Even before our era, Egypt was quite developeda 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.
The beginning 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.
These 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 sought 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 concrete word (action), but also consonant sounds present in this word.
To make it easier, we will transfer the experience of the Egyptians toRussian 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 called hieroglyphs. 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's not hard to guess that with this methodletters, when they represent only consonants, their combinations or whole words (such hieroglyphs also existed), it was very problematic to understand what is written in the message.
Using our example, it would be easyto confuse the ball with Shura, but wider with Lake Shira. Here it finally becomes clear to us why the Egyptians used the identifying signs. These were clues that faced a hieroglyph or hieroglyphics and helped to more accurately understand the meaning of the word they wrote.
The badges-determinants were not read, they carried only the semantic load. So, for example, if we had drawn wavy lines before "0", we would have got Lake Shira.
