How to Read Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs | SideQuest Animated History
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Join us as we delve into the captivating journey of the Ancient Egyptian language, including its evolution from mesmerizing hieroglyphs to the practical Demotic and the eventual transition to Coptic using the Greek alphabet. We'll explore pivotal historical moments like the Roman Empire's influence, the ascent of Christianity, and the vital role of the Rosetta Stone in deciphering hieroglyphs. We'll also learn about the complexities of Ancient Egyptian writing, the dual nature of hieroglyphs as logograms and phonograms, and the challenges of decipherment.
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0:00 - The History of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs
4:05 - Speakly
5:03 - The Rosetta Stone & Decipherment
7:13 - How to Actually Read Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs
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Further Reading:
“The Hieroglyphs of Ancient Egypt” by Aidan Dodson - www.google.com/books/edition/...
A big thank you to Speakly for supporting our adventures across history! Try Speakly for free for 7 days, and get a 60% discount if you join the annual subscription: speakly.app.link/sidequest
But I am Stalin And You are Sauce
Just started watching, I hope mjw is in it 😍
Thank you for keeping with B.C. & A.D. btw keep up the good work.
@@SirWhiskersThe3rd BCE and CE.
I love the idea of a once enthusiastic and sophisticated scribe being relegated to inscribing redundant hieroglyphics thinking "I'm a poet surrounded by idiots..."
in british english sounds better
As someone who actually learned to decipher those as part of training in Egyptology and Assyriology, this is fairly accurate, although I would add the following important information to what was said. As stated, the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were in use for three millennia. Naturally, like every language, it was subjected to language drift. The way they were written, the rules of language, and even the vocabulary shifted in that time. So when translating hieroglyphics, you have to understand that scholars typically don't treat them as a single language, for it would be as nonsensical as trying to match say French with Latin. Similar but different enough to cause problems. So you separate these in Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian. Roughly, Old Egyptian is the pyramid texts (Old Kingdom). Middle Egyptian matches the apex of Egyptian culture (Middle Kingdom) coinciding with the Ramesside epoch which saw an incredibly large production of written material in hieroglyphics, and Late Egyptian pretty much what was found on the Rosetta stone and things of that era. That still covers centuries each time. But it is already more reliable and accurate than just treating the language as singular. It evolved a lot naturally, especially with external influences.
Does this explain the inconsistencies with reading direction, or is that not an aspect language drift would change? (I guess Latin did stay in their lane for the past 2000 or so years)
@@vale.antoni Actually it does not. The reading direction is as far as I am aware, still a mystery. It seems relatively safe to assume that "searching for the direction the figure is looking" is not the way the people of that era figured it out. So there is most likely a contextual elemental that has been overlooked, but so far that's the best we have.
Wow, it's pretty awesome to have insight from someone who actually studied the Egyptian language. Thanks for providing the additional info and context!
Yeah, thanks for explaining it to us.
ive never seen someone so wrong before
As an Egyptian Pharaoh who ruled 2 slaves and 1 palm tree at my heyday during 420 BC (and proud landowner of a 2 meter tall pyramid for 7 minutes until it was used as a nuclear testing site for the USSR), I can confirm that your video is accurate.
420 every year!!
Interesting username you got there
Agreed
@@malegria9641 Yup, want one? I can give you 20% off if you buy 2 packets lol
@@malegria9641 Buy 3 get 1 for free :D
The progression of language is always an interesting matter to consider. We often take speech and a written language for granted, but it has been key to the development of civilization and more.
I'm Egyptian, we still use words from the ancient Egyptian language in our dialect of Arabic, the most common example is the word for woman, in Arabic its "imra'ah" but in our dialect we say "set" which means woman but in the ancient Egyptian language
Better write those down for science lol
Honestly, every so often I just so happen on a link between a Coptic word and an Egyptian Arabic one, and my mind gets blown. It helps that I am an Egyptian with Coptic proficiency, of course. That said, many of these are possibly coincidental, but if the meanings line up, and I can't see how the Arabic word is actually formal Arabic, then it's not unlikely that the Arabic word originates in the Coptic one. For example, I just so happened on the word "forg" (ϥⲱⲣϫ, I believe) that is very similar to Egyptian vernacular, both having some sense of "view" or "watchable" (I'm being very rough in translation).
