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Andrew Robinson | 232 pages | 01 May 2007 | Thames & Hudson Ltd | 9780500286609 | English | London, United Kingdom Ancient ' cryptic hieroglyphs | Nature

A or pictograph is a representing a concept, object, activity, place or event by . Pictography is a form of writing whereby ideas are transmitted through drawing. It is the basis of and hieroglyphs. Early written were based on pictograms pictures which resemble what they signify and Hieroglyphs and Pictograms which represent ideas. It is commonly believed that pictograms appeared before ideograms. They were used by various ancient cultures all Hieroglyphs and Pictograms the world since around BC and began to develop into logographic writing systems around BC. Pictograms are still in use as the main medium of written in some non-literate cultures in , The , and , and are often used as simple symbols by most contemporary cultures. An or ideograph is a graphical symbol that represents an idea, rather than a group of letters arranged according to the of a spoken , as is done in alphabetic . Examples of ideograms include wayfinding signage, such as in airports and other environments where many people may not familiar with the language of the place they are in, as as numerals and mathematical , which are used worldwide regardless of how they are pronounced in different languages. The term "ideogram" is commonly used to describe logographic writing systems such as and . However, symbols in logographic systems generally represent words or morphemes rather than pure ideas. A , or logograph, is a single which represents a word or a The Story of Writing: Alphabets a meaningful unit of language. This stands in contrast to other writing systems, such as alphabets, where each symbol letter primarily represents a sound or a combination of sounds. A Chinese is a logogram used in writing Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Its possible precursors appeared The Story of Writing: Alphabets early as years ago, and a complete in Chinese characters was The Story of Writing: Alphabets years ago in China, making it perhaps the oldest surviving Hieroglyphs and Pictograms system. Chinese characters are derived directly from individual pictograms or combinations of pictograms and phonetic signs. The number of Chinese characters contained in the Kangxi dictionary is approximately 47, although a large number of these are rarely-used variants accumulated throughout history. In China, literacy for the working citizen is defined as knowledge of 4, - 5, characters. Various examples of Chinese Calligraphy throughout the ages, from newspapers to fan inscriptions. Just as Roman letters have a characteristic shape lower-case letters occupying The Story of Writing: Alphabets roundish area, with ascenders or descenders on some lettersChinese characters occupy a more or Hieroglyphs and Pictograms square area. Characters made up of multiple parts squash these parts together in order to maintain a uniform size The Story of Writing: Alphabets shape. Because of this, beginners often practise on squared graph paper, and the Chinese sometimes use the term "Square-Block Characters. Mainland China adopted simplified characters inbut traditional Chinese characters are still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Japan has used its own less drastically simplified characters sincewhile Korea has limited the use of Chinese characters, and Vietnam completely abolished their use in favour of romanized Vietnamese. According to legend, Chinese characters were invented by Cangjie . The legend tells that Cangjie was hunting on Mount Yangxu today Shanxi when saw a tortoise whose veins caught his curiosity. Inspired by the possibility of a logical relation of those veins, he studied the animals of the world, the landscape of the earth, and the stars in the sky, and invented a symbolic system called zi, Chinese characters. examples from Ukiyo- to Sumi-e. A knowledge of calligraphy is an important step in the understanding of Japanese culture. Calligraphy is not merely an exercise in good handwriting, but rather the foremost art form of the Orient. It is the combination of the skill and imagination of the person who has studied intensely the combinations available using only lines. In the West, calligraphy was intended to suppress individuality and produce a uniform style. Japanese calligraphy sho in Japanese attempts to bring words to life, and endow them with character. Styles are highly individualistic, differing from person to person. Japanese calligraphy presents a problem for westerners trying to understand it; the work is completed in a matter of seconds so the uninitiated cannot really appreciate the degree of difficulty The Story of Writing: Alphabets. However, bear in mind that the characters must be written only once. There is no altering, touching up, or adding to them afterwards. Calligraphy began to filter into Japan during the seventh century A. Buddhism from India had travelled via China and Korea and was making many converts in Japan, including the Emperors. Buddhist scriptures were recorded in Chinese writing. This was produced by priests and was aesthetically very pleasing. The most famous Japanese calligrapher was probably the Buddhist monk Kukai. One story records how the Emperor Tokusokutei asked him to rewrite a section of a badly damaged five panelled screen. Kukai is said to have picked up a brush in each hand, gripped one between the toes of each foot, placed another between his teeth, and immediately written five columns of verse simultaneously! : Over five thousand years ago, the people dwelling in southern , the Sumerians, invented one of the world's earliest systems of writing. They did not do so in order to write stories or letters, nor yet to publicize the deeds of gods and kings, though soon enough writing came to be used for those purposes. They