Why did the Egyptians use the identifiers? Historical facts and examples

Even before our era, Egypt was a fairly developed cultural state with its own written language. At first they were separate images-drawings, then - hieroglyphs and badges-determinants to them. Why did the Egyptians use the identifiers? Let's sort it out in order.

Start of writing

At the very beginning, the Egyptian letter was a set of pictures, each of which meant what, in fact, she portrayed.

The Egyptian wanted to write "man" - a little man was drawing, "bird" - drawing a bird, "river" - wavy lines depicting waves.

Such drawings "painted" the walls in the dwellings (inside and outside) and tombs, household utensils and utensils. There are skies, grasses, snakes, birds, people - everything that happened in life, the Egyptians tried to "write down".

But for what the Egyptians used the identifying signs, you ask. It's too early to say, let's first get acquainted with the hieroglyphics.

Hieroglyphs

Writing developed very quickly. Soon it became clear that it was impossible to draw everything. Some facts, events and actions present in a person's life can not be interpreted graphically, for example, the name of a person. For this, simplified signs were made from the drawings, which represented not only a specific word (action), but also consonant sounds present in this word.

To make it easier, we will transfer the experience of the Egyptians to the Russian language. Suppose an oval "0" is a "ball". Now the sign "0" will imply not only the "ball", but also the sounds "shr" in any word. That is, with this sign "0" we can write the words "ball", "broad", "wider", "Shira", "Shura", etc.

Vowel sounds on the letter the Egyptians did not indicate, and the signs for consonants were called hieroglyphics. Such "letters" denoting one or more sounds, there were more than 700 in the Egyptian "alphabet".

Why did the Egyptians use the identifiers? The answers are already close.

Identification badges

It is not difficult to guess that with this method of writing, when only consonants are depicted, their combinations or whole words (such hieroglyphs were also there), it was very problematic to understand what is written in the message.

Using our example, it would be easy to confuse the ball with Shura, and wider with Lake Shira. Here it finally becomes clear to us why the Egyptians used the identifying signs. These were clues that faced hieroglyphics or hieroglyphs and helped to better understand the meaning of the word they wrote.

Badge-determinants were not read, they carried only semantic load. So, for example, if we had drawn wavy lines before "0", we would have got Lake Shira.