Ancient Egyptian Writing: Words with Eternal Life
- In ancient Egypt, the written word was considered to have an eternal life and a voice.
- Very few people in ancient Egypt could read and write, and learning hieroglyphs was a difficult and time-consuming process.
- The scribes were the keepers of the 'words of god' and shared this mysterious skill with rulers and gods.
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お願いします。 To the ancient Egyptians the written word was more than just a few scratches in clay. To them, once written, words had an eternal life―a voice. They could even be dangerous. For protection the picture of a crocodile was ofen drawn with a spear through it, or the snake drawn with its head chopped off. Imagine being afraid to write the word "beast" because you believed it could come to life and get you―talk about nightmares! Egyptians called their writing medu neter, which means "words of god." Thousands of years later the Greeks named there writings hieroglyphs, which means "sacred carvings," because they found them covering temples and tombs. Very few people in ancient Egypt could read and write, perhaps only 1 percent of the population. Imagine being one of the few who possessed the power to give a word life. Imagine being the keeper of the "words of god." The scribes shared this mysterious skill with rulers and gods. Learning hieroglyphs wasn't easy. There were more than 700 signs to memorize. It took students years to master them. While other children were outside playing, the students studying to be scribes spent their days bent over pieces of pottery, drawing and re-drawing the hieroglyphs. Students erasedtheir work with a wet rag and started again until they had pleased their teachers.
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古代のエジプト人にとって、書かれた語は、単なる粘土に付けた2、3のかき傷以上の意味がありました。 彼らにとって、ひとたび、書かれるならば、言葉は、永遠の生命 ― 声 ― を持ちました。 それらは、危険でさえありえました。 用心のために、ワニの絵は、槍を突き刺してしばしば描かれました、あるいは、ヘビは、頭を切り落として描かれました。「獣」という単語を怖くて書けないことを想像してください、なぜならば、あなたは、それが生き返って、あなたを襲うかもしれないと思っていたからです ― 正に、悪夢です！ エジプト人は、彼らの文字をメドゥ・ネテルとよびました、これは、「神の語」を意味します。 数千年後、ギリシア人は、これらの文字をヒエログリフと名付けました、これは、「神聖な彫刻」を意味します、と言うのは、彼らは、それらが寺院や墓をおおっているのを発見したからです。 古代のエジプトでは、ほとんどの人が、読み書きできませんでした、できるのは、おそらく人口のわずか1パーセントだったでしょう。 単語に命を与える能力を持つ少数の人々の一人となったと想像して下さい。 「神の語」を護る人となったことを想像してください。 書記は、この不可解な技術を統治者や神と共有しました。 ヒエログリフを学ぶことは、簡単ではありませんでした。 記憶すべき700以上の記号が、ありました。 それらを習得するために、学生には、何年もかかりました。 他の子供たちが、外で遊んでいる間、書記になるために勉強している学生は、陶器の板にかがんで、ヒエログリフを描いては、また、描いて、彼らの日々を過ごしました。 彼らが先生を満足させるまで、学生は濡れたボロ切れで彼らのヒエログリフを消しては、再び描き始めました。
関連するQ&A
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The more vociferous students in the group sometimes tend to take over in terms of volume and output. The process of writing gives everyone an equal opportunity to express themselves,with no one taking non-stop or politely waiting their turn. Writing down their views gave them a little more time to process other students'contributions and respond appropriately. よろしくお願いいたします！
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お願いします。 (8) With so much to lose, the Egyptians came up with a cheat sheet. During the Old Kingdom, only pharaohs could get into the Field of Reeds. Not wanting to risk forgetting a name or a spell, the kings had the answers to all the questions, along with all the magic spells, buried with them. We call the book of spells from the Old Kingdom the Pyramid Texts. During the Middle Kingdom, when the Field of Reeds was open to everyone, the spell were conveniently written on the sides of the coffins. We call those the Coffin Texts. In the New Kingdom the spells were written on scrolls and buried with the body. The words written during the New Kingdom are now known as the Book of the Dead. The Egyptians thought of every possible unpleasantness and wrote spells to protect against it. They even had a spell that prevented them from having to stand on their head and eat feces―or step in some. "What I detest is feces, and I will not eat it... and I will not touch it with my toes." Obviously the ancients weren't taking chances on anything less than a perfect afterlife.
