Ancient Egypt

The Step Pyramid at Saqqara was built by the architect Imhotep at the instigation of King Djoser sometime between 2630 and 2611 BCE. The pyramid was the first large building to be made entirely of cut stone blocks, and it was far larger than anything that had gone before. The Step Pyramid paved the way for the great pyramids of the following century.

Imhotep chose a site where his building would dominate the area.There he built a six-stepped pyramid that was 61 m tall and symbolized the hill on which creation began.The pyramid was surrounded by other large buildings. The whole complex was bounded by a wall that was more than 1.6 km long.

Enclosed within the wall were buildings such as a temple and storage rooms for provisions and grave goods that had also been provided in earlier royal tombs.What was new, however, was a court where the king could celebrate his jubilees— ceremonies through which the power of the king was believed to be ritually renewed.

All the buildings were lavishly furnished and decorated. In the underground rooms, for example, the walls were hung with panels of blue-glazed tiles, while in another location, there were low-relief carvings that showed the king performing the running ceremony that was part of his coronation. A life-size statue of Djoser seated on his throne was installed in a special room close to the temple, and many other statues of gods and of members of the royal family were dotted around the enclosure. The storage rooms contained more than 40,000 stone vessels, which probably contained wine, oil, and foodstuffs.

The temple in the complex had an important role to play in the cult of dead kings. Priests in the temple carried out ceremonies and rituals that were designed to serve the dead kings in the same way as they had when the kings were alive. In this way, the present king’s ancestors were venerated, and the continuity that was essential to Egyptian civilization was preserved.

The Step Pyramid of Djoser stands in the desert at Saqqara. In the foreground are stone replicas of the kiosks that would have been in use during festivals to celebrate the royal jubilee.

ORIGINS

The ancient Egyptians believed that writing was invented by the god Thoth and called their hieroglyphic script “mdju netjer” (“words of the gods”). The word hieroglyph comes from the Greek hieros (sacred) plus glypho (inscriptions) and was first used by Clement of Alexandria.

The earliest known examples of writing in Egypt have been dated to 3,400 BC. The latest dated inscription in hieroglyphs was made on the gate post of a temple at Philae in 396 AD.

The hieroglyphic script was used mainly for formal inscriptions on the walls of temples and tombs. In some inscriptions the glyphs are very detailed and in full colour, in others they are simple outlines. For everyday writing the hieratic script was used.

After the Emperor Theodsius I ordered the closure of all pagan temples throughout the Roman empire in the late 4th century AD, knowledge of the hieroglyphic script was lost. decipher the script.

DECIPHERMENT

Many people have attempted to decipher the Egyptian scripts since the 5th century AD, when Horapollo provided explanations of nearly two hundred glyphs, some of which were correct. Other decipherment attempts were made in the 9th and 10th by Arab historians Dhul-Nun al-Misri and Ibn Wahshiyya, and in the 17th century by Athanasius Kircher. These attempts were all based on the mistaken assumption that the hieroglyphs represented ideas and not sounds of a particular language.

The discovery, in 1799, of the Rosetta Stone, a bilingual text in Greek and the Egyptian Hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts enabled scholars such as Silvestre de Sacy, Johan David Åkerblad and Thomas Young to make real progress with their decipherment efforts, and by the 1820s Jean-François Champollion had made the complete decipherment of the Hieroglyphic script.

HIEROGLYPHS REPRESENTING SINGLE CONSONANT

These glyphs alone could be used to write Ancient Egyptian and represent the first alphabet ever divised. In practice, they were rarely used in the fashion.

Uniconsonantal hieroglyphs