Egyptian Hieroglyph And Pristine Scripts

A hieroglyph is known as a stylized picture of an object representing a word, syllable, or sound. Two pristine scripts have been known for using the hieroglyphic style for their writing system, the Egyptians and the Mayans. The former script was created in 3300 BC and was the second earliest pristine script created after Cuneiform script. The latter was created 3000 years later in 300 BC and was the last pristine script created and discovered. Although both scripts utilized the hieroglyphic method, neither scripts were influenced by the other, and they were created independently. However, this independence did not remove similarities in scripts’ characteristics, as they both followed logosyllabic methods. Egyptian hieroglyph became the superior

The script was logographic and syllabic; the former meaning each symbol specifically meant a word or phrase, while the latter meaning each symbol contained between one, two, or three consonantal sounds making them uniconsonantal, biconsonantal, and triconsonantal, respectively. There were approximately 1,000 unique symbols in this script, which included logograms, syllabic signs, phonetic complements, and determinatives. Egyptian hieroglyphs used uniconsonantal signs as phonetic complements to confirm pronunciation, while determinatives, which contained no associated sound, used logograms to differentiate between multiple word meanings. Cartouches were a form of determinative which used an oval enclosing a group of hieroglyphs to distinguished the title and name of Egyptian royalty (McDermott). Hieroglyphs depended on aesthetics and writing was based on white space and symmetry. This was the reason for their unique directionality in multiple directions. The direction depended on the animal and human faces, where the script was read towards the face of the animal or human, allowing the directionality to be from left to right or from right to left. In Object E13560C, the door frame of Merenptah and the sun god showed the symmetry of hieroglyphic writing and contained the multiple directionality using birds as the direction markers. Egyptian

They were similar by many aspects of symbols and script methods and differed in historical content. Mayan hieroglyphs were like Egyptian hieroglyphs as they were also logographic and syllabic, containing approximately 800 symbols. One major difference in structure was that one sound in the Mayan language could be represented with multiple symbols. For example, B’alam, the Mayan word for meaning jaguar, had multiple ways of writing that included logograms and syllabic signs. Because of this, Mayan script also used phonetic complements, but not determinatives. The directionality was from left to right which differed from Egyptian, but the Mayan script was written in blocks, which follows the aesthetics of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Another major difference between the two scripts was the continuation of the scripts. Egyptian hieroglyphs caused the creation of hieratic, demotic, and Coptic, as a form of a common script. Even further, the Egyptian hieroglyph influenced the Proto-Sinaitic script and the creation of their early alphabet, which led to the creation of the Phoenician alphabet and then the true Greek alphabet which included vowels. The Mayan hieroglyphs had a completely different history and the modern Mayan languages were derived from the Latin alphabet rather than the original Mayan script. This was due to the destruction and actions of Diego de Landa