What are hieroglyphs?

Hieroglyphics (hieroglyphs), also known as ideograms, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Sumerian, ancient Indian, and Chinese oracle-bone inscriptions,[2] all arose independently from the simplest drawings and patterns of primitive societies. About 5,000 years ago, the ancient Egyptians invented hieroglyphics, which were slow to write and difficult to read. Chinese hieroglyphics are the crystallization of the wisdom of the Chinese people - an inheritance from the primitive way of describing things, and the most graphic and well-preserved form of writing that has evolved to this day.

Hieroglyphic writing refers to the use of purely graphic shapes that resemble the things they represent in shape. Generally speaking, hieroglyphics were the first scripts to be produced. The lines or strokes of the text are used to outline the shape of the object to be represented in a specific way.

Hieroglyphics came from pictographs, the most primitive method of creating words, with a diminished pictorial nature and an increased symbolic nature. Egyptian hieroglyphics, Sumerian, ancient Indian, as well as Chinese oracle bones and stone inscriptions, all independently arose from the simplest drawings and patterns of primitive society.

The Chinese oracle-bone character for "moon" looks like the shape of a moon, the character for "turtle" (especially the traditional [turtle]) looks like the side of a turtle, and the character for "horse" is a horse with a horse's hyena and a horse's head. is a horse with a horse's iguana and four legs, "鱼" is a swimming fish with a fish's head, body and tail, "艹" (the original character for "grass") is two bundles of grass, and the character "门"([men], which is more similar to "门") is the left and right sides of a horse. like) is the shape of two doors on the left and right. The character for "wine" is You (you), which is like a bottle without wine, and the character for "sun" is like a circle with a point in the center, much like the shape one sees when looking directly at the sun.

It is worth mentioning that the first Chinese writing was hieroglyphic, and although Chinese characters still retain the characteristics of hieroglyphic writing, they have evolved over thousands of years and are far from the original image, so they do not belong to hieroglyphic writing, but to the ideographic system of the semantic writing. In addition, the Mayan characters "head script" and "geometric" are also.

Limitations

Because some physical and abstract things cannot be drawn, it is very limited. Therefore, after being based on pictograms, Chinese characters developed into ideograms, and other methods of creating characters were added, such as huiyi (会意), jiqi (指事), xingyin (形声), jiqi (转注), and fugue (假借), in the Six Books. However, these new methods were still based on the original hieroglyphic characters, which were used as the basis for combining, subtracting, adding or deleting symbols.

Regionality

Hieroglyphics in different countries (regions)

Hieroglyphics were developed from primitive drawings. The primitive petroglyphs in Ancient Egypt, though not as old as those in Europe, have been passed down for a longer period of time than the petroglyphs in Oceania, which have lasted more than 10,000 years, making it one of the longest continuation of petroglyphs in the world. According to the differences in style and art, the color of the stone scale, the types of animals shown, costumes and weapons, etc., they can be divided into four periods:

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Hieroglyphic living fossil Dongba Wen

(1) Ancient Buffalo Period (about 9000 BC a 3500 years ago).

(2) The period of bull-herding (about 3500 B.C.E. and 1500 B.C.E.).

(3) Horse period (c. 1500 BC to 2nd century AD).

(4) Camel period (beginning about the 2nd century). The Sahara rock paintings in Africa, located in Algeria and Libya not far from the border of the central Sahara Argel plateau, is recognized by scholars around the world, "the world's largest museum of prehistoric art".

The hieroglyphics of ancient India also originated from the development of drawings, mainly in the hilly areas of the Vindhya mountain range in central India. The oldest petroglyphs date back to the Late Paleolithic period, 20,000 years ago. According to their style, Indian rock paintings are broadly categorized into: naturalistic rock paintings, which mainly depict individual wild animals in a rustic and realistic form. Stylized petroglyphs, which began to distill lines from blocks of color, outlining people and animals in brief, thick lines. Alternatively, silhouetted flat paintings were used in conjunction with shallow strokes of thick lines. The animals are more realistic, while the figures are patterned and geometric. Eclectic petroglyphs, mostly depicting horseback riding, elephant riding or walking and metal use.

