonic signs like the usual letters today).

The second group: binary signs (which is one sign but speak two letters together).

Third group: three-letter signs (which is one sign but speaks three letters together).

This is in addition to a group of other signs that are not uttered utterly, but rather for grammatical purposes such as identifying the dual, plural, masculine, and feminine, and some symbols affirming the meaning known as allocations.

The Hieroglyphic Font

It is also worth noting to talk about The Initial Sinaitic Alphabet, It is probably the origin of the 22 letters in the later Northwest Semitic alphabets, It is believed to have originated around 1700 BC in the context of a Samian development of Egyptian hieroglyphs In the Sinai Peninsula, And from it arose the first "clear" alphabet, the Phoenician alphabet from which the Aramaic alphabet evolved.

The Initial Sinaitic Alphabet

The Hieratic Font:

This font started to form in the middle kingdom, It is an evolution of the hieroglyphic font and an increase in symbols, fine tuning the line in a relatively new way, And gradual disappearance of the rule of dual while preserving the words that it contained.

In the late intermediate stage, the first signs of identify appeared, which were:

B for masculine

T for feminine

N for plural

These letters remained gender specific for all later stages.

In this era, a new fomt for writing on papyri appeared "the Hieratic font", It was shorthand from Hieroglyphs, less accurate in writing and clarity.

The Hieratic was intended for the priests, So was called the Greek "ἱερατικά", meaning the "priestly" font, and the Hieratic was not different from the Hieroglyph in anything but the writing script only without any other development in the language.

The Hieratic Font

The Demotic Font:

This is a simplified font from the Hieratic font and was used in the codification of religious texts, but it was not limited to this, as it was written with texts of training scribes, letters, legal and commercial documents of the ancient Egyptians.

This name was derived from the Greek word "δημοτικός - dēmotikós" which means 'the popular", It was known with this name because it was not limited to the category of priests only, but rather it is the font of the daily transactions in this era.

This font has appeared since the eighth century B.C. The emergence of this font came as a result of the multiplicity of activities and the large number of administrative transactions, which needed speed in blogging and achievement.

One of the most distinguishing features of this font than the previous fonts the disappearance of the rule of dual, And the frequent use of the letter T instead of the letter D until it almost disappeared completely, Just as it replaced the letter T for the feminization with the letter Y.

The Demotic font was not written just by engraving on stone and metal, but was also written by ink using a brush on papyrus, Papyrus and ostracon were the two main materials for writing this font.

The Demotic Font

The Coptic Font:

This last font is considered unique and new for the Egyptian language, as the Egyptian language has turned from an expressive language based in its writing on graphics and symbols to a contemporary alphabet.

Coptic is distinguished by its adherence to the basic grammar of late Egyptian language without change, and is very similar to Demotic, It was written in Greek letters equal to the Egyptian pronunciation in addition to seven Demotic letters that only the Egyptian can pronounce, which they are (ϣ ϥ ϧ ϩ ϫ ϭ ϯ).

Also the Greek font made the pronunciation of the Egyptian words more musical pronunciation due to the emergence of the vowels with the consonant.

The first attempts at Coptic writing were made by the ancient Egyptians in the Hellenistic era, However, the credit for fixing the Egyptian Coptic alphabet to be as its currently known and the normalization of the spelling system was Pntenous the head of Theology School of Alexandria, who performed a Coptic translation of the Bible during the reign of Pope Demetrius, the twelfth patriarch.

Initially, the Bible was read in Greek, then verbally translated into the Coptic language, as it had not yet been translated into Coptic, When the need for an Egyptian Coptic translation of the Bible increased, and with the spread of the Bible translation from the Greek version known as the Septuagint translation among the people, Coptic writing spreaded with the bible, Also the Egyptian Orthodox Church took it as its official language even after it developed it in 1858 AD.

It is also worth noting that many ancient Egyptian expressions and grammatical rules are still used in Egyptian colloquially, and there are few small villages, a few Egyptian families in the south, and some Egyptians who study it, Are still inheriting the language from their ancestors till today.

Sources:

The Ancient Egyptian Language. Abdel-Halim Nour El-Din.

The Ancient Egyptia Language, a historical study. James P. Allen.

Ancient Egyptian Language and Writing: The History and Legacy of Hieroglyphs and Texts in Ancient Egypt. Charles River.

Deciphering the Proto-Sinaitic text. Paul D. LeBlanc

The Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions and their decipherment. William Foxwell.

Hieroglyphs: the history of a literary symbol. Liselotte Dieckmann.

A Variety of Demotic texts and studies. Joaquim Frederick.

New Approaches in Demotic Studies. Franziska Naether.

Hieratic texts from Tibetons. Kim Rehult.

In the Coptic Language. Carl Abel.

Egyptian-Coptic Linguistics in Typological Perspective. Eitan Grossman, Martin Haspelmath and Tonio Sebastian Richter.