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Type
Logophonetic
Genealogy
Egyptian
Location
Africa > Egypt
Time
3100 BCE to 400 CE
Direction
Variable
Meroïtic
Coptic
Map data
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The Scorpion King...and you just thought it's a movie:
 "King Scorpion: A Pretty Bad Dude" at Archaeology Magazine
 "Earliest Egyptian Glyphs" at Archaeology Magazine
 "Were Egyptians the first scribes?" at BBC Online
The Egyptian Hieroglyphs is among the old writing system in the world. Unlike its
contemporary cuneiform Sumerian, Egyptian Hieroglyph's origin is much more obscure. There
is no identifiable precursor It was once thought that the origin of Egyptian Hieroglyphs are
religious and historical, but recent developments could point to an economical impetus for this
script as well as push back the time depth of this writing system.
How It Works
The Egyptian writing system is complex but relatively straightforward. The inventory of signs is
divided into three major categories, namely (1) logograms, signs that write out morphemes; (2)
phonograms, signs that represent one or more sounds); and (3) determinatives, signs that
denote neither morpheme nor sound but help with the meaning of a group of signs that
precede them.
Examples of logograms:
Like Proto-Sinaitic-derived scripts, Egyptians wrote only with consonants. As a result, all
phonograms are uniconsonantal, biconsonantal, and triconsonantal.
The following are the uniconsonantals:
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