Dictionary Translates Ancient Egypt Life

[questionmark]

Ancient Egyptians did not speak to posterity only through hieroglyphs. Those elaborate pictographs were the elite script for recording the lives and triumphs of pharaohs in their tombs and on the monumental stones along the Nile. But almost from the beginning, people in everyday life spoke a different language and wrote a different script, a simpler one that evolved from the earliest hieroglyphs.

These were the words of love and family, the law and commerce, private letters and texts on science, religion and literature. For at least 1,000 years, roughly from 500 B.C. to A.D. 500, both the language and the distinctive cursive script were known as Demotic Egyptian, a name given it by the Greeks to mean the tongue of the demos, or the common people.

Demotic was one of the three scripts inscribed on the Rosetta stone, along with Greek and hieroglyphs, enabling European scholars to decipher the royal language in the early 19th century and thus read the top-down version of a great civilization’s long history.

http://www.nytimes.c...?pagewanted=all

Edited September 18, 2012 by Still Waters
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[Idano]

Chicago researchers can now say "Cutler threw a brick" in Demotic now....what fun!

[Hippycrite]

Comicon? Nah, I'm headed to the Demotic Research Workshop!

[Melo -]

cultural diversity via past obscurity lol and what great culture

[Sundog]

The Demotic Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago

interesting.

thanks, questionmark