About Hieroglyphics

The Egyptians began to form a pictographic written language about 5000 years ago, which they continued to use for more than 3500 years, until about 400 AD. Eventually, the pictures they used to represent words came to represent sounds. These symbols, hieroglyphs, or "sacred inscriptions" were adapted for use in everyday life, in addition to their important religious.

After 400 AD, the Egyptian language was written in the Greek alphabet, with the addition of several extra letters to represent Egyptian sounds that didn't exist in Greek. This form of Egyptian is called Coptic, and was in turn eventually replaced by Arabic, the language spoken in Egypt today. The ancient Egyptian tongue died out, only the hieroglyphics remain to remind us that it ever existed.
For more than 1000 years, the hieroglyphics were little more than mysterious symbols carved on ancient monuments. All kinds of theories abounded: some thought that they recorded magic spells, others secret religious ceremonies. Then, in 1799, Napolean's army uncovered the key. The Rosetta Stone was discovered when Lieutenant Bouchard's men were remodeling the Fortress at Rosetta. The slab of basalt is inscribed with three texts, each in a different script: one in Demotic, one in hieroglyphics, and one in Coptic. Scholars hoped to use the Greek text to translate the others. Twenty-three years later, the young Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion became the first person in thousands of years to read hieroglyphics.

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Sun fall perpendicular on Ramses II's face

The great temple of Abu Simbel, dedicated to the glory of King Ramsses II. Though the temple is officially dedicated to the triad Amon-Ra, Ptah and Ra-Harakhte, its front is dominated by four gigantic statues of the great pharaoh himself. Because of their remote location near the Sudanese border in southern Egypt, the temples were unknown until their rediscovery in 1813. They were first explored in 1817 by the Egyptologist Giovanni Battista Belzoni.
He had this temple built in this otherwise desolate area on the actual site of a much older shrine of a local personification of the god Horus. The facade is one 119 feet wide and 100 feet high, while the colossal statues are 67 feet in height wearing the characteristic nemes head cloth and the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt.
The king is accompanied by some of his wives, sons and daughters who appear in much smaller size beside his legs. Right above the entrance stands a figure of the god Re-Harakhte in a small niche. The top of the facade is crowned by a row of baboons.

The central entrance leads into a large hall with massive pillars fronted by Osiris figures of the king. The most striking feature of the site is that the axis of the temple is specially tilted in such a way so that twice every year, on 22 February and 22 October, the first rays of the morning sun shine down the entire length of the temple-cave to illuminate the back wall of the innermost shrine and the statues of the four Gods seated there. With the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, the temples were threatened with submersion under the rising waters of the reservoir (Lake Nasser). Between 1964 and 1966, a project sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Egyptian government disassembled both temples and reconstructed them on top of the cliff 200 feet above the original site.

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