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The first full sentence written in mature hieroglyphs so far discovered was found on a seal impression in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen at Umm el-Qa'ab, which dates from the Second Dynasty (28th or 27th century BC). Around 800 hieroglyphs are known to date back to the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom Eras.
The first abjad to gain widespread usage was the Phoenician abjad. Unlike other contemporary scripts, such as cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Phoenician script consisted of only a few dozen symbols. This made the script easy to learn, and seafaring Phoenician merchants took the script throughout the then-known world.
Some modern authors distinguish between consonantal alphabets, with the term abjad coined for them in 1996, and true alphabets with letters for both consonants and vowels. In this narrower sense, the first true alphabet would be the Greek alphabet, which was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet. Many linguists are skeptical of the value of ...
The temple-based priesthoods died out and Egypt was gradually converted to Christianity, and because Egyptian Christians wrote in the Greek-derived Coptic alphabet, it came to supplant demotic. The last hieroglyphic text was written by priests at the Temple of Isis at Philae in AD 394, and the last known demotic text was inscribed there in AD 452.
The Phoenician alphabet [b] is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) [2] used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BC. It was one of the first alphabets, attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region.
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.
Writing in ancient Egypt—both hieroglyphic and hieratic—first appeared in the late 4th millennium BC during the late phase of predynastic Egypt. By the Old Kingdom (26th century BC to 22nd century BC), literary works included funerary texts , epistles and letters, hymns and poems, and commemorative autobiographical texts recounting the ...
(The original block statue started with the Tomb of Hetep, Saqqara, 12th Dynasty as two cuboid statues, one each of granite and limestone, and inscriptions explaining the block form, and exposed limbs receiving the first rays of the morning sun-(to arise out of primordial earth). The granite statue represents the daytime sunlit journey, the ...