invented writing because they needed a means of accounting for the receipt and distribution of resources. For their numbers had grown and their society had become complex in the alluvial plains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates rivers, an The Story of Writing: Alphabets which required attentive management in order to sustain a large, -based civilization. Hence the need for organizing labor and resources; hence the need for accounting and accountability. The accounting system the people of ancient Iraq developed comprised both a method of recording language in writing, and a method of authenticating and authorizing records and transactions, through sealing them with personal or official seals. The writing system employed signs to represent numbers, things, words, and the sounds of words. All of the signs were originally pictograms, that is, little pictures of things, actions, or Hieroglyphs and Pictograms. But they could be used to represent either Hieroglyphs and Pictograms things of Hieroglyphs and Pictograms they were pictures, or the sounds of the words for those things. A picture of a person's head could be used to mean "head" or "person," and it could also stand for the sound of the word for "head," which was "SAG" in Sumerian. Through using signs to represent like "a" and "sag" as well as to represent things and words for things, all the elements of language could be encoded Hieroglyphs and Pictograms writing. Clay was chosen as the standard medium of writing, for it was readily available, malleable, and recyclable, yet durable when dried in the sun or baked. Reeds, which grow abundantly in marshes and along riverbanks, were used to make Hieroglyphs and Pictograms implements called reed styli. For most types of records and documents, clay was formed into rectangular tablets, but for certain purposes cones, balls, prisms, and other shapes were used! To write Hieroglyphs and Pictograms clay, one would impress the tip of a reed stylus into the surface and draw it along to make each stroke of a sign. These strokes acquired a "wedge-shaped" appearance, having a triangular head and slender tail, so the modern discoverers of this ancient writing system called it "cuneiform" — for "wedge-shaped. The Sumerian was adapted for the writing of the Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite and LuwianHurrian and Urartian languages, and it inspired the Old Persian and national alphabets. The complexity of the system prompted the development of a number of simplified versions of the Hieroglyphs and Pictograms. Old Persian was written in a subset of simplified cuneiform characters known today as . It formed The Story of Writing: Alphabets semi-alphabetic , using far fewer wedge strokes than Assyrian used, together with a handful of for frequently occurring words like "god" and "king. The use of became widespread under the Assyrian Empire and the Aramaean gradually replaced cuneiform. The last known cuneiform inscription, an astronomical text, was written in AD Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Pictograms are a writing system used by the Ancient Egyptians, that contained a combination of logographic, alphabetic, and ideographic elements. Hieroglyphs emerged from the preliterate artistic traditions of Egypt. Engraved hieroglyphs are all more or less figurative: they represent real or imaginary elements, sometimes stylized and simplified, but perfectly recognizable in most cases. In fact, the The Story of Writing: Alphabets character can even, according to context, be interpreted in diverse ways: as a phonogram phonetic readingas an ideogram, or as a semantic . Hieroglyphic frescoes. Hieroglyphic reliefs. Hieroglyphs consist of three kinds of : phonetic glyphs, including single- characters that functioned like an alphabet; logographs, representing morphemes; and , or ideograms, which narrowed down the meaning of a logographic or phonetic word. By the Greco-Roman period, they numbered more than 5, As writing developed and became more widespread among the Egyptian people, simplified forms developed, resulting in the The Story of Writing: Alphabets and popular scripts, which eventually formed the basis on which the Phoenicians structured the modern alphabetic system. These variants were also more suited than hieroglyphs for use on papyrus. Hieroglyphic writing was not, however, eclipsed, but existed along side the other forms, especially in monumental and other formal writing. The Rosetta Stone contains parallel texts in hieroglyphic and demotic writing. Show More. Hebrew: The World’s Oldest Alphabet: English came from Hebrew

Egyptian hieroglyphs 32 c. The history of alphabetic writing goes back to the Hieroglyphs and Pictograms writing system used for in the Levant in the 2nd millennium BCE. Most or nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic proto-alphabet. Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian languagewhich required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their Egyptian surroundings to describe the soundsas opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language. Mainly through PhoenicianHebrew and later Aramaicthree closely related members of the Semitic family of scripts that were in use during the early first millennium BCE, the Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the , , northern Africa and South Asia. Some modern authors distinguish between consonantal scripts of the Semitic type, called " " sinceand "true alphabets" in the narrow sense, [6] [7] the distinguishing criterion being that true alphabets consistently assign letters to both and on an equal basis, while the symbols in The Story of Writing: Alphabets pure stand only for consonants. So-called impure abjads may use or a few symbols to represent vowels. In this sense, then the first true alphabet would be the Greek alphabetwhich was adapted from The Story of Writing: Alphabets , but not all scholars and linguists think this is enough to strip away The Story of Writing: Alphabets original meaning of an alphabet to one with both vowels and consonants. Latinthe most Hieroglyphs and Pictograms used alphabet today, [8] in turn derives from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets, themselves derived from Phoenician. Two scripts are Hieroglyphs and Pictograms attested from before the end of the fourth millennium BCE: Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs were employed in three ways in Ancient Egyptian texts: as logograms ideograms that represent a word denoting an object pictorially depicted by the ; more commonly as phonograms writing a sound or sequence of sounds; and as determinatives which provide clues to The Story of Writing: Alphabets without directly writing sounds. This was not done when writing the Egyptian language, but seems to have been a significant influence [ citation needed ] on the creation of the first alphabet used to write a Semitic language. All subsequent alphabets around the world have either descended from this first Semitic alphabet, or have been inspired by one of its descendants . The script of Easter Island may also be an independently invented alphabet, but too little is known of it to be certain. The Proto-Sinaitic script of Egypt has yet to be fully deciphered. However, it may be alphabetic and probably records the Canaanite language. Several correspondences have been proposed with Proto-Sinaitic letters. This Semitic script adapted Egyptian hieroglyphs to write consonantal values based on the first sound of the Semitic name for the object depicted by the hieroglyph the "acrophonic principle". The first Canaanite states to make extensive use of the alphabet were the Phoenician city-states and so later stages of the Canaanite script are called Phoenician. The Phoenician cities were maritime states at the center of a vast trade network and soon the Phoenician alphabet spread throughout the Mediterranean. Two variants of the Phoenician alphabet had major impacts on the history Hieroglyphs and Pictograms writing: the and the . The Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, like their Egyptian prototype, represented only consonants, a system called an abjad. The Aramaic alphabet, which evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th century BCE, to become the official script of the Persian Empireappears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia:. By at least the 8th century BCE the borrowed the Phoenician alphabet and adapted it to their own language, [16] creating in the process the first "true" alphabet, in which vowels were accorded equal status with consonants. According to Greek legends transmitted by Herodotusthe alphabet was Hieroglyphs and Pictograms from to Greece by Cadmos. The letters of the Greek alphabet are the same as those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both alphabets are arranged in the same order. All of the names of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet started with consonants, and these consonants were what the letters represented, Hieroglyphs and Pictograms called the acrophonic principle. However, several Phoenician consonants were absent in Greek, and thus several letter names came to be pronounced with initial vowels. Since the start of the name of a letter was expected to be the sound of the letter the acrophonic principlein Greek these letters came to be used for vowels. As this fortunate development only provided for five or six depending on dialect of the twelve Greek vowels, the Greeks eventually created Hieroglyphs and Pictograms and other modifications, such as eiouand which became omegaor in some cases simply ignored the deficiency, as in long a, i, . Several varieties of the Greek alphabet developed. The Athenians c. After first writing right to left, the Greeks eventually chose to write from left to right, unlike the Phoenicians who wrote from right to left. Many Greek letters are similar to Phoenician, except the letter direction is reversed or changed, which can be the result of historical changes from right-to-left writing to The Story of Writing: Alphabets left-to-right writing. Greek is in turn the source of all the modern scripts of Europe. Although this description presents the evolution of scripts in a linear fashion, this is a simplification. For example, the Manchu alphabetdescended Hieroglyphs and Pictograms the abjads of West Asia, was also influenced by Korean [ citation needed ]which was either independent The Story of Writing: Alphabets traditional view or derived from the of Hieroglyphs and Pictograms Asia. The Story of Writing: Alphabets apparently derives from the Aramaic family, but was The Story of Writing: Alphabets influenced in its conception by Greek. A modified version of the Greek alphabet, using an additional half dozen demotic hieroglyphs, was used to write Coptic Egyptian. Then there is Cree syllabics an abugidawhich is a fusion of and Pitman developed by the James Evans. A tribe known as the Latinswho became the Romans, also lived in the Italian peninsula like the Western Greeks. From the Etruscansa tribe living in the first millennium BCE Hieroglyphs and Pictograms central Italyand the Western Greeks, the adopted writing in about the seventh century. In adopting writing from these two groups, the Latins dropped four characters from the Western Greek alphabet. They also adapted the Etruscan letter Fpronounced ',' giving The Story of Writing: Alphabets the '' sound, and the Etruscan S, which had three zigzag lines, was curved to make the modern S. These changes produced the modern alphabet without the letters GJUWYand Zas well as some other differences. Over the Hieroglyphs and Pictograms centuries after Alexander the Great conquered the Eastern The Story of Writing: Alphabets and other areas in the third century BCE, the Romans began