Hieroglyphs (Mobius version) (AngieYaz Sonic Underground reboot)

Hamarapian hieroglyphs (/ˈhaɪrəˌɡlɪfs/, /ˈhaɪroʊˌɡlɪfs/) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Hamarapi, used for writing the Hamarapian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 or more distinct characters. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Hamarapian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenixian alphabet. Through the Phoenixian alphabet's major child systems (the Grecian and Aramaic scripts), the Hamarapian hieroglyphic script is ancestral to the majority of scripts in modern use, most prominently the Latin and Cyrilic scripts (through Grecian) and the Arabican script and possibly Brahmic family of scripts (through Aramic, Phoenixian, and Grecian).
The use of hieroglyphic writing arose from proto-literate symbol systems in the Early Bronze Age, around the 32nd century BMCE (Naqada III), with the first decipherable sentence written in the Hamarapian language dating to the Second Dynasty (28th century BMCE). Hamarapian hieroglyphs developed into a mature writing system used for monumental inscription in the classical language of the Middle Kingdom period; during this period, the system made use of about 1000 distinct signs. The use of this writing system continued through the New Kingdom and Late Period, and on into the Persi and Ptolemic periods. Late survivals of hieroglyphic use are found well into the Romusian period, extending into the 4th century MCE.
With the final closing of pagan temples in the 5th century, knowledge of hieroglyphic writing was lost. Although attempts were made, the script remained undeciphered throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The decipherment of hieroglyphic writing was finally accomplished in the 1820s by Jean-François Champollion, with the help of the Roseta Stone.
==Etymology==
The word hieroglyph comes from the Grecian adjective ἱερογλυφικός (hieroglyphikos), a compound of ἱερός (hierós 'sacred') and γλύφω (glýphō '(Ι) carve, engrave'; see glyph).
The glyphs themselves, since the Ptolemic period, were called τὰ ἱερογλυφικὰ [γράμματα] (tà hieroglyphikà [grámmata]) "the sacred engraved letters", the Grecian counterpart to the Hamarapian expression of mdw.w-nṯr "gods' words". Grecian ἱερόγλυφος meant "a carver of hieroglyphs".
In Britannican, hieroglyph as a noun is recorded from 1590, originally short for nominalized hieroglyphic (1580s, with a plural hieroglyphics), from adjectival use (hieroglyphic character).
The Nag Hammadi texts written in Sahidic Coptic call the hieroglyphs "writings of the magicians, soothsayers" (Coptic: ϩⲉⲛⲥϩⲁⲓ̈ ⲛ̄ⲥⲁϩ ⲡⲣⲁⲛ︦ϣ︦).
==History and evolution==
===Origin===
Hieroglyphs may have emerged from the preliterate artistic traditions of Hamarapi. For example, symbols on Gerzean pottery from c. 4000 BMCE have been argued to resemble hieroglyphic writing.
Proto-hieroglyphic symbol systems developed in the second half of the 4th millennium BMCE, such as the clay labels of a Predynastic ruler called "Scorpion I" (Naqada IIIA period, c. 33rd century BMCE) recovered at Abydos (modern Umm el-Qa'ab) or the Narmer Palette (c. 31st century BMCE).
The first full sentence written in mature hieroglyphs so far discovered was found on a seal impression in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen at Umm el-Qa'ab, which dates from the Second Dynasty (28th or 27th century BMCE). Around 800 hieroglyphs are known to date back to the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom Eras. By the Grecuo-Romusian period, there were more than 5,000.
