Cracking hieroglyphs

and word classes

Description

In this activity children become Egyptologists to learn about or revise nouns, verbs and pronouns. The resource contains a problem set, a brief description and history of the hieroglyphic script, some information about Ancient Egyptian and definitions of relevant grammatical terminology.

The Ancient Egyptian data is based on Robert Cowen Jr’s Egyptian Primer and has been simplified for the purpose of this exercise.

Hieroglyphs were symbols used to write Ancient Egyptian, one of the languages spoken in Egypt at the time of the pharaohs.

Cleopatra by René Gosciny in Asterix and Cleopatra (Albert Uderzo & René Gosciny 1965)

people, animals or objects ...

= m

= pr

or sounds and syllables.

☞

☞

= Man

= Owl

Symbols used to represent things in the world were also often used to represent particular sounds.

Hieroglyphic symbols could represent⬇

⬇

At the height of their glory, hieroglyphs decorated every building of Ancient Egypt.

But with time, the script was abandoned in favour of a more practical alphabet.

For centuries after this, Greek, Arab and Western European scholars tried in vain to decipher hieroglyphs.

Ibn Wahshiyya, a 10th century muslim scholar from Iraq, came very close. He managed to correctly decipher a high number of characters. But he didn’t crack the code. Ibn Wahshiyya

Photo credit: Alchetron

At the end of the 18th century, a group of French soldiers found the Rosetta Stone, an inscription in hieroglyphs and its translation in two other languages, including Greek.

With these translations, French linguist Jean-François Champollion, aided by the work of his British rival, Thomas Young, managed to decipher the lost hieroglyphic code.

Right:T. YoungBottom: J.F. Champollion by Léon Cogniet.

How did Champollion crack the code?Well, it’s not as difficult as it sounds.

And you can do it too. All you need are some analytical skills and plenty of imagination.

If you want to try it, close your eyes for 2

seconds and then click on the magic link

Congratulations! You have been transported to Dahshūr, near Cairo in Egypt. It’s the year

1789 and you are a famous Egyptologist.

Inside a pyramid, you have found several stones with fragments of an Ancient Egyptian text and some of their translations in Greek.

Your companion, who speaks

Greek, has translated these parts into English for you.

Champollion par Mazan ©DR

On the next few slides are the sentences and fragments of sentences that have been translated into English by your friend.

Look at them very carefully and answer the following questions (you may want to copy the questions on a piece of paper).

1. What are the signs for the words see, take, scribe, king, son, built, house, go, boats, servant, father, fire, papyrus book, write? Put the signs into a different column depending whether they represent verbs or nouns (click here

for definitions of verbs and nouns).

2. What are the signs for personal pronouns? (Click here to read what a pronoun is).

3. Where do verbs go in an Ancient Egyptian sentence? When a noun, pronoun or noun phrase describes the person doing the action of the verb, where does it go?

The boats of the King

The scribe of the King

The house of the scribe

The son of the King

Ramses IIPhoto source: Wikipedia

The father of the King

The servant of the King

DO YOU WANT A BIT OF HELP? Click HERE for tips on where to start.

She sees

You (many people) take

They write

I write the papyrus book

I go

They take the boats

She sees fire

We write

You (boy) see

You (girl) see

He goesFather built the house

Now that you have deciphered the meaning of several signs, you can start working on fragments that have no translation. For example, how would you translate the two sentences below.

Tip: Egyptians wrote the names of Kings and Queens inside cartouches, like the one containing the (coloured) signs. This cartouche refers to a very famous Egyptian Queen. She married two Roman emperors and her name contains the same sound twice!

King

Boats

Scribe

House

Papyrus book

Servant

Fire

Son

Father

Answers: Nouns

See

Take

Write

Built

Go

Answers: Verbs

I

You (boy)

You (girl)

He

She

We

You

They

Answers Pronouns

Word order

The verb comes first in the sentence (when reading left to right).

