Predecessors
By 2700 BCE, the ancient Egyptians had developed the hieroglyphic writing system. Hieroglyphs are employed in three ways in Ancient Egyptian texts: as logograms (ideograms) that represent a word denoting an object pictorially depicted by the hieroglyph; more commonly as phonograms writing a sound or sequence of sounds; and as determinatives (which provide clues to meaning without directly writing sounds). Since vowels were mostly unwritten, the hieroglyphs which indicated a single consonant could have been used as a consonantal alphabet (or "abjad"). This was not done when writing the Egyptian language, but seems to have been significant influence on the creation of the first alphabet (used to write a Semitic language). All subsequent alphabets around the world have either descended from this first Semitic alphabet, or have been inspired by one of its descendants (i.e. "stimulus diffusion"), with the possible exception of the Meroitic alphabet, a 3rd century BCE adaptation of hieroglyphs in Nubia to the south of Egypt – though even here many scholars suspect the influence of the first alphabet.
Read more about this topic: History Of The Alphabet
Famous quotes containing the word predecessors:
“No philosopher understands his predecessors until he has re-thought their thought in his own contemporary terms.”
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