Egyptian hieroglyphs

Period

c. 3200 BC

Map

Inventions map

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs or hieroglyphics were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined ideographic, logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system. Moreover, owing in large part to the Greek and Aramaic scripts that descended from Phoenician, the majority of the world's living writing systems are descendants of Egyptian hieroglyphs—most prominently the Latin and Cyrillic scripts through Greek, and the Arabic and Brahmic scripts through Aramaic. Hieroglyphs are thought to be one of four writing systems developed without outside influence, the others being cuneiform, Chinese characters, and Mayan script.

Sources: Wikipedia — Egyptian hieroglyphs · CC BY-SA 4.0

Earlier and later events nearby

1. c. 3200 BCEgyptian hieroglyphsThis page
2. c. 3100 BCNarmer unifies Egypt
3. c. 2560 BCConstruction of the Great Pyramid of Giza
4. AD 639–642Arab conquest of Egypt

Who ruled this land

States that held this place in the historical borders data (Cliopatria). Years are approximate, as fine as the data's snapshots (every few years to a century). Tap to open the map for that year.

Other maps for this period

• Inventions mapCuneiform