to borrow Greek words, so they had to adapt their alphabet again in The Story of Writing: Alphabets to write these words. From the Eastern Greek alphabet, they borrowed and Zwhich were added to the end of the alphabet because the only time they were used was to write Greek words. The Anglo-Saxons began using Roman letters to write Old English as they converted to Christianity, following Augustine of Canterbury 's mission to Britain in the sixth century. Because the Runic wenwhich was first used to represent the sound 'w' and looked like a p that is narrow and triangular, was easy to confuse with an actual p, the 'w' sound began to be written using a double u. Because the u at the time looked like a , the double u looked like two v's, W was placed in the alphabet by V. U developed when people began to use the rounded U when they meant the u and the pointed V when the meant the consonant V. began as a variation of Iin which a long tail was added to the final I when there were several in a row. People began to use the J for the consonant and the I for the vowel by the fifteenth century, and it was fully accepted in the mid-seventeenth century. The order of the letters of the alphabet is attested from the fourteenth century BCE in the town of on 's northern coast. About twelve of the tablets have the signs set out in alphabetic order. There are two orders found, one of which is nearly identical to the order used for HebrewGreek and Latinand The Story of Writing: Alphabets second order very similar to that used for Ethiopian. It is not known how many letters the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet had nor what their alphabetic order was. Among its descendants, the had 27 consonants, the South Arabian alphabets had 29, and the Phoenician alphabet Both sequences proved remarkably stable among the descendants of these scripts. The letter names proved stable among the many descendants of Phoenician, including SamaritanAramaicSyriacArabicHebrewand Greek alphabet. However, they were largely abandoned in TifinaghLatin and Cyrillic. The letter sequence continued more or less intact into Latin, ArmenianGothicand Cyrillicbut was abandoned in BrahmiRunicand Arabic, although a traditional abjadi order remains or was re-introduced as an alternative in the latter. These 22 consonants account for the phonology of Northwest Semitic. One modern national alphabet that has not been graphically traced back to the Canaanite alphabet is the Maldivian script, which is unique in that, although it is clearly modeled after Arabic and perhaps other existing alphabets, it derives its letter forms from numerals. Another is the Korean Hangulwhich was created independently in The Osmanya alphabet was devised for Somali in the s by Osman Yusuf Kenadidand the forms of its consonants appear to be complete innovations. Among alphabets that are not used as national scripts today, a few are clearly independent in their letter forms. The Zhuyin phonetic alphabet and Japanese both derive from Chinese characters. The Santali alphabet of eastern India appears to be based on traditional symbols The Story of Writing: Alphabets as "danger" and "meeting place", as well as pictographs invented by its creator. The names of the Santali letters are related to the sound they represent through the acrophonic principle, as in the original alphabet, but it is the final consonant or vowel of the name that the letter represents: le The Story of Writing: Alphabets represents eHieroglyphs and Pictograms "thresh grain" represents . In early medieval Ireland, consisted of tally marks, and the monumental inscriptions of the Old Persian Empire were written in an essentially alphabetic cuneiform script whose letter forms seem to have been created for the occasion. Changes to a new writing medium sometimes caused a break in graphical form, or make the relationship difficult to trace. It is not immediately obvious that the cuneiform Ugaritic alphabet derives from a prototypical Semitic abjad, for example, although this appears to be the case. The shapes of the English and letters, for example, are derived from the alphabetic order of the , but not from the graphic forms of the letters themselves. Most modern forms of shorthand are also unrelated to the alphabet, generally transcribing sounds instead of letters. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. . BCE Hieratic 32 c. BCE Demotic 7 c. BCE Meroitic 3 c. BCE Proto-Sinaitic 19 c. BCE Ugaritic 15 c. BCE Phoenician 12 c. BCE Paleo-Hebrew 10 c. BCE Samaritan 6 c. BCE Libyco-Berber 3 c. BCE Paleohispanic semi-syllabic 7 c. The Story of Writing: Alphabets Aramaic 8 c. BCE Brahmic family see E. Tibetan 7 c. CE Devanagari 10 c. CE Canadian syllabics Hebrew 3 c. BCE Avestan 4 c. CE Palmyrene 2 c. BCE Nabataean 2 c. BCE Arabic 4 c. BCE Sogdian 2 c. BCE Orkhon old Turkic 6 c. CE Old Hungarian c. The Story of Writing

Thank you for visiting nature. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. In Hieroglyphs and Pictograms meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. Reprints and Permissions. 's cryptic hieroglyphs. Nature Download citation. Issue Date : 10 February By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines. If you find Hieroglyphs and Pictograms abusive or that does not comply with our terms or guidelines please flag it as inappropriate. Advanced search. Skip to main content Thank you for visiting nature. Download PDF. Rights and permissions Reprints and Permissions. About this article Cite this article Ancient Egypt's cryptic hieroglyphs. Comments By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines. Search Article Search Search. Quick links Explore articles Hieroglyphs and Pictograms subject Find a job Guide to authors Editorial policies. Close banner Close. Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily. Email address Sign up. Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing.