Customer Reviews

Hieroglyphics: The Writings of Ancient Egypt

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book, while not covering the actual text of the language, covers a very important component of Middle Egyptian: The Determinatives. A lot of words in Middle Egyptian were spelled the same, and the only thing that told them apart was the picture that said what they were. This was also important for showing if something was a statement or a proper name. Very good addition to any hieroglyph book collection!

Maria Carmela Betro's Hieroglyphics provides a handbook to the hieroglyphic writing of the Nile Valley, using an organization by symbol to lend to a dictionary of history and explanation. An amazing guide to a written language that blends phonic symbols with pictograms.

I am torn regarding this book. While it is an exellent study of the individual signs, covering several stages in the evolution of the particular glyph in hieroglyph, hieratic, and demotic characters, it lacks grammer and even word structure aside from a fraction of a page in the introduction. If you are a student of hieroglyphics in the history of the Egyptian culture this could be a most useful book. It is also entertaining and informative to the casual reader, but a student of Egyptian grammer would do better to look elsewhere. Perhaps to Gardiner's "Egyptian Grammar." Betro's book is not, in my opinion, the "complete handbook" it claims to be.

This is a very interesting book if you are interested in the background and history of each individual hieroglyphic sign. It's a great supplement to introductory books about the ancient Egyptian language - most books only arrange the signs into families or types and don't tell you much about individual signs. If other books about hieroglyphs leave you hungry for more, then this may be the book for you.