Write Like an Egyptian

For the Rosetta Stone project I was in the African cultures group. Fittingly enough for a project emulating the famous stone, we decided to write out our message in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics... and because that's virtually the only written language of ancient Africa that has been translated into English, so we had no choice in the matter. Now, I'm not trying to make this project sound miserable, it really ended up being a lot of fun! It was really cool to see just what challenges played into the translation of ancient texts. Follow after the jump to find out for yourself!

Would You Like Some Cyanide with that?

So I know that Professor Burton wants us to start to transition our posts into our new unit on printing, but I had another idea I really wanted to post about. In class on Tuesday we brushed on the topic of how the development of writing systems granted access to the languages of other cultures by means of translation and an easier structure for teaching that language, which led to a larger dissemination of these languages. This greater understanding of other languages led to a very significant tactical change - the beginning of intelligence gathering and espionage between civilizations. This idea particularly piqued my interest because as a Middle Eastern Studies/Arabic major this is one of the career fields I'm interested in going into, (and I think it would be kinda cool to talk about ancient spies).

Writing- It's Kind of a Big Deal

So I've basically given up on finding new information on the ancient Kush language... As much as I want to find out more about them, for the time being it appears that they will remain one of the great mysteries of ancient history, at least until some remarkable discovery is made in The Sudan. Sadly the prospects of that seem rather slim because of the more pressing issues they face like slavery, civil war, drought, and genocide, which puts archeological efforts and decoding a dead language pretty much on the back burner.

But as you've probably already guessed, I've found out some interesting stuff about Ancient Egyptian writing! Follow after the jump to find out what!

Those Are Some Fancy Doodles!

A Meroitic inscription

So for this blog post I was determined to find some further information on the written language of Kush (Meroitic). I scoured the web, and I spent a good chunk of time in the library poring over titles on African linguistics and literature. It's safe to say that I came out of that experience a lot more confused than when I went in. I found NOTHING about further research on the Kushite language, and I could hardly find anything on Ancient African languages at all! I did however find plenty of sources analyzing the language families, ancestral connections, and literature of modern day Africa. I didn't spend a whole lot of time looking through those because that's not in the prescribed time period for this course, but I did learn a few interesting things...

Now You're Speakin' My Language... Well, Not Really...

As I'm sure I've made abundantly clear in my previous blog posts on the Kush civilization, no has yet been able to decipher their ancient written language. So instead of making a blog post about nothing, I decided I would turn to another ancient African people whose language has been decoded. Luckily one such civilization, arguably one of the most studied in history, lied just to the north of Kush, and their cultures and language systems were closely linked in many respects - I'm talking of course, about the Egyptians. As we're shifting to the study of written knowledge and educational systems, I think the Egypt is a very interesting civilization to scrutinize because we have uncovered so much evidence about their educational system.