The Dawenkou culture is one of the important remains of the late Neolithic period, named because it was first discovered at the site of Dawenkou in Tai'an County, Shandong Province, and its distribution range is bordered by the Bohai Sea in the north, against the Suwannese in the south, and into the Henan Province in the west, starting in 4300 B.C.E., and developing into the Longshan culture of Shandong Province by about 2500 B.C.E. The Dawenkou culture is characterized by its pottery, which has been used for many years. The pottery of the Dawenkou culture has obvious characteristics, and the inhabitants practiced the custom of pulling teeth during puberty, which is the birthplace of the ancient ancestors' tooth-pulling custom along the southeast coast of China. The social economy of the Dawenkou Culture had developed to a high level. Many engraved symbols that have been found are considered to be the predecessors of hieroglyphic writing. From the patterns on animal bones and pottery and stone tools unearthed later, it can be determined that ten thousand years ago, semi-figurative pictorial and floral symbols appeared in China.

Oracle Bone Script

According to linguists' research, a large number of recently unearthed "oracle bone scripts" were widely and maturely used in China during the Shang Dynasty (1,800 to 1,200 B.C.E.). During this period, a variety of advanced cultures were invented and utilized in China, including pottery production, house construction, mural art, and silk weaving production.

The oracle bone script, also known as qiwen, tortoise shell script or tortoise shell and animal bone script, is a very important ancient Chinese character data. In total*** more than 100,000 pieces of inscribed oracle bones contain more than 4,000 different character graphics, of which about 2,500 characters have been recognized.

The oracle bones contain about 27% of the characters in form, which shows that the oracle bones are already a fairly mature writing system. From the oracle bones of the Yin and Shang Dynasties, it seems that the Chinese characters at that time had already developed into a writing system capable of recording the Chinese language in its entirety. In the discovered oracle bones of Yinxu, the number of single characters has reached about 4000. Among them, there are a large number of referential characters, pictograms, ideograms, and also a lot of morpho-sound characters. There is a huge difference in appearance between these characters and those we use today. But in terms of the method of constructing characters, the two are basically the same.

International linguistics recognizes that the language recorded in the Yinshang oracle bones belongs to old Chinese, not to the ancient or primitive languages of other language families. The Swedish sinologist Klas Bernhard Johannes Karlgren, in his book "The Nature and History of the Chinese Language", has studied the Yinshang oracle bones in detail, and has proved that the Yinshang oracle bones are the early forms of the Sino-Tibetan Chinese language family, not the early forms of other languages, based on the fact that the oracle bones were written in the same characters as Mai/Lai, and that they were written in the same characters as the root of the word "ku".

Experts found that 8,000 years ago, Henan Pei Li Gang culture of Jiahu Qi carving and later than it four or five thousand years of the Yinxu Oracle Bone Inscriptions have a striking similarity, one is the same writing tool, all to sharp tools as a tool to symbols engraved on the tortoise shell, bone; two is the same role, the Shang Dynasty Oracle Bone Inscriptions are used to record the content of divination, and Jiahu Qi carving is also related to the divination; three is the same principle of the creation of the same word, the Jiahu The third is the same principle of character creation, Jiahu Qigong is the matter of symbols, while the oracle bone inscription of the matter of many words. Experts believe that "the discovery of the Jahu Qixing has provided reliable evidence for the exploration of the historical origin of Shang Dynasty oracle bones". Jiahu engraving and later oracle bone, Jinwen and modern Chinese characters, from the writing characteristics, there are three structural levels, Jiahu carved with the Shang dynasty oracle bone inscriptions are consistent, because the same carved on the hard oracle bone and other objects, the strokes strong, skimming and folding have moment.

