Why did the Egyptians use identification badges? Historical facts and examples

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:55

Even before our era, Egypt was a fairly developed cultural state with its own written language. At first, these were separate images-drawings, then - hieroglyphs and identifying icons for them. What did the Egyptians use tokens for? Let's sort it out in order.

Beginning of writing

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

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

The walls in dwellings (inside and outside) and tombs, household utensils and dishes are "painted" with such drawings. There is a sky, grass, snakes, birds, people - everything that happened in life, the Egyptians sought to "record".

But why did the Egyptians use identification badges, you ask. It's too early to talk about this, let's first get acquainted with the hieroglyphs.

Hieroglyphs

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

To make it easier, let's transfer the experience of the Egyptians into Russian. Let's say the oval "0" is a "ball". Now the sign "0" will mean not only "ball", but also the sounds "shr" in any word. That is, with this sign "0" we can write the words "ball", "width", "wider", "Shira", "Shura", etc.

The Egyptians did not designate vowel sounds in writing, and the signs for consonants were called hieroglyphs. There were more than 700 such "letters" denoting one or more sounds in the Egyptian "alphabet".

Why did the Egyptians use identification badges? Answers are close.

Determinant icons

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

Following our example, it would be easy to confuse the sphere with Shura, and the expanse with Lake Shira. Here it finally becomes clear to us why the Egyptians used identifying icons. These were the hintswhich stood in front of the hieroglyph or hieroglyphs and helped to more accurately understand the meaning of the word they wrote.

Determinant icons were not readable, they carried only a semantic load. So, for example, if we drew wavy lines before "0", then we would get Lake Shira.