Arabic I believe comes from the demotic script, I dont think muslims had a script until they reached Egypt and they used the demotic form to create their own. Shoot I just found out there's a ton of different types of Arabic
@@danielbarry5547 this is easy to refute if you've ever heard of the Nabatean script, a natively arabian script from around modern Jordan that predates Islam by at least a century. It's far from the only one, too, it just so happens to be eerily similar to modern Arabic script.
@@minamagdy4126 I see what you mean, all three looked alike!
This reminds me of a history class project we did at school back in the 1980's. We were all tasked with creating a mini newspaper from the perspective of Egyptions long ago. Everyone wrote articles in different scripts. It was a lot of fun creating our own hieroglyphics.
wait, so you didn't use the actual hieroglyphs, just made up your own? boy that doesn't sound frustrating to read at all 🙂
I’ve been learning this for two years, so proud to be able to read this. Now i can finally understand the emojis my egyptian friend sends me
I heard somewhere that the modern study of emojis is being taken seriously because of its potential translation problems within disputes in court cases. I thought it was a BS story, but apparently people are using emojis instead of words in situations that are beyond just sending funny texts. The world is a crazy place sometimes. 😅 p.s. adding a joke... Some people actually just like eggplant. Real eggplant. Like for food. 😂
I remember at school we were assigned to read "The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien (which I thought was pronounced "Irr" Tolkien because of the font used to print his name!) Anyway I was intrigued by the language printed around the end sheet papers of the book, and set out to translate them. I was delighted to find that they made sense in English! I don't think I could do it today (it's been about 60 years!) but of course now I know that Professor Tolkien's mastery was not just literature but language as well. In fact I understand that he and his brother had invented worlds and languages to play with as children!
I can finally become an archeologist without college debt
Better off an Egyptologist. Archaeology is a tad too broad.
@@RipRLeeErmey Egyptology is a pyramid scheme. You learn it, realize its useless, study for PhD, teach others.
As a real archeologist working for an environmental solutions firm, I recommend looking into getting the credentials anyway. That's what anyone cares about, sadly.
Still, I feel for you for not accumulating the college debt. 😅
hahahahahaha, funny, debt, student, american, funny american kid with college debt, funny, upvote for you funny american kid, you are funny
It's also important to note that not havings simbols for vowels was quite common in tge middle east. You can see it also in hebrew and arabic for example
Why is that?
@@williamvunga7397i think it has to do with the idea that "Consonants" at the time were viewed as whole "Syllables". Like in Spanish: B(be) C(se) F(efe) S(ese) M(em) L(el) etc.
@@MalekitGJ but the spanish letters don't represent syllables, only single phonemes... Many languages use several phonemes to spell a specific letter, that doesn't mean that they represent whole syllables
@@el_ias2094 i know rational thinking is becoming a scarce resource but: Really? Think about what i wrote and how the Spanish alphabet "pronounce" those consonants, now extrapolate to how this would be similar to how ancient people through about their own written language.
@@williamvunga7397The Afroasiatic languages all share a unique feature of consonant "stems" in words, where you use the same set of consonants for an idea and then swap out the vowels for the different words or conjugations and what have you. So "ktb" is "writing" and kitab is the word for book. They also generally have a low number of vowels (arabic has like, 3). Then you can just recognize the words because of context.
Chinese works like this sorta with its phonosemantic compounds. 時, 侍, and 詩 for instance all mean completely different things but are pronounced similarly to 寺
As an indonesian, i thank you for providing knowledge about the origins of our ancient script, which comes from Brahmi. And our ancient script are Kawi, Javanese, Lontara, old sundanese & Sundanese
~9:55 Nfr was probably pronounced something like "Nafir" in Old Egyptian and "Nafi'" in Middle Egyptian, "Nefer" is Egyptological pronunciation. Egyptological pronunciation is not meant to be accurate, it just fills in the vowel spaces with a default "e" to make it easier to read Egyptian words out-loud without knowing how they were originally said.
