Ancient Egyptians & Mesopotamians
Comparison of Cuneiform and Hieroglyphics.
What's cuneiform and hieroglyphics?
The Origins
- Hieroglyphics is found to be invented about 3,500BC
- Cuneiform is thought to be invented between 3,400BC-3,300BC
Did you know that Cuneiform wasn't translated until the 1800's? That's pretty cool.
Hieroglyphics
Cuneiform
Hieroglyphics
How were they created?
Hieroglyphics
Hieroglyphics is a very picture like alphabet. It was used on many tombs, walls, and paintings. It was the first invented of the two forms of writing. The Mesopotamian's and Egyptian's were very committed to their gods, they never knew what they looked like but thought they knew through stories based down. To keep record of these stories they started to draw the pictures or symbols that they were represented by. It started to get more and more known and used.
Cuneiform
Whats so cool about these forms of writing?
Hieroglyphics is a very interesting form of writing. Its very important as well (to the Egyptians at least). The Ancient Egyptians were the users of hieroglyphics. While looking into Ancient Egypt you can definitely tell it was important. It was just about as important as the pyramids. Without hieroglyphics we wouldn't know a lot about the Ancient Egyptians. Also, a cool thing about hieroglyphics is they had certain pictures to describe a role. So a mother would have a certain picture and daughter would have a different one.
Cuneiform was used by the Mesopotamian's. Just hieroglyphics, cuneiform is one of the earliest known ways of writing. We use writing just about everyday and for almost everything. Without it who knows where we would be or what we would be doing. It would be crazy. After translating cuneiform we got to know the stories of the Mesopotamian's. If we were to never translate it we wouldn't know as much about them.
Similarities & Differences
Similarities:
- Sometimes the two forms of writing spilled into each other. Sometimes cuneiform used picture type characters and hieroglyphics combined symbols to create words.
- Both were a form of writing.
- Both ended up getting translated
Differences:
- Cuneiform used symbols to form words while hieroglyphics used pictures to represent words
- Hieroglyphics changed every few years and new pictures were constintaly added, cuneiform for the most part stayed the same throughout the years (it did remove some symbols here and there too).
- Cuneiform had around 600 or so symbols where as hieroglyphics had 1,000+