4. Writing

Abstract

‘Writing’ focuses on Egyptian writing. Egyptian hieroglyphs consist of ideograms and phonetic signs representing the sound of all or part of a spoken word. The connections between writing and art were therefore much stronger in pharaonic Egypt than in many other cultures. The Narmer Palette reveals some interesting facts about the origins of Egyptian writing. The general assumption was that the first examples of the Sumerian cuneiform writing system appeared significantly earlier than the Egyptian hieroglyphs. This assumption was somewhat unravelled by archaeological discoveries made at the excavations at tomb U-j during the 1990s. What can the use and abuse of texts in Egyptology tell us?