Written Language

Thousands of years after prehistoric men painted the walls of their caves, a clever race of people in another part of the world invented a way to write their language. They lived in Egypt, an ancient land on the River Nile in Africa. The Egyptians were small dark people, and everything about them was elegant. They built palaces and temples and decorated them beautifully. They made fine cloth, delicate jewelry, and graceful furniture. For their dead kings they built vast pyramids which they filled with everything needed for life in the afterworld. On the walls of the tombs they wrote about the lives of the kings, the history of their reigns, and prayed for their souls. The writing of the Egyptians began with pictures. At first the pictures meant just the objects that were pictured—a house, an arrow, a serpent, a dish, a duck, a man, and so on. Then gradually pictures were designed to express ideas and action. The picture of an eagle meant eagle. If the eagle had a man's head, the picture meant spirit or soul. The picture of an eye meant eye, but the picture of two eyes meant see, and if tears fell from the eyes the picture meant weep or cry. The Egyptians did something else with the pictures of their written language. They used some of the pictures or hieroglyphics, as they were called, to stand for sounds in their language. Although the picture of an eagle meant the bird, it could also stand for vowel sound /a:/ as in our word car. Egyptian writing was complicated.