Reminds me of the little bit of Japanese I've studied: phonetic characters (two sets of them!) mixed with logographic kanji, which sometimes have the pronunciations written next to them if the kanji is thought to be too obscure.
Just one small add on the writing sequence (from left to right (L2R) or right to left (R2L), there is also the boustrophedon way, where you alternate from one to the other each line, like a "snake". That way, it minimizes the length of your eyes reading it. Also, Egypcians could write so that 2 texts faced the center of the temple, for aesthetic reasons.
Well put.
I’m glad I was busy for a while so now I can come back and binge multiple videos from this channel. I love the narrator and animations. They chose interesting topics as well!
Priceless 😂😂. I grew up on the backend of Empire. His wit, humour & charm takes me back.
Nice look into this ancient language
Big fan of Ancient Egypt and Side Quest (also those jokes at the end made me chuckle)
I find it pleasantly fitting that I could actually imagine a posh Victorian gentleman give a talk on a subject like “the history of hieroglyphics”
Another absolutely fascinating SideQuest story! Thank you, can't wait for the next one!
One of the best videos on KZhead about the hieroglyphs.
I think that my knowledge of hieroglyphs has increased by an order of magnitude thanks to this video! And there i thought that Sidequest videos--which ive misses greatly--were just for fun!
This is pretty close to how Old Norse runes work as well. There was no defined spelling at first, and was pretty much sounded out, but the Futhark runes aren't meant for Norse, and because of that, spoken runes do not sound like Norse. For example, a popular variation of the runes lacked a G sound, so they just used a K. the Old Norse word for king is konungr, but if you seen it in runes, it would sound like kunukR (the R is stressed). So if you take something written in runes and SPEAK in those runes, it'll sound mostly like gibberish. Writting in Old Norse does have a few weird rules, one of which I know of is you don't write the same rune twice in a row in a word. Like the name Gunnfús in Runes would only be spelled k-u-n-f-u-s in runes. Theres no real reason we know of why they do it, but I'm willing to bet its to save time and space.
I Love your voice, it is so calming.
Side quest continues to make amazing videos!
favorite video ever
You worked really hard I like it ❤
Lots of great information in this
This is a very very elaborate add!
I didn't recognize "oodj-ah" when you said it, but I did recognize the hieroglyphs as part of "`anx, wdja, sneb".
Good show sidequest. Have my thumbs up as usual...
Honestly one of the best most educational videos I have ever watched. And I recently survived going thru chem in college and passed Organic Chem 2.
i learned Sundanese and Javanese in school, too! The alphabet was quite complicated, but nice
Are you from Jakarta?
@raidernation2163 Bogor to be precise, but my place are kinda weird, it stands on 3 city border, Bogor, Bekasi, and Jakarta
A good day to start off with a SideQuest video.
Good Show 🧐
Well, when it comes to pronunciation we cannot tell exactly - we know that it changed during millenia even in Latin. So modern Latin, medieval Latin or classical Latin sounded different despite using almost the same spelling. Luckily we can trace this evolution.
Hooray for SideQuest
Hmmm... i didn't know it was phonetic. Great vid 😊
2:42 the most zased sentence spoken on this channel. Jokes aside, lovely video!
legendary
Glad that Jawi, Kawi, Sundaneese and javanese (hanacaraka) is recognized.. I study hanacaraka for 4 years in elementary and junior high school. But never mastered it.. Too bad..
@@muhammadazrilnaufalmakmur Nah, senasib.. Meski kita nyampai dilevel medioker.. Tapi kan kita sudah ikut berperan aktif melestarikan.. He he he
God, I love this channel
Interesting!
AWESOME
I’ve read somewhere that Egyptologists get around the lack of vowels in written Egyptian by adding an “e” when in doubt. If it seems like some ancient Egyptian words or names have a lot of e’s, they’re technically just placeholders for vowels.
