The emergence of writing in Egypt

Abstract

The cultural history of ancient Egypt is markedly different from that of contemporary Mesopotamia, and the adoption of the idea of writing by the Egyptians conforms to a general pattern, which shows the tendency of Egypt to adopt and perfect inventions made elsewhere in the Near East. Theories of a conquering ‘dynastic race’, which gave rise to Egyptian civilisation, are unnecessary. Hieroglyphs show many of the signs of deliberate invention, probably in association with the royal court, appearing suddenly, and developing rapidly. They are so well suited to the underlying language, one of the Afroasiatic group, that their creation seems to be deliberate. Uniconsonantal, or ‘alphabetic’, signs are a striking and unique feature of the system, which was essentially complete by 3000 B.C.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 25 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.