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Slide 2 Topics What does hieroglyphs mean? What directions did they write? What did they use to write on? How did hieroglyphs change in time? Comparing hieroglyphs with todays alphabet. What is my opinion? Sources. Slide 3 The Ancient Egyptians started to write over 5.000 years ago, around 3.000 BC. They used pictures of objects, people and animals to write down their language. It is called HIEROGLYPHS !!! Hieroglyphs comes from Greek. Hiero means, holy and glyphe means writing. So hieroglyphs mean holy writing; the words of God. Slide 4 Hieroglyphic signs only represented consonants. b, c, d, f, g, h, l. There werent any hieroglyphs for vowels. a, e, i, o, u So, can you guess what this word is ? TTHNKHMN Slide 5 Three directions Top to bottom Left to right Right to left The Egyptians wrote hieroglyphs in three directions; from top to bottom, left to right and right to left. But how do we know which way to read it ? Here is the secret! If the animal or person is facing left you read left to right. If they are facing right, you read from right to left. Slide 6 The first man-made writing material was papyrus. The Egyptians invented papyrus about 2000 BC, for about 2500 years ago. It was the only writing material. They wrote hieroglyphs on papyrus with tall straight hallow stems. These stems were their pens. They were thin and sharp. They dipped the stems in ink to write. The ink and paint came from plants. The Egyptians didnt write only on papyrus. They also wrote on stones. They carved and painted hieroglyphs on tomb walls, in temples and in their school. They used hieroglyphs at war and government. Slide 7 Hieroglyphs developed in three steps 1.Picturegrams 2.Ideograms 3.Phonograms At the beginning each hieroglyphs represented only one object. They didnt represent the things we can t see. It was picturegrams. For example a disk represented the sun, crescent the moon and wavy lines water. But there werent any hieroglyphs to represent thoughts, light or day. Then, the Egyptians developed ideograms. So, hieroglyphs became symbols of ideas, not only objects. For example a disk represented sun and day. And the third step was phonograms. Each hieroglyph represented sounds. For example a bee and leaf. They put these sounds together and made the word belief. So they could write everything. + = belief Slide 8 When we compare today s alphabet with hieroglyph writing, we can see that they are completely different. It was more difficult so everybody couldn't read and write hieroglyphs. There were some people and their only job was to read and write. They wrote in three directions but we write from left to write. The Egyptians had about 700 symbols for each object but we have about 29 letters and they didn't have vowels but we do. Slide 9 I think hieroglyphs were very difficult and I have understood that Ancient Egyptians were very clever people. I liked studying this subject. Slide 10 www.childrenuniversity.manchester.co.uk www.wikipedia.com www.ancientegypt.co.uk www.eyelid.co.uk www.eyptologyonline.com Slide 11