Writings from Ancient Egypt

Product Information

Seters, John Van (1997), In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History, New Haven: Yale University Press, ISBN 1-57506-013-2 Even after the Neolithic, several cultures went through an intermediate stage of proto-writing before they used proper writing. The quipu of the Incas (15th century CE), sometimes called "talking knots", may have been such a system. Another example is the pictographs invented by Uyaquk before the development of the Yugtun syllabary for the Central Alaskan Yup'ik language in about 1900. There is limited but solid evidence in Egyptian literature and art for the practice of oral reading of texts to audiences. [53] The oral performance word "to recite" ( šdj) was usually associated with biographies, letters, and spells. [54] Singing ( ḥsj) was meant for praise songs, love songs, funerary laments, and certain spells. [54] Discourses such as the Prophecy of Neferti suggest that compositions were meant for oral reading among elite gatherings. [54] In the 1st millennium BC Demotic short story cycle centered on the deeds of Petiese, the stories begin with the phrase "The voice which is before Pharaoh", which indicates that an oral speaker and audience was involved in the reading of the text. [55] A fictional audience of high government officials and members of the royal court are mentioned in some texts, but a wider, non-literate audience may have been involved. [56] For example, a funerary stela of Senusret I (r. 1971–1926 BC) explicitly mentions people who will gather and listen to a scribe who "recites" the stela inscriptions out loud. [56] Of several pre-Columbian scripts in Mesoamerica, the one that appears to have been best developed, and has been fully deciphered, is the Maya script. The earliest inscriptions which are identifiably Maya date to the 3rd century BCE, and writing was in continuous use until shortly after the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century CE. Maya writing used logograms complemented by a set of syllabic glyphs: a combination somewhat similar to modern Japanese writing.

Pictographic: glyphs directly represent an object or a concept such as (A) chronological, (B) notices, (C) communications, (D) totems, titles, and names, (E) religious, (F) customs, (G) historical, and (H) biographical. An Egyptian historian, known by his Greek name as Manetho ( c. 3rd century BC), was the first to compile a comprehensive history of Egypt. [174] Manetho was active during the reign of Ptolemy II (r. 283–246 BC) and used The Histories by the Greek Herodotus ( c. 484 BC– c. 425 BC) as his main source of inspiration for a history of Egypt written in Greek. [174] However, the primary sources for Manetho's work were the king list chronicles of previous Egyptian dynasties. [171] Tomb and temple graffiti [ edit ] Artistic graffiti of a canine figure at the Temple of Kom Ombo, built during the Ptolemaic dynasty Much of what we consider knowledge is inscribed in written text and is the result of communal processes of production, sharing, and evaluation among social groups and institutions bound together with the aim of producing and disseminating knowledge-bearing texts; the contemporary world identifies such social groups as disciplines and their products as disciplinary literatures. The invention of writing facilitated the sharing, comparing, criticizing, and evaluating of texts, resulting in knowledge becoming a more communal property across wider geographic and temporal domains. Sacred scriptures formed the common knowledge of scriptural religions, and knowledge of those sacred scriptures became the focus of institutions of religious belief, interpretation, and schooling, as discussed in the section on writing and religion in this article. Other sections in this article are devoted to knowledge specific to the economy, the law, and governance. This section is devoted to the development of secular knowledge and its related social organizations, institutions, and educational practices in other domains. The first " abjads", mapping single symbols to single phonemes but not necessarily each phoneme to a symbol, emerged around 1800 BCE in Ancient Egypt, as a representation of language developed by Semitic workers in Egypt, but by then alphabetic principles had a slight possibility of being inculcated into Egyptian hieroglyphs for upwards of a millennium. [ clarification needed] These early abjads remained of marginal importance for several centuries, and it is only towards the end of the Bronze Age that the Proto-Sinaitic script splits into the Proto-Canaanite alphabet ( c. 1400 BCE) Byblos syllabary and the South Arabian alphabet ( c. 1200 BCE). The Proto-Canaanite was probably somehow influenced by the undeciphered Byblos syllabary and, in turn, inspired the Ugaritic alphabet ( c. 1300 BCE). With the collapse of the Roman authority in Western Europe, literacy development became largely confined to the Eastern Roman Empire and the Persian Empire. Latin, never one of the primary literary languages, rapidly declined in importance (except within the Roman Catholic Church). The primary literary languages were Greek and Persian, though other languages such as Syriac and Coptic were important too.