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お願いします (6) The Hyksos army was made up of professional soldiers. They drove chariots, wore body armor and leather helmets, and wielded bows designed to shoot arrows farther than ordinary wooden bows. It's no surprise that the Hyksos beat the Egyptians in those first battles. But the Egyptians learned from the encounters. They stole the ddsign of the chariot from the Hyksos and then improved upon it. The Egyptians made the chariot lighter. The redesign positioned the driver over the axle and they covered the wooden axle with metal so that it turned more smoothly. These changes made it easier for the horse to pull the chariot. The driver stood, holding onto straps for balance, with a soldier at his side. The soldier held a shield and was armed with a bow and arrows, a sword, and a javelin. The back of the chariot was open so that the charioteers could jump out with ease and engage in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy. (7) The Egyptians trained. They held battle competitions in front of the king. Archers shot at targets. Wrestlers grappled with one another. Swordsmen clashed blades. What had once been a rag-tag scrabble of men became an organized military. But they still had work to do on their style of waging war. Before a battle, the Egyptians notified the enemy which day they planned to attack and where. If the enemy wasn't ready, the Egyptians rescheduled. And if the enemy retreated into their fortress, rather than rudely barging in, the Egyptians would patiently wait outside hoping to starve them out. Unfortunately, Egypt's enemies weren't always as courteous.
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お願いします。 If the students' minds began to wander, the teacher would remind them with words like these in the Satire of the Trades, "I would have you love writing more than your mother and have you recognize its beauty." If the students continued to misbehave,the teacher might warn them about other professions like the "coppersmith at his toil at the mouth of his furnace his fingers like crocodile skin his stench worse than fish eggs." Or the gardener who carried a pole across his shoulders "and there is a great blister on his neck, oozing puss." Maybe then, practicing hieroglyphs wouldn't seem so bad. The students might even agree with the teacher that "it is greater than any profession, there is none like it on earth." Once the scribes' schooling was done it was time to become an apprentice and to learn even more about the craft by serving a working scribe. We know from an inscription on a statue that a scribe named Bekenkhons spent 11 years as an apprentice in the royal stables after going to school for 4 years at the temple of Mut at Karnbk. There were plenty of job opportunities for scribes. Everything from personal letters to military secrets to magic spells was written by the scribes. Scribes calculated how many bricks it would take to build a wall, and how many loaves of bread it would take to feed the bricklayers. Scribes wrote out healing directions for doctors. They recorded births and deaths. Anything anyone wanted or needed written down required a scribe. Over time, the slow-to-write hieroglyphs were replaced by an easier system of writing. Scribes still used the sacred way of writing on temples and tombs, but for everyday writing they used a shorthand they called sesh, which means "writing for documents." Later, the Greeks named this writing hieretic.
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お願いします。 There are challenges to living in a country that is mostly desert. By the time the Old Kingdom rolled around, about 2700 BCE, Egyptians were up to meeting those challenges―the most obvious would concern water. Although the derert continually tried to push in on the farmland along the edge of the Nile, the Egyptians had learned how to push back. They coaxed the waters of the Nile inland, filling the buckets of their shadufs and emptying them into channels they had dug through their gardens. Not only were they irrigating their farmlands, they were expanding them. Farmers grew more food than the people could possibly eat. The king's granaries filled. The government organized and financed massive irrigation projects. When you grow more food than you can possibly eat you are left with something to trade with other nations―grain. What Egyptians didn't have they could now get through trade. A challenge less obvious to those nnt used to surviving in a desert environment is the lack of wood. There are no tall trees in a desert. Actually, there are no trees at all, with the exception of what grew right along the edge of the Nile and in the occasional oasis. Egyptians needed wood―a lot of wood―especially for boats and coffins. They had their eye on the cedar that grew to the northeast, in the land that we now call Lebanon. It was ideal for both boats and coffins because cedar resists rot, and a rotting boat or a rotting coffin can be a problem. And so it began―we've got grain, we need wood, you've got wood, you need grain, let's trade. It was not much different, in principle, from trading baseball cards.
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お願いします。 For more than 3,000 years, the sons and the occasional daughter of the rich and the royal studied to become scribes. It was a profession for the privileged. But over time, fewer and fewer scribes learned the ancient sacred symbols. The Greek alphabet found its way into Egyptian writing and even vowels became visible. Eventually, there was no one left who knew how to read those first words drawn in pictures. In modern times, the curious drawings taunted scholars. The mysterious history of ancient Egypt was right there in front of them. If only someone could read it. The carvings circling temple columns, the paintings coloring coffins, the words written on tomb walls waited in silence for someone to crack the code. Who would be first to figure out what the ancients had written? In 1799 the French army was in Egypt as part of Napoleon's grand plan to conquer the world. His engineers were rebuilding an old fort along the branch of the Nile called the Rosetta. The men had torn away one wall and were clearing the rubble when they found a gleaming black stone carved in three different scripts. Even though the engineers could not read the words, they knew the stone must be important. Napoleon sent artists to make copies of the text carved in the stone and the copies were sent to scholars all over Europe. The slab of black stone that the priests had carved the thank-you note into 2,000 years before became known as the Rosetta Stone. Scholars translated the Greek right away, but no one could read demotic or hieroglyphs. How did those curious carvings work?