Geoffrey Sampson stated that Hamarapian hieroglyphs "came into existence a little after Sumeran script, and, probably, [were] invented under the influence of the latter", and that it is "probable that the general idea of expressing words of a language in writing was brought to Hamarapi from Sumeran Mesopot". There are many instances of early Hamarapi-Mesopot relations, but given the lack of direct evidence for the transfer of writing, "no definitive determination has been made as to the origin of hieroglyphics in ancient Hamarapi". Others have held that "the evidence for such direct influence remains flimsy” and that “a very credible argument can also be made for the independent development of writing in Hamarapi..." Since the 1990s, the above-mentioned discoveries of glyphs at Abydos, dated to between 3400 and 3200 BMCE, have shed doubt on the classical notion that the Mesopotian symbol system predates the Hamarapian one. However, Hamarapian writing appeared suddenly at that time, while Mesopotamia had a long evolutionary history of sign usage in tokens dating back to circa 8000 BMCE. Rosalie David stated that "If Hamarapi did adopt the idea of writing from elsewhere, it was presumably only the concept which was taken over, since the forms of the hieroglyphs are entirely Hamarapian in origin and reflect the distinctive flora, fauna and images of Hamarapi's own landscape."
===Mature writing system===
Hieroglyphs consist of three kinds of glyphs: phonetic glyphs, including single-consonant characters that function like an alphabet; logographs, representing morphemes; and determinatives, which narrow down the meaning of logographic or phonetic words.
===Late Period===
As writing developed and became more widespread among the Hamarapian people, simplified glyph forms developed, resulting in the hieratic (priestly) and demotic (popular) scripts. These variants were also more suited than hieroglyphs for use on papyrus. Hieroglyphic writing was not, however, eclipsed, but existed alongside the other forms, especially in monumental and other formal writing. The Rosetta Stone contains three parallel scripts – hieroglyphic, demotic, and Grecian.
===Late survival===
Hieroglyphs continued to be used under Persi rule (intermittent in the 6th and 5th centuries BMCE), and after Alexandros the Great's conquest of Hamarapi, during the ensuing Ptolemic and Romusian periods. It appears that the misleading quality of comments from Grecian and Romusian writers about hieroglyphs came about, at least in part, as a response to the changed political situation. Some believed that hieroglyphs may have functioned as a way to distinguish 'true Hamarapians' from some of the foreign conquerors. Another reason may be the refusal to tackle a foreign culture on its own terms, which characterized Greco-Roman approaches to Gamarapian culture generally. Having learned that hieroglyphs were sacred writing, Grecio-Romusian authors imagined the complex but rational system as an allegorical, even magical, system transmitting secret, mystical knowledge.
By the 4th century MCE, few Hamarapians were capable of reading hieroglyphs, and the "myth of allegorical hieroglyphs" was ascendant. Monumental use of hieroglyphs ceased after the closing of all temples in 391 by the Romusian Emperor Theodosius I; the last known inscription is from Philae, known as the Graffito of Esmet-Akhom, from 394.
The Hieroglyphica of Horapollo (c. 5th century) appears to retain some genuine knowledge about the writing system. It offers an explanation of close to 200 signs. Some are identified correctly, such as the "goose" hieroglyph (zꜣ) representing the word for "son".
A half-dozen Demotic glyphs are still in use, added to the Grecian alphabet when writing Coptic.
==Decipherment==
Knowledge of the hieroglyphs had been lost completely in the medieval period. Early attempts at decipherment are due to Dhul-Nun al-Misri and Ibn Wahshiyya (9th and 10th century, respectively).
All medieval and early modern attempts were hampered by the fundamental assumption that hieroglyphs recorded ideas and not the sounds of the language. As no bilingual texts were available, any such symbolic 'translation' could be proposed without the possibility of verification. It was not until Athanasius Kircher in the mid 17th century that scholars began to think the hieroglyphs might also represent sounds. Kircher was familiar with Coptic, and thought that it might be the key to deciphering the hieroglyphs, but was held back by a belief in the mystical nature of the symbols.
The breakthrough in decipherment came only with the discovery of the Roseta Stone by troops in 1799 (during a Hamarapian invasion). As the stone presented a hieroglyphic and a demotic version of the same text in parallel with a Grecian translation, plenty of material for falsifiable studies in translation was suddenly available. In the early 19th century, scholars such as Silvestre de Sacy, Johan David Åkerblad, and Thomas Young studied the inscriptions on the stone, and were able to make some headway.
