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18 March 2017 ProQuest

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1. Read like an Egyptian? No mystery. It's easy as ABC................................................................................. 1

18 March 2017 ii ProQuest

Document 1 of 1

Read like an Egyptian? No mystery. It's easy as ABC

Author: Lane, Bernard

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Abstract (Abstract): It appears to take only a few days to equip an enthusiastic amateur with a basic grasp of
hieroglyphs, the ancient Egyptian script that lay forgotten, or impenetrable to inquiry, for 1500 years.
Mr [Christian Knoblauch], a postgraduate student at Sydney's Macquarie University, home to the Australian
Centre for Egyptology, said the image of hieroglyphs as mysterious and difficult had a long history.
The Greeks took hieroglyphs to be symbolic rather than phonetic. Romans, Arabs and Renaissance scholars
also suffered bouts of Egyptomania but hieroglyphs were invested with more myth than meaning until 1799,
when the Rosetta Stone was discovered with the same text in three scripts: Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphs.

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Full text: HIEROGLYPHS rock, but apparently they're not rocket science.
It appears to take only a few days to equip an enthusiastic amateur with a basic grasp of hieroglyphs, the
ancient Egyptian script that lay forgotten, or impenetrable to inquiry, for 1500 years.
Egyptologist Christian Knoblauch believes students who completed his three-day seminar at the University of
Queensland yesterday should "be able to read basic scripts from monuments".
"They'll be able to work out what's happening in scenes of daily life ... they'll be able to read the names of kings,
read the names of gods ... all the kinds of things you'd expect to find in tombs and temples, and museums of the
world."
Mr Knoblauch, a postgraduate student at Sydney's Macquarie University, home to the Australian Centre for
Egyptology, said the image of hieroglyphs as mysterious and difficult had a long history.
"That's a view of hieroglyphs that we inherited from the Greeks," he said.
"(In the Renaissance) scholars generally believed them to be quite symbolic."
For these thinkers, he said, it was as if the Egyptians had been able to seize an object itself -- such as a cat --
by depicting it, and had made the medium of language redundant.
"(But) what we've been learning in the last few days is that hieroglyphs can be read just like an alphabet," Mr
Knoblauch said.
There are more than 700 different hieroglyphs (Greek for sacred words or carving). Some are pictures
representing words, some stand for consonants, others are not pronounced but shed light on an adjoining word.

The Greeks took hieroglyphs to be symbolic rather than phonetic. Romans, Arabs and Renaissance scholars
also suffered bouts of Egyptomania but hieroglyphs were invested with more myth than meaning until 1799,
when the Rosetta Stone was discovered with the same text in three scripts: Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphs.
In the 1820s a gifted Frenchman linguist Jean-Francois Champollion deciphered the stone, thereby founding the
modern study of hieroglyphs.
Illustration
Caption: Hoe the Ptolemaic Egyptians would have expressed 'Go, Pat Rafter!'; Source: webperso.iut.univ-
paris8.fr/~rosmord/ nomhiero.html; Photo: Diagram

Company / organization: Name: American Broadcasting Cos; Ticker: ABC; NAICS: 513112, 511120, 513120;
DUNS: 00-697-9819;

Publication title: The Australian; Canberra, A.C.T.

18 March 2017 Page 1 of 2 ProQuest

Pages: 3

Number of pages: 0

Publication year: 2001

Publication date: Jul 9, 2001

Year: 2001

Section: Local

Publisher: News Limited

Place of publication: Canberra, A.C.T.

Country of publication: Australia

Publication subject: General Interest Periodicals--Australia

ISSN: 10388761

Source type: Newspapers

Language of publication: English

Document type: NEWSPAPER

ProQuest document ID: 357706284

Document URL:
https://unmtaos.idm.oclc.org/login?URL=?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/357706284?accountid=14689

Copyright: Copyright News Limited Jul 9, 2001

Last updated: 2012-03-02

Database: Global Newsstream

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