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The glyps fonts are pictorial
representations of objects, buildings, flora, people, fauna,
things that the ancient Egyptian used in their everyday life and
were very familiar to them. The pictographs started to have a
specific meaning in the moment when people felt the needing of a
spoken language, with words and sentences. Then, the Egypt` s
people started to develop a system of phonograms-ideograms
combination; the phonograms are sound-signs spelling out a word
in a system of letters (an alphabetical one) and the ideograms
are sense-signs which used to be added to the spelled-out word
with the purpose of depicting the word` s meaning. This language
had a vocabulary, a grammar and syntax. In the first place, the
hieroglyphs were used for formal secular and religious purposes.
A script, cursive and simpler was developed at the beginning of
the historical period. In this script, each character was one
hieroglyph` s simplified version. Toda, the script is known as
hieratic and used to be very used around 800 BC for literary
texts, business and religious texts. The today demotic is a
script that came from hieratic; the literary and legal
inscriptions as well as the business ones were written using the
demotic. There were also beliefs that, in a way, the hieroglyphs
had a secret meaning, being more than just a popular script and
these beliefs from the time of Diodorus Siculus` visit in Egypt,
in the first century BC. Plotinus, an important philosopher of
the third century considered that the hieroglyphs represented
the Platonic ideas in a visual way, each of them having wisdom
and understanding that reveals to the initiated people a real
knowledge, talking about the things` substance. Today, the glyps
fonts can be seen in museums, on objects from the ancient Egypt.
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