Ancient Egyptian script

Egyptian hieroglyphics

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics after tens of thousands of years ago the development of drawings, patterns, around 4000 BC (6000 years ago) to produce a systematic hieroglyphic writing - the holy book of words. Like Sumerian, ancient Indian, and Chinese oracle-bone inscriptions, it arose independently from the simplest drawings and patterns of primitive societies, but the script was initially only a pictographic script before it developed into a hieroglyphic script - consisting of three types of symbols: ideograms, epigraphs, and radicals. Ideographic symbols are pictures used to represent concepts or definitions of something. But the ideograms could not represent the pronunciation of words, so the ancient Egyptians invented the phonetic symbols. The epigraphic symbols are also some graphics, it **** has 24 sub-sounds, on the basis of which a large number of double sub-sounds and triple sub-sounds are formed. For example, the mouth is a single consonant, the sound of "Y", the swallow is a double consonant, the sound of "Wr", the beetle is a triple consonant, the sound of "hpr", etc., but these pronunciations are expressed in more than one meaning! In order to make a distinction, the ancient Egyptians invented the radical symbol. The role of this radical symbol is mainly to distinguish between different categories of symbols, similar to the Chinese characters in the radicals and radicals. Most of the Egyptian scripts have radical symbols. The script was often inscribed on temple walls, religious monuments, and papyrus, and its main users were monks and scribes. Egyptian hieroglyphics had a major influence on later alphabetic scripts.

At different stages of the history of ancient Egypt, Egyptian hieroglyphs changed many times with the needs of social life. During the Middle Kingdom period, there was a priestly script, and in the late Egyptian period, there was a civil script, and during the Roman rule, there was a Coptic script (an Egyptian script written in modified Hieroglyphics). For various historical reasons, the ancient Egyptian script did not develop into an alphabetic script. However, the ancient Egyptian script had an important influence on the formation of the Phoenician alphabet. Around 1500-1000 B.C., the Phoenicians, who had risen on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, traded with the Egyptians, and it was at this time that the learned Phoenician monks rewrote simple hieroglyphics into an orderly alphabet to aid in their trade and commerce.

Because of the cumbersome nature of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, with the demise of Ancient Egypt, the script gradually became dead and completely forgotten. It is due to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the success of Shang Boliang's interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphics that the entire history of ancient Egypt is revealed to us.

Fonts

There are three fonts in the Sacred Script: Inscription, Monastic and Popular. The inscriptions were at first common to both the common and the common people, and later became the solemn scripts carved on the stone walls of the pyramids and temples, as well as painted on stoneware and pottery, etc.; it is also the general name of the three scripts. Its symbols look like pictures, but in fact most of them have long lost their pictorial function. Monumental script is a decorative orthography, and monastic script is a practical cursive script, mainly used for religious scripture writing. The internal structure of these two scripts is identical. The Mass Style, also known as the Epigraphic Style or the Tufu Style , is a simplified form of the Monastic Style.

Discovery

In 1799, when Napoleon was leading his army on an expedition to Egypt, an officer under him, Bouchard, led his soldiers to discover a broken black basalt stele when they were building fortifications near the city of Rosetta. The same inscription was carved on the tablet in three scripts in two languages. At the top was ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, in the center was ancient Egyptian cursive hieroglyphics (also known as minuscule script), and at the bottom was Greek script. This is the famous stone monument later called "Rosetta Stone" by the world.

Egyptian hieroglyphics (left)

To truly understand the culture and history of ancient Egypt, one must read Egyptian hieroglyphics. Therefore, after the news of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone was published in the Egyptian Newspaper at the time, it immediately attracted the attention of scholars from all over the world. They tried to decipher the writing on the stele. The Greek text on the stele was quickly read. The text in the middle of the stele was also quickly recognized as the ancient Egyptian civil script. However, although scholars can use the Greek text on the stele to understand the meaning of hieroglyphics and civil script, but still did not solve the mystery of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics Surprisingly, at the age of only 11 years old, the French teenager Shang Boryang [3] is determined to unravel the secrets of the ancient Egyptian script on the Rosetta Stone, so that the monument can speak and tell people the secrets of ancient Egypt. The secrets of Ancient Egypt. In order to read Egyptian hieroglyphics, he worked diligently for 21 years. Shang Boliang found that the ancient Egyptians wrote the name of the king with a box or a thick line under the name. On the "Rosetta Stone", there are also lines framing the text, is it the king's name? After continuous exploration, Shang Boliang finally read the two hieroglyphs of Egyptian King Ptolemy and Queen Cleopatra against the Greek text, which could be spelled out from right to left, from left to right, or from top to bottom. Shang Boliang was thus convinced that the graphic symbols in hieroglyphics, in general, represented pronounced consonants. By 1822, the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphics, which had remained baffling for more than 1,000 years, was finally solved by Shang Boliang.

