A noted linguist examines extinct languages, from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the mysteries of as-yet undeciphered writings, in this scholarly work. While certain ancient languages were passed down continuously through the ages, many others were ignored for centuries. When scholars began to decipher these extinct languages in the early nineteenth century, they uncovered previously inaccessible riches of knowledge and history. Yet much work remains to be done on undeciphered scripts that continue to tantalize and perplex us today. In Extinct Languages, linguist Johannes Friedrich guides readers through the fascinating world of recovered systems of writing, including Egyptian and Hittite hieroglyphs, Babylonian cuneiform, and others. He also explains the methodology and principles behind the deciphering process that will one day crack ancient mysteries such as the Indus Valley script.
Frequently asked questions
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes, you can access Extinct Languages by Johannes Friedrich in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Historical & Comparative Linguistics. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
I. The Three Great Decipherments in the Study of the Ancient Orient
1. The Egyptian Hieroglyphics
Egypt is the homeland of the mysterious pictographic characters which even the ancient Greeks contemplated with reverent wonderment and called hieroglyphics, “sacred signs,” because they suspected that they contained secret wisdom of the magician priests of Egypt. With the obelisks in Rome also, this notion of a magic significance of the hieroglyphics survived among the beliefs of the Occident, and also profound minds of modern times permitted themselves to be influenced by it. Without a belief in a certain mysterious wisdom hidden within the hieroglyphics, a work of art like Mozart’s Magic Flute would be inconceivable. This is why it is fitting that a presentation of the decipherments be introduced by a discussion of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. For the sake of clarity, also a brief geographic and historical survey will be useful.
(a) Land and People, History and Culture
The cultural situation on African soil is rather simple; in the ancient days there was only one known civilized race there, the Egyptians whose mighty edifices and the pictographic writing on them still fill the modern visitor with no less amazement than they inspired in the ancient Greeks.
Even in remote antiquity, Egypt was known as a gift of the Nile. Only the Nile Valley, about 500 miles long but only a few miles in width, is arable land, but extremely fertile at that, nurtured by the floods of the Nile, and flanked by barren desert on both sides. The Egyptians seem to have been a race of mixed blood, of African and Semitic-Asiatic extraction; their language was a remote kin of the Semitic tongues. They considered themselves the original inhabitants of the land, and actually no other race can be demonstrated to have lived there before them.
Originally, there must have been two separate kingdoms in Egypt: A Northern kingdom (Lower Egypt) in the Delta, and a Southern one (Upper Egypt) in the narrow Nile Valley, extending all the way to Assuan, at the first cataracts. King Menes of the Southern Kingdom united both realms about 2850 B.C., and that event marked the beginning of the first of the thirty dynasties into which the Greek-Egyptian priest Manetho (about 280 B.C.) divided the entire history of the Egyptian monarchs up to Alexander. Beginning with the 3rd Dynasty, the city of Memphis, on the boundary line between the two original kingdoms (in the vicinity of modern Cairo), was the capital of the Old Kingdom. The 4th Dynasty included the great pyramid builders, Cheops, Chefren and Mycerinus, and the era of the 5th Dynasty marks the beginning of the specific worship of the sun god Re. The reign of the 6th and 7th Dynasties (about 2350–2050 B.C.) was a period of political weakness.
The Middle Kingdom introduced a new golden age, beginning with the 11th Dynasty. The city of Thebes, in the south, was the capital in those days. The political heyday of this era was represented by the reign of King Sesostris II, conqueror of Nubia (1878–1841 B.C.), and the cultural high point by his son, Amenemhet III (1840–1792 B.C.). A new decline ensued with the invasion of the Hyksos (15–16th Dynasties—about 1670–1570 B.C.), an Asiatic race of barbarians whose chief god is known to us under the Egyptian name Šth (Seth) and was a Near-Eastern weather deity.
The expulsion of the Hyksos by Amosis (1570–1545 B.C.) marks the beginning of the New Kingdom (about 1600– 715 B.C.). Thutmosis I (1524–about 1505 B.C.) and above all Thutmosis III (1502–1448 B.C.) were great conquerors on Asiatic soil. Thutmosis III conquered Palestine, and in a battle at Karkhemish, at the bend of the Euphrates, he defeated the Hurrians, a race powerful in Northern Syria. Thus he created an Asiatic province of Egypt, which included Palestine and Syria and remained in existence for a long time. Also Egypt was unable to escape the influence of the highly advanced Syrian civilization; it manifested itself materially in the importation of clothes, furniture, etc., and culturally in an acquaintance with Semitic deities, such as Astarte and Baal, and in the many Semitic words incorporated into the Egyptian language.
