Where did hieroglyphs come from?

[Northern_Piper]

How did the system of Egyptian hieroglyphs develop? do we have any surviving fragments of ‘proto-hieroglyphs’? did the system of hieroglyphs evolve over the centuries, so that an inscription can be dated from the style of hieroglyphs, or was the system fairly static?

[naita]

Wikipedia: Egyptian_hieroglyphs#History_and_evolution

Hieroglyphs emerged from the preliterate artistic traditions of Egypt. For example, symbols on Gerzean pottery from ca. 4000 BCE resemble hieroglyphic writing. For many years the earliest known hieroglyphic inscription was the Narmer Palette, found during excavations at Hierakonpolis (modern Kawm al-Ahmar) in the 1890s, which has been dated to ca. 3200 BCE. However, in 1998, a German archaeological team under Günter Dreyer excavating at Abydos (modern Umm el-Qa’ab) uncovered tomb U-j of a Predynastic ruler, and recovered three hundred clay labels inscribed with proto-hieroglyphs, dating to the Naqada IIIA period of the 33rd century BCE. The first full sentence written in hieroglyphs so far discovered was found on a seal impression found in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen at Umm el-Qa’ab, which dates from the Second Dynasty. In the era of the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom, about 800 hieroglyphs existed. By the Greco-Roman period, they numbered more than 5,000.

[CalMeacham]

They came from Thoth. Didn’t they teach you any religion in school?

His roles in Egyptian mythology were many. Thoth served as a mediating power, especially between good and evil, making sure neither had a decisive victory over the other.[27] He also served as scribe of the gods,[28] credited with the invention of writing and alphabets (i.e. hieroglyphs) themselves.[29]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoth

[Simplicio]

How much has the language changed over the years. Obvoiusly no non-scholars read or write in hieroglyphcis anymore, but could a speaker of coptic Egyptian travel to 3300 BC and have any hope of understanding the spoken language?

[Peter_Morris]

@Northern_Piper

How did the system of Egyptian hieroglyphs develop?

A hieroglyph is a Rebus. You know the game, where you say the pictures aloud to make a phrase? A picture of an eyeball, a wood saw, and an ewe can be read as “I saw you.” Hieroglyphs work the same way.

It’s a bit more complex, because it also includes ideograms to distinguish between various words that sound alike.

do we have any surviving fragments of ‘proto-hieroglyphs’? did the system of hieroglyphs evolve over the centuries, so that an inscription can be dated from the style of hieroglyphs, or was the system fairly static?

Yes, it changed over time. When first invented, there were a few hundred standard symbols in use. Over centuries, this grew to several thousands. Each of them represented a specific syllable.

And then much later, they had a revolutionary idea. They invented a simplified system, using just 24 glyphs, from which it was possible to build any word.