Originally, the inscription on the "Rosetta Stone" was a letter of gratitude to the king of the city of Memphis, Egypt, in 196 BC, from the monks. The king was Ptolemy, the Pharaoh of the Fifteenth Dynasty. Soon after he ascended to the throne of the king, canceled the monks owed taxes, and for the temple to open up a new source of income, the temple took special protective measures, to the monks to bring a series of benefits, so quickly won the admiration of the monks. So the monks wrote this letter of gratitude and inscribed it on this black basalt monument stone in two characters written in three scripts.

The tiny city of Rosetta became world-famous thanks to this monument, which helped solve the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphics. However, the famous tablet is long gone from the city and is now in the British Museum in London.

Because of the laboriousness of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, with the fall of ancient Egypt, the script gradually became dead and completely forgotten. It is due to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the success of Shang Boliang's interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphics that the entire history of ancient Egypt is revealed to us.

Cuneiform writing

Cuneiform writing in the Two Rivers Valley

Was developed by the Sumerians in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys around 3200 BC. During its history of about 3,000 years, cuneiform was gradually simplified and abstracted from the original hieroglyphic writing system, and the number of characters was reduced from about 1,000 in the Early Bronze Age to about 400 in the Late Bronze Age. Most of the discovered cuneiform characters were written on clay tablets, while a few were written on stone, metal or wax tablets. Scribes used sharpened reed sticks or wooden rods to inscribe on the soft clay tablets, which became hard and resistant to deformation after being sunned or baked.

Cuneiform was used by many ancient civilizations to write their languages, but these languages did not necessarily belong to the same related language family, for example, the Hittites and the Persian Empire also used cuneiform, but these two languages were Indo-European languages unrelated to Sumerian. The Akkadians also used cuneiform as a writing tool, but Akkadian and Sumerian languages are quite different. Because most of them were carved on clay tablets, the lines were straight and cuneiform, and they used reed poles or wooden sticks to imprint on the clay tablets to facilitate writing, so most of the strokes of the characters were triangular lines, and the character shapes were also evolving with the evolution of the civilization, and they were gradually fixed to the syllabic symbols by the changing hieroglyphics.

Origin of the Mayan script

The Mayan script first appeared around A.D., but the first stone tablet with a date was unearthed in 292 A.D. and found in Tikal. Since then, Mayan writing has circulated only in a small area centered on Belden and Tikal. It was only in the middle of the fifth century that Mayan writing spread throughout the Maya region, when commercial trading routes were established, and it was along these routes that the Mayan writing spread throughout the region. It was the only people in the Americas to leave written records. In early A.D., they created hieroglyphics, one of the five earliest scripts in the world.

The Mayan script is very marvelous, it has both hieroglyphics, ideograms, and morpho-sounds, it is a kind of script with both ideograms and phonograms functions. It is a union of hieroglyphics and sounds, and the Mayan carved script represents both an overall concept and its own unique pronunciation.

The Mayan script has a large part of a character called the main character and a small part called the connecting character, and there are two kinds of fonts: "geometric" and "head font", and there is also a combination of human, animal, and god patterns composed of "whole body". There are two types of scripts, "geometric" and "head script", as well as "full body", which combines human, animal and god designs, and is mainly used for calendars. Mayan script reading method, from top to bottom, two lines of a group, "left → right → (the next paragraph) left → right" order of reading. The Mayan script is difficult and obscure, and less than one-third of it can be interpreted to date. Processed and analyzed statistically, each word of the script has four syllables. The writing is in the shape of a square, similar to a Chinese seal. Part of the graphic is an ideogram and part is a phonetic symbol, making it an "ideographic script".

