Recent research indicates neanderthals like Uncle Hairy here were doing cave drawings and paintings as far back as 30,000 or more years ago. If that's so, then there's probably a progression from that to the eventual development of the pictographs and hieroglyphs which later became our first forms of writing.
And for those of you who don't have a copy of the two-volume set of Sir E.A. Wallis Budge's An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary ( Dover Publications Inc., New York) perhaps I should say that there's literally hundreds of hieroglyphs to express various ideas and concepts and words or phrases.
There's also a couple of possible interpretations of these, depending upon whether or not you choose the common one or the more detailed and introspective or intuitive method, but we won't go into all that just now. Let's just say it's an interesting study for anyone who would like to know what those ancient writings actually tell us. And what a lot of them on temples and royal monuments say turns out to be very repetitive and mostly rather boring recitals of the great Pharaoh's accomplishments, both real and imagined, and there's a traditional pattern to all that self-congratulatory advertising. But what we're writing today owes its roots to those people, for sure.
Geez Ray I thought it was you without your glasses.
ReplyDeleteNo, I don't have that much hair, and
ReplyDeleteI can't run that fast either, so it's a good thing those dinosaurs all died off.