The Rosetta Stone [antikvár]

Hieroglyphs before deciphermentOn 24 August ad 394 on the island of Philae at the southern border of Egypt hieroglyphs were used apparently for the last time to inscribe the ancient Egyptian language. The final inscription on stone in demotic, the latest and most cursive of the three scripts employed by the ancient Egyptians, is dated less than sixty years later, to ad 452. Although it is possible that demotic written with ink and brush or pen on papyrus was in use a little longer, for all useful purposes during the next i ,370 years ancient Egypt was silent, for the art of reading her ancient scripts had been lost. There was no one to give voice to the countless hieroglyphic inscriptions which swarmed all over her monuments or to the texts in cursive hieratic and demotic crowded on papyri and flakes of stone and pottery. The language itself, however, survived written in Greek letters supplemented by seven signs borrowed from demotic, in a form called Coptic which is the script and language of the Christian descendants of the ancient Egyptians. Indeed, the word Coptic is merely a form of Aiguptios, that is, Egyptian. Coptic as a spoken language died out in the sixteenth century ad, but it is still read in Coptic churches at the present day. Its vocabulary consists of a mixture of ancient Egyptian and Greek words. Of even greater importance later, early Coptic primers were written in Arabic so anyone who could read Arabic had access to the last form of the ancient Egyptian language.Even while ancient Egyptian was a living language the Greeks and Romans made no real attempt to understand the scripts in which it could be written. Of ancient authorities only Clement of Alexandria writing during the second to third centuries ad made quite clear the distinction between hieroglyphs, the script of official and religious texts, and demotic, the script of everyday communication. In particular, the enigmatic, esoteric and symbolic nature of hieroglyphs was stressed; cursive demotic held no interest to compare with the pictorial script in the eyes of classical writers. As early as the first century bc the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, commenting on hieroglyphs, wrote: 'Now it happens that the forms of their [the Egyptians'] letters take the shape of all kinds of living creatures and of the extremities of the human body and of implements. . . . For their writing does not express the intended idea by a combination of syllables, one with another, but by the outward appearance of what has been copied and by the metaphorical meaning impressed upon the memory by practice. So the hawk symbolises for them everything which happens quickly because this creature is just about the fastest of winged animals. And the idea is transferred, through the appropriate metaphorical transfer, to all swift things and to those things to which speed is appropriate.'During the early centuries ad the adoption of hieroglyphs by the Neo-Platonist philosophers as a divinely inspired script symbolically embodying all human wisdom gave rise to a body of hermetic writings and to such tracts as Horapollo's Hieroglyphica. That these were