I'm spending a little bit more time in Aswan then planned. You see, Aswan is a nice little place, very relaxed, and it has some beautiful scenery. Green in some parts, desert hills in the background, little felucca boats on the nile, and every evening a dark red sun. In other words, a good place to recover from some hectic travelling and take it easy for a while.I ran across a little book called "practical hieroglyphics" in one of the restaurants here (uhm, well yes, some also sell books, naturally) and it is really very interesting stuff. The ancient Egyptian language actually consisted of an alphabet of sorts with each little icon representing a letter. Next to that, they also had icons that acted as determinants, giving a certain different meaning to a collection of letters, or that represented entire words or parts of words in themselves. So in some cases the spoken version of the word matched the icons assigned in the alphabet, but in others they simply used dedicated icons.
The word for, f.e., cat was "miw", I quite like that btw, but the icons used to represent it from right to left are: a little black panther, a little chicken, some reeds and a collar with a bell. And I can see how that makes sense... I mean instead of going " hey, there you have one of those little black panther thingies who wear collars and chase little chickens through the reeds" they simply said "hey, a miw". Jut why exactly there is the addition of the reeds, the little chicken and the collar is still a bit of a mystery to me...
I can easily see how the language might have developed (I'm not sure that this is actually the case) from wall paintings, etc, by standardizing certain images as fixed letters or words. The evolution of the language is also quite interesting to see, as they moved from hieroglyphics to something that we might recognize as an actual aplhabet.
