Many have souvenirs from Egypt, where there are inscriptions in the form of hieroglyphs. Of course, I want to understand what is written there. The most correct thing was to ask the seller. But what if the idea to decipher the inscription came much later?
It is necessary
- - table of correspondence of hieroglyphs to sounds and concepts;
- - a computer;
- - Internet access;
- - knowledge of the English language;
- - Coptic-English Dictionary.
Instructions
Step 1
Choose those hieroglyphs that interest you first. A total of 166 different characters were identified in Egyptian inscriptions. Some of them are not letters, but ideograms, that is, symbols of some concepts. For example, in modern writing this role is played by number - it can also be written as the word “number”
Step 2
Compare the selected hieroglyphs with the Latin letter correspondence table. It was first compiled by Jean-François Champollion, a French scientist who has the honor of deciphering ancient Egyptian inscriptions. Write down the letters found - you get the sound of the written word. If some modern concept was encrypted with hieroglyphs, then you can easily translate it from English, as the most common language in tourism. If we are talking about a real ancient inscription, then additional efforts will have to be made
Step 3
Study similar tables for ideograms and consonances. In Egyptian, various characters were mixed together with letters, and vowels were not used. Compare the translated words with the contents of the Coptic dictionary. The fact is that it was precisely the knowledge of the language of the Copts, still inhabiting Egypt, that allowed Champollion to understand and translate the hieroglyphs. Surely this exercise will help you too. It remains only to find the correspondence of the found English word in Russian
Step 4
Explore the English-speaking part of the Internet: search for, for example, the following words "The Egyptian hieroglyphs to decipher". Unlike Russian-language queries, this approach gives a much larger number of really useful links. A so-called virtual tour of Egypt can be advised: https://www.virtual-egypt.com/newhtml/hieroglyphics/. There is a detailed story about the meaning of the hieroglyphs here. In addition, there is an opportunity to solve the opposite problem: to translate your name into Egyptian hieroglyphs.