Underground Egyptian tombs built in the desert provide possibly the most protective environment for the preservation of papyrus documents. For example, there are many well-preserved Book of the Dead funerary papyri placed in tombs to act as afterlife guides for the souls of the deceased tomb occupants. [24] However, it was only customary during the late Middle Kingdom and first half of the New Kingdom to place non-religious papyri in burial chambers. Thus, the majority of well-preserved literary papyri are dated to this period. [24] Six major historical writing systems (left to right, top to bottom: Sumerian pictographs, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese syllabograms, Old Persian cuneiform, Roman alphabet, Indian Devanagari) Extensive bureaucracies arose in the ancient Near East [2] and China [88] [89] which relied on the formation of literate classes to be scribes and bureaucrats. In the Ancient Near East this was carried out through the formation of scribal schools, [90] while in China this led to a series of written imperial examinations based on classic texts which in effect regulated education over millennia. [91] Literacy remained associated with rise in the government bureaucracy, and printing as it emerged was tightly controlled by the government, with vernacular texts only emerging later and then being limited in their range up through the early twentieth century and the fall of the Ching dynasty. [92] In ancient Greece and Rome, class distinctions of citizen and slave, wealthy and poor limited education and participation. In Medieval and early modern Europe church dominance of education, both before and for a time after the reformation, expressed the importance of religion in the control of the state and state bureaucracies. [93] The first writing systems of the Early Bronze Age were not a sudden invention. Rather, they were a development based on earlier traditions of symbol systems that cannot be classified as proper writing, but have many of the characteristics of writing. These systems may be described as "proto-writing". They used ideographic or early mnemonic symbols to convey information, but it probably directly contained no natural language.

Dating texts by methods of palaeography, the study of handwriting, is problematic because of differing styles of hieratic script. [64] The use of orthography, the study of writing systems and symbol usage, is also problematic, since some texts' authors may have copied the characteristic style of an older archetype. [64] Fictional accounts were often set in remote historical settings, the use of contemporary settings in fiction being a relatively recent phenomenon. [65] The style of a text provides little help in determining an exact date for its composition, as genre and authorial choice might be more concerned with the mood of a text than the era in which it was written. [66] For example, authors of the Middle Kingdom could set fictional wisdom texts in the golden age of the Old Kingdom (e.g. Kagemni, Ptahhotep, and the prologue of Neferti), or they could write fictional accounts placed in a chaotic age resembling more the problematic life of the First Intermediate Period (e.g. Merykare and The Eloquent Peasant). [67] Other fictional texts are set in illo tempore (in an indeterminable era) and usually contain timeless themes. [68] One of the Heqanakht papyri, a collection of hieratic private letters dated to the Eleventh dynasty of the Middle Kingdom [69] During the reign of Akhenaten (r. 1353–1336 BC), the Great Hymn to the Aten—preserved in tombs of Amarna, including the tomb of Ay—was written to the Aten, the sun-disk deity given exclusive patronage during his reign. [134] Simpson compares this composition's wording and sequence of ideas to those of Psalm 104. [135]Phonetic system: graphemes refer to sounds or spoken symbols, and the form of the grapheme is not related to its meanings. This resolves itself into the following substages: a b Simpson 1972, p.57 states that there are two Middle-Kingdom manuscripts for Sinuhe, while the updated work of Parkinson 2002, pp.297–298 mentions five manuscripts.

Further information: Ancient Egyptian philosophy A New Kingdom copy on papyrus of the Loyalist Teaching, written in hieratic script It was not until 1799, with the Napoleonic discovery of a trilingual (i.e. hieroglyphic, Demotic, Greek) stela inscription on the Rosetta Stone, that modern scholars were able to decipher ancient Egyptian literature. [186] The first major effort to translate the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone was made by Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) in 1822. [187] The earliest translation efforts of Egyptian literature during the 19th century were attempts to confirm Biblical events. [187] Private legal documents for the sale of land appeared in Mesopotamia in the early third millennium BCE, not long after the initial appearance of cuneiform writing. [80] The first written legal codes followed shortly thereafter around 2100 BCE, with the most well known being the Code of Hammurabi, inscribed on stone stellae throughout Babylon circa 1750 BCE. [81] While Ancient Egypt did not have codified laws, legal decrees and private contracts did appear in the Old Kingdom around 2150 BCE. The Torah, or the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, particularly Exodus and Deutoronomy, codified the laws of Ancient Israel. Many other codes were to follow in Greece and Rome, with Roman law to serve as a model for church canon law and secular law throughout much of Europe during later periods. [82] [83]Gozzoli 2006, pp.283–304; see also Parkinson 2002, p.233, who alludes to this genre being revived in periods after the Middle Kingdom and cites Depauw (1997: 97–9), Frankfurter (1998: 241–8), and Bresciani (1999). Modern historians consider that some biographical—or autobiographical—texts are important historical documents. [166] For example, the biographical stelas of military generals in tomb chapels built under Thutmose III provide much of the information known about the wars in Syria and Palestine. [167] However, the annals of Thutmose III, carved into the walls of several monuments built during his reign, such as those at Karnak, also preserve information about these campaigns. [168] The annals of Ramesses II (r. 1279–1213 BC), recounting the Battle of Kadesh against the Hittites include, for the first time in Egyptian literature, a narrative epic poem, distinguished from all earlier poetry, which served to celebrate and instruct. [169] Parkinson, R. B. (2002), Poetry and Culture in Middle Kingdom Egypt: A Dark Side to Perfection, London: Continuum, ISBN 0-8264-5637-5 Spalinger, Anthony (1990), "The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus as a Historical Document", Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur, 17: 295–337 Parke, Catherine Neal (2002), Biography: Writing Lives, New York and London: Routledge, ISBN 0-415-93892-9