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The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. [5] Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system.
Jean-Joseph Marcel said the middle script was "cursive characters of the ancient Egyptian language", identical to others he had seen on papyrus scrolls. He and Louis Rémi Raige began comparing the text of this register with the Greek one, reasoning that the middle register would be more fruitful than the hieroglyphic text, most of which was ...
Demotic (from Ancient Greek: δημοτικός dēmotikós, 'popular') is the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Nile Delta.The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts.
It was the first Ancient Egyptian bilingual text recovered in modern times, and it aroused widespread public interest with its potential to decipher this previously untranslated hieroglyphic script. Lithographic copies and plaster casts soon began circulating among European museums and scholars.
The total number of distinct Egyptian hieroglyphs increased over time from several hundred in the Middle Kingdom to several thousand during the Ptolemaic Kingdom.. In 1928/1929 Alan Gardiner published an overview of hieroglyphs, Gardiner's sign list, the basic modern standard.
The final script adopted by the ancient Egyptians was the Coptic alphabet, a revised version of the Greek alphabet. [18] Coptic became the standard in the 4th century AD when Christianity became the state religion throughout the Roman Empire; hieroglyphs were discarded as idolatrous images of a pagan tradition, unfit for writing the Biblical ...
The Egyptian language, or Ancient Egyptian (r n kmt; [1] [note 3] ' speech of Egypt '), is an extinct branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages that was spoken in ancient Egypt.It is known today from a large corpus of surviving texts, which were made accessible to the modern world following the decipherment of the ancient Egyptian scripts in the early 19th century.
The Phoenician alphabet was deciphered in 1758 by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, but its relation to the Phoenicians remained unknown until the 19th century. It was at first believed that the script was a direct variation of Egyptian hieroglyphs, [18] which were deciphered by Champollion in the early 19th century.