Writing Flashcards
Main Languages by 500 BC
- New Assyrian (Cuneiform)
- Egyptian (Hieroglyphic, Demotic)
- Old Persian (Cuneiform)
- New Babylonian (Cuneiform)
- Greek
- Aramaic
Start of Egyptian Hieroglyphs
-Set of Ivory tags with pictograms found in Abydos Tomb U-j from 3100 BC, denoting names of tomb owners
End of Egyptian Hieroglyphs
-Last inscription at Philae
Linear A
- LMIA-B c.1700-1500 BC
- First proper Greek writing
- Some signs have been identified but it remains undecipherable - characters can be classified but we don’t know what the language is
Linear B
- LMII-LMIIIB, 1450-1190
- Language is Greek, so can be deciphered
- Found both on Crete and on the mainland but likely originated in Crete
- Written on unbaked clay which turns back into mud so does not survive - only baked/surviving examples are from fires/destruction
- Used for administrative purposes
Phaistos Disk
- Fired clay disk from Minoan palace of Phaistos on the island of Crete around the Middle/Late Minoan Bronze Age, early 2nd millennium
- Still unsure if it’s genuine
- Still untranslated as corpus too small
- Cretan hieroglyphs
Hieroglyphs
- Alphabetic signs
- Egyptian writing only one in the near east which is on Papyrus (from 25th c BC), although started on stone, rather than clay
- Bilateral and trilateral signs - multiple letters such as nfr or pr or nb
- Symbols include water, twisted flacks, two reeds, owl, horned viper, ankh/sandal strap, hare, crane, eye, axe, owl
- Can be written left to right or right to left so can be symmetrical with a central character in the middle - know what way to read it by looking at which way the living creatures are facing - you read into the beaks/muzzles etc
Demotic Egyptian
- 5th c BC
- Developed after hieratic, after hieroglyphic
- Essentially replaces hieratic
- ’ a bunch of agitated commas’
- No longer as recognizable as the pictures they originally were, much more simplied
Cuneiform
- Means ‘wedge shaped writing’ - effectively pictograms at first but develops in characters
- Written on unbaked clay tablets with a stylus
- Diplomatic language of the whole near east by late 14th c BC
Materials
- Division of the Ancient world is papyrus vs clay tablets
- Papyrus and ink in Egypt
- Clay tablets and stylus - typically unbaked. If they are found baked this may indicate a fire or sacking of a city in Mesopotamia
- Baked clay tablets sent in unbaked clay envelopes
Protocuneiform to Cuneiform
- Recognisable pictures of things drawn upright
- Began being drawn on their side around 3000BC for no apparent reason
- Become more and more abstract from the 3rd millennium
Royal Five-Fold Titulary
- Way in which Kings full names are written - in ovals known as cartouches.
- Horus, Nebti, Golden Falcon, Prenomen, Nomen (latter is name given at birth)
- Falcon, Vulture and Cobra, Falcon, Ant and something above Stela, Duck and Aten above Stela
htp-di-nsw
- Offering formulae found in tombs and temples - funerary contexts
- Includes names and epithets of god, Prayer, and titles and name of worshipper e.g. Anubis being worshipped by Amenhotep
- Sort of a magical spell for obtaining food in the afterlife
Hieratic Script
- 20th c BC, mid way between hieroglyphic and demotic
- Vaguely recognizable as the symbols they were originally - still a little pictographic, but simplified - moves further away as time passes
- Originally written in columns, but later written right to left, without the symmetry of hieroglyphs
- Now written on papyrus and ostraka (a flake of limestone or rarely pot sherds) - also used by artists
- Vowels are not writtend
Coptic Script
- Beyond our period
- Once Christianity comes in, hieratic, demotic and hieroglyphic scripts all disappear due to link between these scripts and paganism
- Replaced by coptic - essentially the greek alphabet with a few demotic characters added in for sounds which you don’t find in greek script
- Greek has vowels, so now Egyptians use vowels- previously these were not written
Literary Genres
- Inscriptions for the Gods
- Texts of Burial
- Biographies
- Historical Inscriptions
- Chronicles
- Administrative Documents
- Expedition Records
- Philosophy
- Human Relationships
- Stories
- Magical-Medical texts
- Law Codes (but none from Egypt exist)
- Diplomatic Correspondence
Types of cuneiform sign
• logograms/ideograms (signs denoting whole word: same sign can mean something different in Sumerian and Akkadian)
• syllograms (signs denoting a syllable: may vary in reading depending on context; may be several signs
for the same syllable, with use dependent on context)
• phonetic complements (syllogram used to remove ambiguity in reading of a logogram)
• determinatives (signs placed before or after logograms to show the class of thing referred to)
Descent of the Cunieform Script
Sumerian Cuneiform»_space; Old Akkadian
- SC split into 4 branches
- Elamite, Babylonian, Assyrian and Hittite
- Used in all of the med except the Aegean and Egypt
Amarna Letters
- Diplomatic correspondence form most of the East Med world
- Some incoming texts are baked clay encased in an envelope of unbaked clay, sometimes with the same text on the outside so you can tell they haven’t been tampered with
- Written in Akkadian cuneiform, the diplomatic language
- Typically asking for/giving daughters and gold - but Egyptians typically don’t give their daughters, but they do have gold, so get Babylonian daughters
- 382 total tablets over 30 years, from around 1388-1332 BC, in the reigns of Amenhotep III Akenhaten and Tutankhamun in the 18th dynasty
Egypto-Hittite Treaty
- 1250 BC
- Exists on a wall in the temple of Karnak, and on clay tablets in Hati - both sides copies survive
- Had been at war for the best part of a century but signed a treaty as it seemed neither side was going to win, but other power centers e.g. Mesopotamia were growing, so they should collaborate
Cretan hieroglyphs
- No trace of any kind of literacy until the 15th c BC
- MMI-III, early 2nd Millennium
e. g. Phaistos Disk - Most simply seal impressions that are pictographic - some significance, maybe to do with ownership?
Proto-Sinaitic script
- 1800 BC
- Small carvings which are basically Egyptian with hieroglyphs, but also this proto-sinaitic script
- Adapting hieroglyphs into an alphabetic script
- Attempts by semetic speaking populations inspired to try and create a language
Ugaritic alphabetic cuneiform
- 1200 BC
- Attempts to create a purely alphabetic version of cuneiform
Proto-Semitic
- Descended into Canaanite, Phoenician and Early Hebrew
- These Descented into Greek and Aramaic
- Greek descends into Latin, Irish, German, Runic, Roman, Cyrillic, Modern Greek, Armenian and Georgian
- Aramaic descends into Hebrew, Syrian, Mongolian, Arabic