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By: The Scribe on September, 2007
For anyone who is even vaguely familiar with Egyptian hieroglyphs, it’s fairly clear to see that the writing process in ancient Egypt was a little more laborious and involved than the effort it takes to write down words today using the Latin alphabet. In fact, writing with hieroglyphs was such a time-consuming process that even the ancient Egyptians got tired of how long it took to get a short note down… and much in the same way that a person today might take notes using standard shorthand notation, ancient Egypt had its own “short-hand” form of hieroglyphs! This was known as the hieratic script.
The hieratic writing system was developed alongside the hieroglyphic system, essentially for the purpose of allowing scribes to write information down quickly, without resorting to the laborious process of writing and drawing hieroglyphs. It is important to note, however, that hieratic is not a derivative of hieroglyphic writing – they were simply scripts developed in parallel, each for their own specific purpose.
The earliest appearance of hieratic came around 3200 BC, and was used for a variety of purposes: legal texts, personal letters, administrative documents, historical accounts, literary writings, medical texts, mathematical theorem, and also religious documents. In fact, when the usage of the more popularly known hieroglyphs and the lesser known hieratic scripts are compared – it isn’t hard to see that hieratic was actually a far more important type of writing than hieroglyphs, since hieratic was used on a daily basis for everyday living.
Hieratic was also the first writing system that students would learn when they entered into an educational program in ancient Egypt, and there are plenty of surviving examples of students’ practice texts from thousands of years ago. It was typically written with ink and a reed brush onto papyrus, stone, wood, or shards of ostraca. On occasion, hieratic would be used to write a religious text onto the linens of someone being mummified.
Unlike hieroglyphs, hieratic was always written from right to left in horizontal lines, both so that the scribe’s hand would not smudge what he had just written, as well as to increase writing speed. However, even with the hieratic serving as a shorthand form of writing, there were two variations on the script – a relaxed, businesslike form that was used for administrative documents, and an uncial bookhand-form that was used for more important literary, religious, or scientific texts. Comparatively, it would be like English writers using cursive writing for important documents, and using printed letters for everything else.
In addition, personal letters had their own form of shorthand hieratic, using a highly cursive and stylized version of the script – in these texts, there are plenty of abbreviated words and phrases, which is not unusual to find in any modern language today! By 200 AD, hieratic had been demoted to use primarily for religious texts, with a new non-hieroglyphic form of writing called demotic taking its place.
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Tomorrow: A (French) Pirate of the Caribbean
By: The Scribe on September, 2007
It is no secret that the Roman Empire once controlled more territory than any other empire in history – and it now appears that perhaps the secret to Roman success has been revealed! No, it wasn’t impeccable strategy, courageous generals, or unparallel war tactics… instead, the success of the Roman armies hinged on one crucial element: they always had warm toes.
Indeed, if there is one thing that’s important when it comes to war, it’s the comfort of the soldiers – after all, if you’re freezing cold, how can you possibly swing your sword at full strength? So, it appears that the Roman armies who went northward to conquer England took all necessary precautions to ensure that they were properly equipped for battle – including bringing along some very heavy woolen socks.
This is now known because one of the artifacts found at an excavation in Durham, England, was a highly unusual Roman razor handle: it was 5 centimeters high, made of copper alloy, and was shaped like a human leg and foot. The very unusual part is that the foot is wearing a common soldier’s sandal – but it also has a thick, woolly sock on at the same time! Socks and sandals together in Roman times? Clearly, comfort came before fashion on the northern frontier.
However, whether it was fashionable among the ranks to wear socks and sandals or whether the soldiers were simply protecting themselves against the harsh cold of the British north, there is one piece of evidence from another archaeological site that suggests Roman soldiers took their foot care very seriously – a letter was once found at the Roman fort of Vindolanda near Hadrian’s wall, in which a soldier actually wrote home to ask for… more socks!
Turns out socks are a handy gift after all…
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Tomorrow: Egyptian hieratic script
By: The Scribe on September, 2007
In the ancient wilderness of China, India and Vietnam, there once existed a very special monkey… actually, he wasn’t a monkey at all, but a giant, 10-foot-tall ape called Gigantopithecus. Coming in at 2 to 3 times bigger than any modern gorilla, the Gigantopithecus was the largest ape to ever have existed – and for some reason, it died out rather suddenly about 100,000 years ago.
As terrifying as it might have been to meet this giant primate on a stroll through the forest, early humans wouldn’t have needed to fear the ape for anything other than its size – all indications are that the Gigantopithecus species subsisted on mostly bamboo, with seasonal plants to supplement its diet! Researchers know this to be the case because, while fossil evidence for these enormous apes is scarce, plenty of huge molars have been found that are nearly one square inch in size.
In total, palaeoanthropologists have three mandibles, or jaw bones, of the giant apes, as well as hundreds of teeth. Based on its size, Gigantopithecus would have weighed at least half a ton – which seems to suggest that the extinction of the species must have come as a result of climate change, and not from being hunted by other animals. These primates were, quite simply, too big to fear threats from predators!
One theory is that Gigantopithecus was a victim of a bamboo crisis, since bamboo crops tend to go through cycles of growth – every twenty to sixty years, bamboo forests tend to experience a shift and die out before regaining crop strength. It is possible that competition with the area’s pandas and other bamboo-eating creatures may have simply caused the short straw to be drawn by these apes.
As one might expect, Cryptozoologists maintain that one Gigantopithecus species – there are three distinctly known species in total – did not die out, and instead managed to survive by adapting to its environment… and which is now known by the more popular names of ‘Bigfoot’ and ‘Yeti’!
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Tomorrow: More Ancient Standard
By: The Scribe on September, 2007
It seems that 55 million years ago, some ancient British bogs had a serious case of indigestion. All across the countryside, bogs were releasing large belches of methane gas, which is a greenhouse gas now known to be more powerful than carbon dioxide – and as a result, the bogs probably contributed on a large scale of a period of global warming.
How can modern wetlands reveal clues about global warming from 55 million years ago? Researchers were able to take sediment cores from deep inside several wetland areas in Kent, and measure the internal chemistry of the ancient layers. The organic compound levels that were produced by bacteria were then used to estimate the ancient levels of methane-consuming microbes that lived in the bogs.
The results of the study showed that there were significantly more methane-eating microbes in Kentish wetlands around 55 million years ago than at any other period, and for this to have happened, there must have been an awful lot of methane emissions coming from the bogs themselves. Based on what is already known about ancient climate in this area, the region probably first began to warm up, causing plant material to decay much more rapidly than usual – which, as a result, triggered the increased methane levels and “burps” from Kent’s wetlands.
If Britain’s other wetlands had a similar response to the ones studied from Kent… well, the result would have been catastrophic, with enormous amounts of methane gas being released into the atmosphere, thus causing a rapid acceleration of the global warming process.
Essentially, burping bogs were one of the main factors for a severe period of global warming… and although scientists hope that there is not a repeat of this ancient catastrophe in the future, it might not hurt to invest in a few extra bottles of Febreze, just in case…
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Tomorrow: Giant Apes.
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