Happy Birthday Rosetta Stone!

Do we know when the ancient Egyptians started using their hieroglyphs (Drawings and pictures) as a sign of alphabet for each drawing (snake for s, rod for other letter) ? How many years exactly before 196 BC ? I think this is a very important issue for historians and those who are interested in Ancient History .

 

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There are two scholarly camps. One group dates the first evidence of hieroglyphs to the Narmer pallet, dating to approximately 3150 B.C. Theoretically it is believed that this piece of stonework illustrates King Narmer's unification of Upper and Lower Egypt...



The other scholarly perspective is that hieroglyphs can be dated to approximately the Naqada II period of the Predynastic which dates a bit earlier to 3500 B.C. Here is an example of slipware pottery found at the site by Flinders Petrie. Note the squiggly lines on the upper right hand side of the pot. This may be the hieroglyph for "water."



My own theory is that the origins were probably a bit earlier than this, though there is no evidence in grave goods of earlier cultures yet.

 

@ancient coin hunter. You didn't get the point of my question. The Rosetta stone proved that the Hieroglyphs in 196 BC were used as an alphabet, like the Phoenicians or later the Greeks and then the Romans.
The Egyptians,for their part, did not use their hieroglyphs as an alphabet at the beginning. It must be sometime surely before 196 BC, possibly fifth century BC. Not older then that.

 

There were always alphabetic elements in hieroglyphics as well as ideogrammic elements, so the question can only be answered as to a matter of degree. The ideogrammic elements were present all the way until the end of the system in the 4th century A.D. Coptic however, written in predominantly Greek characters, captures both the consonants and syllables of Late Egyptian. So I would not declare a complete transformation until this time (3rd century A.D.)

 

Historians distinguish "Alphabet" from "Writing". Even Cuneiform was not considered an Alphabet but rather a Writing. The first practical Alphabet is believed to be the Phoenician(Circa 1200 BC) though it did not include vowels. Thanks ACH. Cheers.

 

It took some digging but I finally managed to find them! I apologize for the quality. I wasn't the great photographer then like I am now

 

The Rosetta Stone did no such thing, at least not by design. It introduces error to try to characterize it as you have done here. Hieroglyphic remained logographic, but Greek, after the Phoenician influence, was almost entirely alphabetic, having transformed from Linear B many centuries earlier. The transitional meeting point between these two systems was the New Kingdom development of Demotic which neither of you seems willing to discuss. Here is a note from Wikipedia that speaks to the issue:

"It [Demotic] is generally dated between 650 and 400 BCE, as most texts written in Early Demotic are dated to the Twenty-sixth Dynasty and the subsequent rule as a satrapy of the Achaemenid Empire, which was known as the Twenty-seventh Dynasty. After the reunification of Egypt under Psamtik I, Demotic replaced Abnormal Hieratic in Upper Egypt, particularly during the reign of Amasis II, when it became the official administrative and legal script. During this period, Demotic was used only for administrative, legal, and commercial texts, while hieroglyphs and hieratic were reserved for religious texts and literature."

The note continues into the Ptolemaic period as follows:
"Middle Demotic (c. 400–30 BC) is the stage of writing used during the Ptolemaic Kingdom. From the 4th century BC onwards, Demotic held a higher status, as may be seen from its increasing use for literary and religious texts. By the end of the 3rd century BC, Koine Greek was more important, as it was the administrative language of the country; Demotic contracts lost most of their legal force unless there was a note in Greek of being registered with the authorities."

Coming as it does well into the Ptolemaic period, the Rosetta stone provides a transition from a logographic writing of the decree of Ptolemy V to an alphabetic one which had become more universally accessible to the intended readers. In the custom of ancient Egyptian, the divinity of the Pharaoh and his pronouncements called for hieratic, which was god-speak, but the demotic provided a transition to the mundane. That is what the Rosetta stone facilitated.

At no point in all this did hieroglyphic lose its logographic structure. It was entirely consonantal, but consisted of over 1000 morphemes to convey its lexical content. The efficiency of the alphabetic scripts was that they required a much smaller number of glyphs to express the words. This style took over the writing systems of the entire Ancient Near East. BTW Ugaritic even included three forms of aleph which had vocalic character embedded in the glottal stop.

 

Nice explanation @lrbguy -thanks for providing some clarification.

 

Speaking of aleph (or Ox), try turning the capital 'A' upside down. You get '∀' looks like the head of an ox to me.