Digital Scrapbook Entry #4 －Egypt

Agnes Yu

World History 1 Period 7

11/21/14

                     The writing systems in ancient Egypt compared to Chinese characters.

Link 1: Ancient Egypt Writing systems

http://www.ancientscripts.com/egyptian.html

Link 2: Chinese characters development

http://www.interestingchinese.com/chinese-written-language/characters-history-development.html

  As we all known, ancient Egypt's writing systems are one of the greatest writing systems in the 

world. They called this system as Hieroglyphs. It combined logographic and alphabetic elements 

together. Egyptians used cursive hieroglyphs for religious literature on papyrus and wood. It was a 

really categories which are: logograms, phonograms and determinatives.

 

(These are the two pictures of the Hieroglyphs, they are not like "words" but more like symbols that 

have their own meaning.)

The systems of Hieroglyphs affected the literature, ancient Egyptians use it to write. And it has been 

inspired the philosophers from the Renaissance period. For example, the philosopher Aristotle, his 

philosophy was inspired by Egyptians and their great Hieroglyphs. Ficino said that "Hieroglyphs are 

symbols by means of which it was possible to express the real significance of things." Thus you can 

see how Hieroglyphs could actually develop in a way that shows people the truths. It's complex and 

hard to understand but what it really means affected people.

Now we are going to talk about Chinese characters, they are logograms. People reminded of Egyptian 

hieroglyphs when they see those Chinese characters. But hieroglyphics are not all logographs that 

represent spoken words. In ancient China, the words were like symbols, but they developed a lot of 

generations and now we have our Chinese. Today, Chinese words are not like symbols or images, 

they are the words to represent knowledge and information. To know Chinese words you have to 

learn at least 4000 words and they are just the basic that help you to learn the rest, it's more complex 

than the hieroglyphs.  And as the develop of Chinese characters, many countries in Asia take some of 

those characters and change them into their own languages.