This is very similar to Coptic's symbol "jenkim", which by default has an e sound (it is the Coptic symbol for a glottal stop, attaching to the letter after it as an apostrophe. It carries the following letter's sound if it is a vowel, and is otherwise a preceding e sound, at least in Lower Egyptian Coptic). I bet that this is from where the tradition began in modern academia, although I doubt the veracity of it being original ancient pronounciation at the frequency that it is used. Fun fact, the same happens whenever even a modern Egyptian feels that there are too few vowels, which happens to be a lot due to the frequency of vowels that Arabic speakers expect to pronounce (abjad scripts tend to do that to you). Since we don't feel comfortable with 2 consonant sounds in a row except separated by a syllable break (mostly), we tend to add e sounds all over the word in pronounciations, even where the pronounciation becomes incorrect, such as in a foreign language. For example, "spicy" may be rendered as "esbicy" or "sebicy". Funnily enough, this happens even to Coptic itself, as, much like other alphabet languages, it wasn't designed for the Arabic speaker to always be comfortable pronouncing it correctly. This tends to the addition of apocryphal jenkims. By the way, this trend exists with non-Egyptian Arabs as well, and may well be independent of Egyptian culture.
I studied thru art history instead of languages. I have noticed that the vowel choices have changed over a couple modern decades. Amen became Amun, for example.
wow, wild. so interesting
Good video.
Something on Pahlavi or Cuneiform please!
This early hoorah!!
Yes
9:05 'Wildly inconsistent' is another way to say 'artistic' 😏
Couldn't come with a good-it's all Greek to me joke 😁 Great video clearing up how Egyptians complicated their own language 😁
Now we know how to talk like an Egyptian I want to walk like an Egyptian
Bangles style or Steve Martin? 😅
An art professor taught me that the direction of the writing and etched figures had to do with how a surface was approached. When entering a decorated space it would be wrong to have anything displayed backwards. Heading inside a tomb for example, reading starts from where you start... So on your right, the figures face right. In the left, they face left. In both cases, you start reading from what is closest. To them it made no sense to go inside then read toward the exit. Especially if the intended reader is the tomb occupant. The dead person would be heading inside only once. The words and pictures might be prayers or instructions on how to deal with Anubis or Ammit, among many other challenges. No one wants to be heading into the afterlife having read backwards, half the cheat sheet as complete, jibberish. There is no telling the beasts and demons... oh wait. I need to go back out and read the other half of my tomb. A big modern issue with understanding this was that so many pieces of ancient Egyptian art was yanked out of their original locations. It was also probably considered rude to turn backwards to the Pharaoh. Etched figures, be they little birds or great big deities were meant to greet the ruler face to face. Gods do not hand out tickets to eternity backwards. Everything on the walls faced the entry to face the approaching dead. A God with its back turned is not handing you an ankh.
So you're saying that beauty could be pronounced 25 different ways, including Nafar, Nifir, Nofor, and Nufur, but we just chose Nefer?
Nefer made me imagine the word mirror... As in reflect or observe...
love you
I don't get why you don't have more subscribers. Great videos!
I love egypt
Nicee i love the ancient history , is really crazy the Mummy we're used for train 🚂 fuel , medicine 🧪 or paint ...
@tywinlannister8015 It is fascinating to read your information being shared by a word smith. Perspective is a beautiful thing. I cannot read hieroglyphics. Instead, I studied these same sources from the view point of art. I wish I could read the words as well as the pictures. I can explain why Tut's tomb has ancient mold in the paint, or why the head dresses got fancier a time passed, but I often feel illiterate. Thank you. 😊
Thanks Soeakly for sponsoring this video. These video’s are really good. Why would I need an annual subscription when I can be fluent in a language in 3 months? I really doubt myself on learning 4 languages in a year.
