Written by perhaps the most prolific, erudite Egyptologist of the 20th century, this solid guide to hieroglyphics remains the standard introduction. Budge gives the history of hieroglyphic writing, its evolution into hieratic and demotic scripts, and the fascinating tale of its decipherment by Young, Champollion, Åkerblad, and others.
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Yes, you can access Easy Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphics by E. A. Wallis Budge in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Egyptian Ancient History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
HIEROGLYPHICS AS IDEOGRAPHS, PHONETICS, AND DETERMINATIVES.
Every hieroglyphic character is a picture of some object in nature, animate or inanimate, and in texts many of them are used in more than one way. The simplest use of hieroglyphics is, of course, as pictures, which we may see from the following :—
a hare ;
an eagle ;
a duck ;
a beetle ;
a field with plants growing in it ; * a star ;
a twisted rope ;
a comb ;
a pyramid, and so on. But hieroglyphics may also represent ideas, e. g.,
a wall falling down sideways represents the idea of “falling” ;
a hall in which deliberations by wise men were made represents the idea of “counsel” ;
an axe represents the idea of a divine person or a god ;
a musical instrument represents the idea of pleasure, happiness, joy, goodness, and the like. Such are called ideographs. Now every picture of every object must have had a name, or we may say that each picture was a word-sign ; a list of all these arranged in proper order would have made a dictionary in the earliest times. But let us suppose that at the period when these pictures were used as pictures only in Egypt, or wherever they first appeared, the king wished to put on record that an embassy from some such and such a neighbouring potentate had visited him with such and such an object, and that the chief of the embassy, who was called by such and such a name, had brought him rich presents from his master. Now the scribes of the period could, no doubt, have reduced to writing an account of the visit, without any very great difficulty, but when they came to recording the name of the distinguished visitor, or that of his master, they would not find this to be an easy matter. To have written down the name they would be obliged to make use of a number of hieroglyphics or pi...
Table of contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Preface
Contents
I. Hieroglyphic Writing
II. The Rosetta Stone and the Decipherment of Hieroglyphics
III. Hieroglyphics as Ideographs, Phonetics and Determinatives
IV. A Selection of Hieroglyphic Characters with their Phonetic Values, etc.
V. Pronouns and Pronominal Suffixes
VI. Nouns
VII. The Article
VIII. Adjectives, Numerals, Time, the Year, etc.
IX. The Verb
X. Adverbs, Prepositions (Simple and Compound), etc.
