Hieroglyphs, Anyone? Trivia Quiz

Answer: Holy writing

The word's etymology from the Greek is: hieros = holy or sacred and gluphein = to carve or to write. They were called holy or sacred because they were mostly used in religious contexts.

Answer: Jean Francois Champollion

Champollion (1790-1832) possessed the ideal qualities for succeeding in the decipherment: he had an extraordinary genius for languages (Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Coptic and others), an outstanding visual memory, drawing skills, logical reasoning and finally, stubborness.
He was plagued by ill health, poor finances, political turmoil, envy and jealousy from rival scholars, but he persisted on his quest on and off for almost 23 years, until he achieved success.

Answer: Cartridge

Cartouche is the oval shape that encircles the names of the pharaohs. In French it means cartridge. The French soldiers who arrived in Egypt with Napoleon in 1799, noticed these oval shapes in the inscriptions on the monuments and called them cartouches because they reminded them of their ammunition.

Answer: Cleopatra's

The Rosetta Stone, discovered by Napoleon's soldiers, had three inscriptions in two languages, Egyptian and Greek, and three scripts: hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. Demotic was a cursive form of hieroglyphic, from the Greek "demos" = common people.
The scholars noticed two cartouches in the hieroglyphic script, and the names of Cleopatra and Ptolemy in the Greek script. The decipherment of these two royal names was the first step on the long road ahead.

Answer: A combination of all three

Champollion's genius was to realize that hieroglyphs included all these different characters. Up to then, all the other scholars and he himself, had followed the theory that hieroglyphs were primarily ideograms, each representing a single word.

Answer: True

This posed another problem for the scholars.
The most common solution has been to insert an e for the missing vowels, so "nfr" becomes "nefer".
But we will never know how it was really pronounced by the ancient Egyptians.
This is why many names and words have different spellings. For instance, the name of the god Amun can also be spelled Amon and Amen.

The first writing system to include vowels was the Greek alphabet.

Answer: A clarifier

The absence of vowels could pose a problem of interpretation in some cases.
If, for example, in English we had the two letters d and r, they could read either deer or door.
In a similar situation, the Egyptians added the determinative at the end of the word, a special character that clarified whether the word represented an idea, an object, an animal or a person, as the case may be.
Determinatives have no phonetic value.

Answer: Coptic

Coptic is the language still used in the liturgy of the Christian Egyptians, and had developed from demotic.
Champollion's knowledge of this language was crucial in his quest, because the Coptic language uses a Greek-type alphabet and includes vowels in the spelling.
Unfortunately, its usefulness was only limited, because it is separated from old Egyptian by over 2,000 years.
Another source are foreign languages, like Greek or Babylonian, which used vowels and sometimes furnished fully vocalized transcriptions of Egyptian words - but there are only few such instances.

Answer: From bottom to top

Ancient Egyptians liked harmony and symmetry and paid attention to the spaces they inscribed.
For instance, in a doorway, they wrote horizontally at the top, and vertically on the sides.
To decide whether to read the horizontal lines from left to right or from right to left, the heads of the living creatures represented are always turned toward the beginning of the sentence.

Answer: Lower class copyists

Few people could read or write.
Long years of studying were required.
The minimum number of hieroglyphs to be learned would have been from a minimum of 200 to a maximum of 3,000.
A scribe's kit consisted of a case with reed pens, a palette with two cakes of ink, one black for normal writing, one red for titles, catchwords, etc. Also a water jar for softening the ink and a string to connect all these items together, so they could be carried over the shoulder.