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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.
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.
Emmanuel de Rougé, who began studying Egyptian in 1839, was the first person to translate a full-length ancient Egyptian text; he published the first translations of Egyptian literary texts in 1856. In the words of one of de Rougé's students, Gaston Maspero , "de Rougé gave us the method which allowed us to utilise and bring to perfection ...
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.
Hieratic (/ h aɪ ə ˈ r æ t ɪ k /; Ancient Greek: ἱερατικά, romanized: hieratiká, lit. 'priestly') is the name given to a cursive writing system used for Ancient Egyptian and the principal script used to write that language from its development in the third millennium BCE until the rise of Demotic in the mid-first millennium BCE.
The letters of the earliest script used for Semitic languages were derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. In the 19th century, the theory of Egyptian origin competed alongside other theories that the Phoenician script developed from Akkadian cuneiform , Cretan hieroglyphs , the Cypriot syllabary , and Anatolian hieroglyphs . [ 24 ]
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.
Each letter of Phoenician gave way to a new form in its daughter scripts. Left to right: Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic. Phoenician was prolific. Many of the writing systems in use today can ultimately trace their descent to it, so ultimately to Egyptian hieroglyphs.