The rule of Egypt over Syria did not last forever. Under Amenophis III (1413–1377 B.C.) and Amenophis IV (1377–1358 B.C.), Syria suffered heavily from the attacks of the
abiru, an alien race of nomads, assumed to have been the Hebrews. An eloquent picture of this struggle is furnished by the correspondence of these two rulers with their Syrian vassals and with independent monarchs in Asia. This correspondence was found in the archives of El Amarna, Egypt, residence of Amenophis IV, in 1887, and to the amazement of the science of the late 19th century, it was found to have been written not in Egyptian, but in Akkadian (Babylonian), on clay tablets, in cuneiform script—because Akkadian was the language of general communication in that era.
The Egyptians soon had a new enemy to fight, the race of the Hittites, of Asia Minor, who took the place of the Hurrians in northernmost Syria shortly after 1400 B.C. Ramses I (1318–1317 B.C.), Sethos I (1317–1301 B.C.) and notably Ramses II (1301–1234 B.C.) had to fight bitter battles against the Hittites for Syria. Also the battle of Kadesh (1296 B.C.), hailed by Ramses II in a long epic poem as a great Egyptian victory, failed to bring a final decision. Ultimately, a peace treaty with the Hittite king
attušili III, preserved in an Akkadian version in cuneiform script in the Hittite state archives in Bogazköy, and in an Egyptian version in the temple of Ammon in Thebes, led to a mutual recognition of the political status quo. The long reign of Ramses II was otherwise another golden age of Egypt.
A new danger threatened the civilization of the ancient Orient about 1200 B.C.: An invasion of barbaric Indo-European races from Europe, whom the Egyptians called “Sea Peoples.” Their first, and most powerful, attack completely destroyed the Hittite empire. The Egyptians were able, under Ramses III (1197–1165 B.C.), to defend their own country at least, but they irrevocably lost Syria and Palestine where indigenous Semitic kingdoms arose then. A political decline of Egypt ensued. The rule of the Ethiopian kings Sheshonk, Taharka, and others (1oth-7th centuries B.C.) was followed by a short-lived conquest by Assyria (670–663 B.C.), another era of independence under the monarchs Psammetichus I, Necho and Amasis (663–525 B.C.), and then came the conquest of the land by the Persians (525 B.C.) whose place was taken by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C., and by Rome in 30 B.C.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to present here a more detailed account of Egyptian civilization; for such information, the reader is referred to Ägypten und ägyptisches Leben im Altertum* by Erman-Ranke (Tübingen, 1923). There he will find more information on the religion of Egypt with its richly diversified pantheon of numerous, partly animal-headed, deities (Re, Ammon, Isis, etc.), its strongly developed belief in life after death (Osiris, ruler of the dead in the underworld in the west), as well as on Egyptian architecture, with the pyramids of the Old Kingdom and the great temples and pillared halls of the Middle and New Kingdoms, on Egyptian science, mathematics, medicine, etc.
(b) The Principles of the Egyptian Writing
The script and system of writing of Egypt are the very important cultural products which command our closer attention at this point. Let it be mentioned in this connection, first and above all, that the Egyptians were the first users of a sort of paper as writing material; it was manufactured from pressed stalks of the papyrus reed, and paper still bears the name of that reed even in our modern languages. Their writing utensil was a kind of brush, made of rushes, which they dipped into black or red ink. The direction of writing was not fixed; it seldom ran in the direction to which we are accustomed (it is merely our custom to print Egyptian texts mostly from left to right, for our own convenience), but in most cases horizontally from right to left, although often also from top to bottom, in which case, too, the vertical columns followed from right to left. It is to be noted that all the pictures of human beings and animals face toward the beginning of the line, also the feet walk in that direction, and the hands are stretched out so as to point that way.
About the written characters of the Egyptian script, it must be stated first of all, in general, that the pictographic script, to which the Greek Clemens Alexandrinus (died after 210 A.D.) already referred as hieroglyphics (“sacred signs”), was chiefly the script used on the monuments, but simpler, more cursive forms developed at a very early date for writing on papyrus. These simplified forms more or less lost their pictorial character and became similar ...
Table of contents
Cover
Title Page
Contents
Introduction
I. The Three Great Decipherments in the Study of the Ancient Orient
II. The Decipherment and Study of Other Scripts and Languages of the Old World
III. Principles of the Methodology of the Decipherment of Extinct Scripts and Languages