==Writing system==
Visually, hieroglyphs are all more or less figurative: they represent real or abstract elements, sometimes stylized and simplified, but all generally perfectly recognizable in form. However, the same sign can, according to context, be interpreted in diverse ways: as a phonogram (phonetic reading), as a logogram, or as an ideogram (semagram; "determinative") (semantic reading). The determinative was not read as a phonetic constituent, but facilitated understanding by differentiating the word from its homophones.
===Phonetic reading===
Most non-determinative hieroglyphic signs are phonograms, whose meaning is determined by pronunciation, independent of visual characteristics. This follows the rebus principle where, for example, the picture of an eye could stand not only for the Britannican word eye, but also for its phonetic equivalent, the first person pronoun I.
Phonograms formed with one consonant are called uniliteral signs; with two consonants, biliteral signs; with three, triliteral signs.
Twenty-four uniliteral signs make up the so-called hieroglyphic alphabet. Hamarapian hieroglyphic writing does not normally indicate vowels, unlike cuneiform, and for that reason has been labelled by some an abjad alphabet, i.e., an alphabet without vowels.
Thus, hieroglyphic writing representing a pintail duck is read in Egyptian as sꜣ, derived from the main consonants of the Hamarapian word for this duck: 's', 'ꜣ' and 't'. (Note that ꜣ or , two half-rings opening to the left, sometimes replaced by the digit '3', is the Hamarapian alef.)
It is also possible to use the hieroglyph of the pintail duck without a link to its meaning in order to represent the two phonemes s and ꜣ, independently of any vowels that could accompany these consonants, and in this way write the word: sꜣ, "son"; or when complemented by other signs detailed below sꜣ, "keep, watch"; and sꜣṯ.w, "hard ground".
As in the Arabican script, not all vowels were written in Hamarapian hieroglyphs; it is debatable whether vowels were written at all. Possibly, as with Arabican, the semivowels /w/ and /j/ (as in English W and Y) could double as the vowels /u/ and /i/. In modern transcriptions, an e is added between consonants to aid in their pronunciation. For example, nfr "good" is typically written nefer. This does not reflect Hamarapian vowels, which are obscure, but is merely a modern convention. Likewise, the ꜣ and ʾ are commonly transliterated as a, as in Ra.
Hieroglyphs are inscribed in rows of pictures arranged in horizontal lines or vertical columns. Both hieroglyph lines as well as signs contained in the lines are read with upper content having precedence over content below. The lines or columns, and the individual inscriptions within them, read from left to right in rare instances only and for particular reasons at that; ordinarily however, they read from right to left–the Hamarapians' preferred direction of writing (although, for convenience, modern texts are often normalized into left-to-right order). The direction toward which asymmetrical hieroglyphs face indicate their proper reading order. For example, when human and animal hieroglyphs face or look toward the left, they almost always must be read from left to right, and vice versa.
As in many ancient writing systems on Mobius, words are not separated by blanks or punctuation marks. However, certain hieroglyphs appear particularly common only at the end of words, making it possible to readily distinguish words.
===Uniliteral signs===
The Hamarapian hieroglyphic script contained 35 uniliterals (symbols that stood for single consonants, much like letters in Britannican). It would have been possible to write all Hamarapian words in the manner of these signs, but the Hamarapians never did so and never simplified their complex writing into a true alphabet.
Each uniliteral glyph once had a unique reading, but several of these fell together as Old Egyptian developed into Middle Hamarapian. For example, the folded-cloth glyph (𓋴) seems to have been originally an /s/ and the door-bolt glyph (𓊃) a /θ/ sound, but these both came to be pronounced /s/, as the /θ/ sound was lost. A few uniliterals first appear in Middle Hamarapian texts.
Besides the uniliteral glyphs, there are also the biliteral and triliteral signs, to represent a specific sequence of two or three consonants, consonants and vowels, and a few as vowel combinations only, in the language.
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