Or you could learn a language 4 times
LOL
Re: inside verses outside art... context matters. I cannot tell the meaning of an ibis verses a goose, but there were intentional differences when the priests saw hieroglyphics inside verses the public outside. The temple walls included secret sacred instructions inside. Outside was propaganda. This is useful for items that are no longer in their original location in modern times. Script meant for the temple workers daily temple jobs with the Deities or meant for a tomb has a very different intent then something outside for the unwashed masses to view but not read. Such differences have a massive influence on context and therefore can help inform scholars like yourself on just what the heck they are trying to translate. Light is/was the major factor in this simple difference. Outside light in Egypt is harsh, unforgiving, it can make a surface tough to read. When looking at a pale beige wall with slightly raised details under the unrelenting sun they can just disappear. External carvings were incised, not raised. With an incised edge done deeply enough, there will always be a shadow that remains visible. But inside... incising is a nightmare to read. The spaces are already super dark, black even. Pushing a carving deep into a wall and adding more shadow while reading under flickering torch light will not work. Interior carvings were bumped up off the wall surface. They were raised, rounded subtly, meant to catch the low light and possibly appear to spring to life. Being raised made them readable and magically empowered. So so so many works of art were pulled out of their original locations before archeology became less of a rich hobby and now is about science. It helps that the ancient Egyptian sun was consistently overwhelming... verses the absolute blackness of a tomb. Ra and Kek be praised. 😊
“Very often conditions are recorded as observable "under thy fingers" [...] Among such observations it is important to notice that the pulsations of the human heart are observed.” ― James Henry Breasted,
@julianr2736 sort of... Cuneiform. You asked about other Rosetta like stones creating big break thoughs? It is not a single big revealing stone, but cuneiform is finally being translated. It was so hard to read because it is not a single language. Apparently, it is a purely phonetic script used for several languages. A "P" sound is a P sound. T is a T, etc. So in cuneiform, the scribe could hear a Sumerian say NuT... and write that down. They could next hear a Egyptian say NuT, same thing, same spelling... but the Sumerian might mean a seed from a tree, while the Egyptian with the same sounds meant the primordial sky goddess of creation, Ra's mother (the Milkyway). Context is everything. There are a lot of cuneiform tablets that still need translating and I am not sure what languages are included. Above was just an example. Seems like AI is letting us finally read the clay tablets.
Definetly was fascinated by hieroglyphs as a kid but have since switched to glagolitic, greek and runes. Love writing texts with them as is just has a great look to it and might get into some more scripts to comprise a text of all sorts of glyphs. Maybe we can get a video on the history of the cyrilic writing system? It is quite an interesting topic and if theres a video about hierohlyphs might as well go through other writing systems.
In all likelihood hieroglyphs probably evolved to mean different things at different times, especially after the introduction of Greek, thus making it near impossible to know exactly what they meant depending on the era.
This reminds me of Really Wild Animals with Dudley Moore
and how factor the Goa'uld into this?
Wow
Thanks bro Can you do a video on asian kingdoms or empires
"the christians burned all non-christian temples" "After the Islamic conquest the christians let Coptic survive as a liturgical language - Yay christianity" ...we forgot about the first part VERY quickly...
yeah, i usually like this guy's videos but he inserted his own personal religious beliefs into this one way too much.
cool
EPIC VIDEO ! NEXT: GREEK
3:23 don't know how many layers of irony that is
❤❤
It can be used as a reference for my exam.
❤❤❤❤
4:00 Yes, as all things eventually do for some reason, it wound up in Britain. God save the ̶Q̶u̶e̶e̶n̶ King. (I’ll never get used to that.)
I can feel myself becoming smarter while watching this video
10:18 Pot, meet kettle.
👍🏻
been a while since this video. hope everything is ok
10:05 the scribes probably charged by the hieroglyph?
"Nefaar" means beauty, but sounds like the perfect name for a Disney villain 😂❤
Nefaarious
Or Nefertiti
After all these millennia evolving languages we now going back to the logogramic language
🎉
It's funny that their writing is so similar to how I take notes.
Hi
Babe wake up, sidequest droped a vid, lets goooo
Hahaha
If you want to know how ancient egypcian sounded, just watch the movie _Stargate_ 😎
Still, easier than english😂
old english use to be wildly inconsistent as well
Sorry Apple, ancient Egyptians used tablets long before you! In fact, nearby, the Ten Commandments were actually written on TWO tablets---God-Inspired! Moses broke the first and had to return for the second. Thank God, again, they were wireless!
"Reformed Egyptian"
2:43 😶🌫️
The only reason to learn Egyptian hieroglyphs is to teach it to other people; in other words, it's a pyramid scheme.
who knew that emojis could be historically relevant?