The new finding confirms that many ancient Egyptians were literate
Archaeologists from Yale University and the Royal museums of art and history, Belgium have discovered ancient Egyptian rock inscriptions that can tell when a system of hieroglyphic writing began to attract broad layers of Egyptian society.
Found a huge inscriptions date back to approximately 3,250 by the BC and are a form of a letter, which, as previously thought researchers at that time used only the ruling class.
The inscription was discovered on a hill in the desert Elkab, it was a bustling district in Ancient Egypt. Although hieroglyphs were widely known from tokens and marks, at that time, it was believed that written symbols have been used mainly for bureaucratic purposes. But there they were, scrawled on a rock along a well-traveled path as a road sign indicating that people at that time were also literate.
Scientists were very surprised by the size of the symbols. Most of the characters usually only a centimeter or two in height, but these characters were the height of more than 50 centimeters.
“Such characters we met more than once, but this size — for the first time. It would be like to see only letters on a computer screen, and then to see those same letters, but on a huge Billboard,” says John Coleman Darnell, a Yale University Professor.
The inscription consists of four characters, written from right to left, this is the dominant direction in late Egyptian texts. Symbols include the bull’s head on a pole and two storks standing back to back with IBIS between them. These symbols are often found in later texts that describe the cycle of solar activity and luminosity, and Darnell, they may “signify the concept of Royal power over an ordered cosmos.”
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