Literacy in Egypt

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topics being covered in our page!

• The Rosetta Stone
• Math In Egypt
• Literacy In Egypt
• External Links 

The Rosetta stone

• The Rosetta stone is the way that scientists learned how to read Heiroglyphics
• The Rosetta stone was rediscovered in 1799 by an army that was going through Egypt.
• The Rosetta stone is made of Egyptian granodiorite stele.
• On the Rosetta stone there are three languages.  These include: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, ancient Greek, and Egyptian demotic script.
• The Rosetta stone was originally held in a temple in Egypt, but later, in early Christian periods, or medieval times it was moved to help build fort Julien near the town of Rashid.
• The Rosetta stone is currently displayed in the British museum.
• Jean-Francois Champalion was the first person to decipher the stone in 1822
• The Rosetta stone is 45 inches tall, 25.5 inches wide, and 27.9 inches thick.
• The Rosetta stone was found by a french soldier, but france lost that war, and britain demanded that france gave them the stone.
• The stone was found by the anciant Egyptian town of Rosetta.

http://www.crystalinks.com/rosetta.html

Math in Ancient Egypt

How numbers were represented in ancient Egypt!

             Back in ancient Egypt, numbers could be written in hieroglyphs or in Hieratic. The representation the number system was always numbered 1 to 10. The number 1 was decided by a simple stroke. The number 2 was represented by two strokes. The number 3 is represented by 3 strokes and so on. The numbers 10, 100, 1000, 10,000 and 1,000,000 had their own hieroglyphs. Number 10 is represented as cattle, number 100 is represented by a bundled rope, the number 1000 is represented by a flower, the number 10,000 is represented by a human finger or a small stick, the number 100,000 is represented by a frog, and a million was represented by a god with his hands raised. 

       Ancient Egyptians also had symbols for math. For +, x, and - they used feet pointed in to the direction to represent the equation.

http://gwydir.demon.co.uk/jo/numbers/egypt/fractions.htm                    http://www.eyelid.co.uk/numbers.htm

     Fractions were used mostly in counting crops. Most fractions were represented by parts of a pharaoh’s eye, except ½ which was represented by a piece of line folded in two.  Egyptians used fractions in a form of 1/n. A frequently used fraction was 2/3 it was frequently used in mathematical texts. 2/3 was represented by a mouth with 2 different sized strokes.  A special hieroglyph used was ¾ and was rarely found in ancient texts. The rest of the fractions were represented by a mouth super-imposed over a number.

Here’s a link to some fun fractions http://gwydir.demon.co.uk/jo/numbers/egypt/fractions.htm

Literacy in ancient Egypt

     In ancient egypt writing was one of the most popular things. It was so important  because it was used in many instances such as what scribes would do, which was record important information.

Impact

• The writing, math, and literacy all had a big impact
• For writing it made it so they could communicate, write letters, teach, and record important events. 

Writing

• Called Hieroglyphics
• A series of about 6000 characters (symbols that were used for communication)
• After being simplified there were around 3000 characters, later on it was cut down to 500 symbols.
• dates back to 3200 B.C. (approximately 5210 years ago)
• the symbols represented words or sounds. The same symbol sometimes was used in different contexts.
• Later on they created another way of communication called hieratic, it was similar to cursive handwriting and it was much faster and easier.
•  In the 1st century AD, the Coptic alphabet started to be included with the Demotic script. It was a changed Greek alphabet with the add on of some Demotic signs.
• Only a small handful of priests could read them, because they kept it a secret.  No one was able to read it for another 1500 years.

Language

• written egyptain language dated back to around 3400 B.C. ( making it one of the earliest languages dating back)-egyptian was spoken umntil the 7^th century A.D. in the form of coptic.
•  The modern day language is egyptain arabic, which gradually replaced cotic.
• Old Egyptian was spoken for some 500 years from 2600 BC onwards
• Middle Egyptian was spoken from about 2000 BC for a further 700 years

http://www.artisansofleisuretraveler.com/blog/2009/04/egypt_a_great_family_travel_destination.php

External links

Here is a link to some fun ancient Egyptian math problems! http://www.eyelid.co.uk/maths2.htm 

follow this link to see how to write you name in Hieroglyphics!!

http://www.discoveringegypt.com/e-name.htm