Western Civ blog post #2

Hey, Reader, My name is Lane Miller. And today in western civilization I did something a little different.

Today we were instructed to read in our textbook, pages 29-43, that covered the beginning of ancient Egypt. however I had already finished reading this in a prior class, so I just gave it a quick once over and moved on to something else.

Well, what was that? Just on Saturday, I had visited the Penn Museum at the University of Pennsylvania. This is a museum of ancient civilizations, including Egypt. I had spent a lot of time looking at the hieroglyphs on the Egyptian artifacts and this sort of kindled a passion for Egypt and its history. So in class, I found it the perfect time to teach myself hieroglyphics.

So i looked up courses on hieroglyphics and clicked on the first one. After reading the first page I had already learned how to tell which way to read the sentence. First, find a character (i.e. a bird or human) and look to see which way the head is facing. if it is facing <--- this way. You read from left to right and vice versa. I also learned some very rudimentary vocab and translation. For instance, if you showed me the glyphs for "son of the scribe" I could translate it for you. 

I also learned that there are two different ways they work. some of the characters are for the actual thing it represents. Like a picture of a man could literally mean man. On the other hand, there are glyphs that mean a sound, like (SH) as a sound.

So long story short I learned the basics of hieroglyphic translation.