It is followed by the noun, pronoun or noun phrase describing the entity performing the action of the verb (known as the subject).

take Cleopatra of servant boats‘The servant of Cleopatra takes the boats.’

see King Cleopatra of son‘The King sees the son of Cleopatra.’

You were a brilliant Egyptologist.

The activity is now over but continue to read to learn more cool stuff about the Ancient Egyptian language.

APPENDIX

Ancient Egyptian developed from a very old language called proto Afro-Asiatic, spoken thousands of years before the pharaohs, probably in the Horn of Africa (the region where today’s Erithrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Somalia are).

Ancient Egyptian is a dead language …

… but its descendant, Coptic, is still spoken by a tiny minority of people living in Egypt.

Ancient Egyptian shares many similarities with Amharic, Arabic, Hebrew and Somali. That is because they all developed out of the same very old language, Proto Afro-Asiatic.

Scientists have been able to reconstruct what Ancient Egyptian might have sounded partly based on the sounds and words of these modern languages..

Want to hear some Ancient Egyptian and the sounds hieroglyphs symbolised?

GLOSSARY

Verbs and Nouns

To study things, scientists like to sort them into categories. To study animals, for example, biologists classify them as mammals, birds, reptiles or insects based on their special properties.

Language scientists do exactly the same with words.

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Birds, for instance, have properties in common that other categories do not have: they have a beak and feathers.

Verbs share some common properties and a good way to identify verbs is to look for these properties. In English, for example, verbs change form in the past tense. Thus, ‘go’ changes to ‘went’ (I go to school every day. → Yesterday, I went to school); ‘decide’ changes to ‘decided’ (I always decide what to watch on TV → Last night, I decided to watch TV). Verbs can also be modified by words ending with -ly. For instance, Valeria quickly ran to the store, I am lazily sitting in my garden, I really fear ghosts!.

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Verbs are words that belong to a category called the verb category or class. Verbs prototypically describe actions. The verb run in Valeria ran to the store, for instance, describes an action. Verbs can also describe states, as in I am sitting in my garden, or feelings ‘I fear ghosts!’.

Words that can be categorised as nouns share common properties. You can identify which words are nouns by looking out for these properties. In English, for example, nouns can be in the plural. Thus, ‘dog’ can be pluralised to ‘dogs’ (one dog → two dogs). Nouns can be preceded by determiners like ‘the’ or ‘this’ (the dog, this dog). They can also be modified by an adjective (the cute dog, the scary dog) or be possessed (my dog, your dog, Aneta’s dog…).

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Nouns are words that belong to a category called the noun category or class. Nouns prototypically refer to people, animals, objects and other things.

Pronouns Pronouns are small words used to replace nouns. A pronoun has little meaning on its own.

To really know what a pronoun means, we need to know what or who it describes. For example, in the sentence “He is mean!”, it is hard to know who he is. However, in the sentence ‘My brother stole my cupcake. He is mean!’, you understand who he is: he is my brother.

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What or who a pronoun describes is usually a noun that has been said before, often in a previous sentence.

It can also be the person speaking, like with I and we or someone spoken to, like you. I, he, you, we but also she, it and they are personal pronouns.

There are other types of pronouns. Pronouns that replace possessors are called possessive pronouns. The pronoun his, for instance, could be used instead of Musa’s in the sentence ‘Musa’s bike’, so it is a possessive pronoun. My, your, his, her, its, our and their are possessive pronouns.

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Tip: How to do your analysis

All the translations on the slide contain the English preposition of. So you should start by identifying what the sign for of is. The sign which is found in all the Ancient Egyptian sentences on this slide will be the sign for of.

Then, identify which other word is the most frequently used. It looks like it is the noun King. The sign that is in all the Ancient Egyptian sentences whose translations include the word King will be the sign for King. Once you have identified these two signs, it will be easy to find out what the other words mean!

Just do the same for the next slide! 👻

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