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お願いします。 At first the pictures stood for the real thing. A picture of the sun meant "the sun." As you can imagine, being able to write about only objects is limiting. How would you write the word "hot"? There is no object named "hot." So the pictures began to stand for ideas related to the object. A picture of the sun might mean light, or day, or―hot. It wasn't long before this was limiting, too. How would you write the word "belief"? What object could you draw that is related to the word belief? But if the objects could also represent a sound, then you could write "belief" as a picture of a bee followed by the picture of a leaf and the reader would be able to figure it out. (This example is an English word. The word for belief in Egyptian would be different, of course.) It wasn't long before there were hundreds of symbols. Reading them was as complicated as writing them because Egyptian writers, called scribes, sometimes wrote right to left, sometimes left to right, and sometimes top to bottom (but never bottom to top). The only clue to which direction you should be reading the inscription was the way the animals and people faced. You read toward the faces. There was no punctuation. There were no periods or question marks so that the reader would know where one sentence ended and the next began. Not even a space between words helped to make the meaning clear. And if that doesn't complicate things enough, the fact that vowels were not used does. Imagine not being able to write a vowel, or should we write mgnntbngllwdtwrtvwl, or worse yet, lwvtrwtdwllgnbtnngm?
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お願いします (18) Slaves were sometimes able to gain their freedom legally. Freedmen, as these lucky ones were called, were usually educated people or household workers. Freed slaves, both men and women, could legally marry―though a former slave could not marry a senator. They were even allowed to own property. Although freedmen could live anywhere they liked, many stayed with their former masters to work for pay. They still needed to make a living. (19) Even though slaves had few possessions of their own, Roman mastes often gave gifts of money to hard workers. A slave could keep this gift, called a peculium, as his private property. Valuable slaves who were careful with their savings might eventually tuck away enough to buy their freedom. This system motivated slaves to work hard. It helped the masters too because, by the time a slave had saved enough money, he or she was probably growing old, and the master could use the money to auy another, younger, slave. (20) Many freedmen worked almost as hard as the slaves did. Most remained desperately poor. But at least as freedmen, they were servants who were paid for their work. And they could not be taken from their families and sold as Spartacus was.
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お願いします (8) The Egyptians even fashioned an inhaler for asthmatics, "bring seven stones and heat them on fire. Take one of them, place parts of these drugs over it, cover it with a new jar with a pierced bottom. Introduce a tube of reed through this hole and put your mouth on this tube so that you swallow its fumes." Experience taught the doctors that there were some things beyond their skill, just as there are today. When examining "a patient with stomach disease suffering from pain in the arms, in the breat and on one side of the stomach" doctors were advised to "say ‘death threatens.’" The symptoms described what we now know is a heart attack.
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お願いします (1) Rules, rules, rules...we may think that rules and creativity don't go together, but for the Egyptians, art was all about rules. Are you painting the king? Make sure you don't draw anything in front of his face or body. That was not a trick shot the king was making with the bow flexed behind his back. The painter was just obeying the rule. When sculpting people seated, make sure that their hands rest on their knees. Always draw the important people bigger. Follow the rules. (2) Walk into any art museum anywhere in the world and you will be able to pick out the Egyptian art immediately. The rules created a style that lasted with almost no change for 3,000 years. The style is called frontalism. Egyptian artists drew the head in profile and the body straight on. By drawing figures with these angles, artists could show a large number of body parts―both arms, both legs, the nose. The Egyptians believed that the drawings could come to life and journey to the afterlife. It's nice to go to eternity with as much of your body as possible. (3) Unlike modern painters who try to give their paintings depth, Egyptian painters made everything look flat. Two artists often worked on the same painting. One artist drew the outline. During the Middle Kingdom, these artists were called "scribes of outlines." And the second artist, known as a "colorist," painted in the color as if he were working on a coloring book. Do you thing he was told to "stay within the lines"?
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