Picture Writing
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Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, was the fertile river plain where civilization was born and where writing first appeared. Southern Mesopotamia was under the control of a series of kings from 3000 B.C. to the 6th century B.C. In its early history, Mesopotamia was a collection of agricultural city-states. These later gave way to centrally controlled empires which spread through conquest.
Source: The Near Eastern collections of the Carlos Museum
Mesopotamia, Babylon. Neo-Babylonian Period, Reign of Nabopolassar, 625 - 605 B.C. Clay, 3 7/8 x 2 1/16 in. (9.8 x 5.2 cm)
Cuneiform ("wedge-shaped") writing is Mesopotamia's most important contribution to the rest of the ancient Near East. Its invention revolutionized the way business and trade were conducted and offered the first opportunity for mankind to record written history. Cuneiform and its principal writing medium, the clay tablet, remained in use for over 3,000 years. Scribes adapted cuneiform script for writing many Near Eastern languages and used it to record business transactions, legal codes, and literary, commemorative, and dedicatory texts. This barrel-shaped cylinder of clay is inscribed with a commemorative text that records the repair of the city wall of Babylon by Nabopolassar. In the text, Nabopolassar invokes his own name as king of Babylon, describes the weakening and settling of the Great Wall of Babylon on its original base, and his repair and rebuilding of the foundation wall which "like a mountain its summit I verily raised... Oh, Wall! Remind Marduk, my lord [patron god of Babylon] of the favor." Kings and officials commonly deposited inscribed tablets of this shape into recesses built below or within new or repaired constructions in Mesopotamia. Their deposit sanctified and protected the construction as well as allowing the king or official to record his name and deeds for the gods and posterity.
Mesopotamia, possibly Nippur. Ur III, c. 2044 B.C. Clay. 1921.118
Letters or important texts were wrapped in a clay envelope, on which the text was re-recorded and a seal applied. This precaution would prevent anyone from tampering with the message by rewetting the clay and changing the tablet's contents. A similar system was used for all kinds of containers, sealed with a clay cap, on which the owner's seal was rolled.
Egypt
Source: The Ancient Egypt Site, Mysteries of Egypt
Detail of Coffin Case and Cover of the Priestess of Amen-Ra, Nesykhonsu Gessoed and painted sycamore fig wood, height 6 feet 11 inches Egypt, Thebes, late Dynasty 21 or early Dynasty 22
Chart shows development of cursoive scripts from pictograms (hieroglyphics)
An example of Egyptian hieroglyphs: the funerary papyrus of Princess Entiu-ny.
Fragment of a Book of the Dead, belonging to Paheby, son of Ankhpakhered and Takhebyt
From The Papyrus of Ani as reproduced in Budge's Egyptian Book of the Dead, first published in 1895.
The original capstone topped an obelisk erected by Queen Hatshepsut at the temple of Amun at Karnak. - This remarkable woman ruled Egypt as a true pharaoh for 15 years during the 18th dynasty (1473-1458 B.C., New Kingdom). In this scene, Hatshepsut is depicted kneeling before the god Amun. She is wearing the clothing of a pharaoh - a man's kilt with a royal bull's tail on the front and the white atef crown of Egypt - to indicate her position as "a female king". Her name, Maat-ka-re, is engraved in a cartouche, a symbol reserved for the names of pharaohs.
Hieroglyphs were called by the Egyptians "the words of God" and were used mainly by the priests. In AD 391 the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius I closed all pagan temples throughout the empire. This action terminated a four thousand year old tradition and the message of the ancient Egyptian language was lost for 1500 years. It was not until the discovery of the Rosetta stone and the work of Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832) that the Ancient Egyptians awoke from their long slumber.
In the beginning hieroglyphic signs were used to keep records of the king's possessions. Scribes could easily make these records by drawing a picture of a cow or a boat followed by a number. But as the language became more complex more pictures were needed. Eventually the language consisted of more then 750 individual signs. Hieroglyphic script is largely pictorial in character. Most are recognizable pictures of natural or man-made objects, often symbolically color-painted. The ground plan of a simple house, or pr, might stand for the word for "house." These are called ideograms. We do something similar when we use a picture of a heart to represent the word "love" in this sentence "I love New York." The pronunciation of a word is the crucial element in using hieroglyphics, how a word sounds is more important then how it is spelled. Because the words "where" and "wear" sound alike they could be written using the same hieroglyphic signs. The same could be said of the words "there". Hieroglyphs are written in rows or columns and can be read from left to right or from right to left. You can distinguish the direction in which the text is to be read because the human or animal figures always face towards the beginning of the line. Also the upper symbols are read before lower. and "their".
THERE are three forms of writing that were used to write the ancient Egyptian language. Hieroglyphics are the original form of writing out of which all other forms have evolved. Two of the newer forms were called hieratic and demotic. Hieratic was a simplified form of hieroglyphics used for administrative and business purposes, as well as for literary, scientific and religious texts. Demotic, a Greek word meaning "popular script", was in general use for the daily requirements of the society. In the third century A.D., hieroglyphic writing began to be replaced by Coptic, a form of Greek writing. The last hieroglyphic text was written at the Temple of Philae in A.D. 450. The spoken Egyptian language was superseded by Arabic in the Middle Ages.
Neurath was much influenced by the severity and geometry of Egyptian wall painting. He visited museums - "The walls were covered with Egyptian wall paintings which greatly pleased me because I could understand every detail, whether they told of the daily life of the Egyptians. What I liked best were pictures with strong, simplified shapes and without too much elaborate detail. It did not matter if a picture was crude and even roughly drawn so long as it gave me information directly or forcefully."
America (Mayan)
The Mayan hieroglyphs are considered to be the most sophisticated and difficult writing system in mesoAmerica and most other ancient writing systems. For years it was believed that the Mayan glyphs would never be translated. The Mayan hieroglyph writing system is similar to the Egyptian hieroglyph system. Unlike the Egyptian hieroglyphs, where they were converted from Egyptian into Greek, there is no easy conversion for the Mayan glyphs from one language to another language. There are many reasons why the Mayan writing system is so difficult. The Mayans used more than 800 individual signs and glyphs that could be combined into any manner to form words or sentences. The glyphs could also be read from left to right, right to left, top to bottom, or bottom to top. On top of that, there is no Mayan alphabet. Each individual glyph could represent a sound, an idea, or both. To add to the confusion, each glyph could have more than one meaning. Since the Mayan hieroglyphs were first documented in 1962, only eighty-five percent of the glyphs have been interpreted. The epigraphers still can only interpret the glyphs rather than read them. First, most of the original text used to decipher them were destroyed by the Spaniard's on missions in Central America or they were lost over time. Second and most obviously, no native speakers can read or write the glyphs.
Source: Mayan Hieroglyphs
Also: Reading Maya Hieroglyphs (shockwave)