Dongba Won

Dongba Hieroglyphic Script is the script of the Naxi people in Lijiang area, which belongs to the type of hieroglyphic ideographs, including hieroglyphic, huiyi, refers to things, and form and sound fonts. The total number of scripts is about 1600 or so.

The ideographic method of Dongba script is mainly to use one character or several characters to represent a sentence, with the characters running from left to right and from top to bottom. This kind of writing was produced before about 11th century A.D., is a very primitive picture hieroglyphics, from the point of view of the development of writing form, it is even more primitive than the oracle bone writing, belongs to the early form of the origin of the writing, the earliest is to write and draw the symbols and images on the wood and stone, and then invented the paper, only then these symbols and images are written on the paper, which became the classic Dongba script. Because Dongba mastered this script, it is called Dongba Wen.

Lijiang Dongba hieroglyphic "love"

With the development of the Naxi society and the interaction of national cultures, at the end of the Ming and early Qing dynasties, some of the Dongba in Lijiang, created the Geba text. Geba means disciple, and Geba Wen means the script created by the disciples of the descendants of Dongba Shilo, and Geba Wen is the transformation and development of Dongba Wen. The Naxi people created two ancient scripts and still use them today, which is not only a valuable historical material for solving the mystery of the creation of human writing, but also one of the ideal scripts for enriching and developing the art of traditional Chinese calligraphy and seal cutting. The Dongba script is regarded as the only "living hieroglyphic script" in the world, which is one of the oldest hieroglyphic scripts in the world, and a "living fossil" of the origin and development of human writing.

Shuishu

Shuishu is a kind of symbol system similar to oracle bone script and jinwen script, which is a record of ancient astronomy, geography, religion, jurisprudence and other ancient culture of the Water Tribe, and it can be called the "encyclopedia" of the Water Tribe. It has been handed down mainly by handwriting and oral tradition. According to expert research and verification, the different characters, the water tribe ancient writing currently has 2500.

The structure of the ancient writing of the water tribe has the following three types: one is hieroglyphic characters, and some characters are similar to the oracle bone and gold; the second is imitation of Chinese characters, that is, the reverse of Chinese characters, inverted Chinese characters, or change the Chinese characters form of writing, and the third is the religious text, which represents the primitive religion of the water tribe of the cryptic symbols. The writing form is from right to left in straight vertical lines, without punctuation marks. The main carriers of the ancient scripts of the Water Tribe are: oral tradition, hand-copying on paper, embroidery, monumental carving, woodcutting, ceramic forging and so on. Because of its hieroglyphic structure, mainly written and depicting things in nature such as flowers, birds, insects and fish, as well as some totem objects such as dragons, the Water Script still retains the information of the ancient civilization, and is still widely used in the Water Tribe area.

The discovery of water books

On June 20, 2012, Chen Lin, director of the Guizhou Provincial Ancient Book Protection Center, sent pictures of unknown texts in ancient stone carvings unearthed in Pingguo County, Guangxi (see attached picture), and asked the museum to identify and interpret them on behalf of the museum. I immediately convened the relevant water book experts on the provision of the 3 blocks of about 300 ancient text carvings for research, identification, interpretation. After the expert group read, agreed that the stone carving of the unknown text for the water tribe text - water book! This text may be the earliest surviving carrier of the water book script, one of the early Chinese hieroglyphics originator. Its archaeological value and historical value to be further excavation and verification! [4]

Naxi

Naxi hieroglyphics for a picture hieroglyphics, *** more than 1,300 words, more than 1,000 years of history.

Correction of Errors

References

[1] People's Education Publishing House, Institute of Curriculum and Textbook. Compulsory Education Textbook History and Society 8th Grade 上.... People's Education Press. 2018.06: p. 125

[2] Shao Jingmin. General Theory of Modern Chinese. Shanghai Education Press. 2001

[3] i.e. Gene Paul Shang Boliang.

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In our daily lives, all of us come into contact with Chinese characters, and all of us can write, but not all the characters that we write can be called Calligraphy, or not all the acts of writing can be categorized into the art of Calligraphy. or not all acts of writing can be categorized as the art of calligraphy. I believe that what can be called calligraphy must be written in a legal manner, with a certain sense of beauty and artistry.