Interesting Facts About Ancient Egypt Part 1
Egyptian Ancient Language: Egyptian language is an Afro-Asian language formerly spoken in ancient Egypt. Now extinct, it however gave rise to the coptic language, liturgical language which ceased to be used as living language. Evolution of the Egyptian language on more than 4500 years can be divided in several great periods:
Archaic Egyptian (before 2600 BC); Early Dynastic Period Old Egyptian (2600 BC to 2000 BC); Old Kingdom Middle Egyptian (2000 BC to 1300 BC); Middle Kingdom up to the Amarna period Late Egyptian (1300 BC to 700 BC); Amarna period through the Third Intermediate Demotic Egyptian (7th BC to 5th AD); Late Period through Roman times Coptic Egyptian (1st AD to 17th AD); Early Roman times to early modern times
Hieroglyphic Characters: The Egyptologists distinguish 3 categories of Hieroglyphic Characters: 1. Logograms, which represent an object (pictogram) or a concept (ideogram); 2. Phonograms, which correspond to an isolated consonant or a series of consonants; 3. Determinatives, ?dumb? signs which indicate the lexical field to which belongs the word.
Appeared four thousand year BC, hieroglyphic characters will be used until the Roman era, thus during more than three thousand years. Hieroglyphic characters knowledge has been lost when the Roman emperor Theodose closed the pagan places of worship in 380. Luckily, after fourteen centuries, Rosetta stone discovery, as well as the genius of Jean-Fran?s Champollion to break, hieroglyphic characters? seal has been broke.
Rosetta stone: The Rosetta stone is a stele fragment from ancient Egyptian origin carrying three versions of the same text, in two languages (old Egyptian and old Greek) and three writing systems (hieroglyphic characters, demotic