Egyptology program chicago

These were written in at least four different scripts: Hieroglyphs, Hieratic, Demotic and Coptic. Ancient Egyptian was first written in the Hieroglyphic script, which famously utilizes signs that look like people, animals and natural and manmade objects, but actually represent consonantal and semi-vowel phonemes, groups of phonemes and classifiers.

The earliest texts written in Hieroglyphs, from around BCE to BCE, consisted of names, labels and short accounts without much grammar. Old Egyptian was written in Hieroglyphs and is best known from the funerary texts inscribed inside of royal burial chambers in pyramids and known as Pyramid Texts, and the autobiographies inscribed in private tombs.

Middle Egyptian was written in both Hieroglyphs and Hieratic, a script that utilizes simplified, cursive versions of Hieroglyphic signs, adapted to be written easily and quickly with ink and brush on papyrus or ostraca potsherds or flakes of stone used as writing material.

Hieroglyphs tended to be used for inscriptions on monuments, like royal decrees and stelae, temple inscriptions, autobiographies in tombs, and even the funerary texts on coffins known as Coffin Texts. Hieratic tended to be used for letters, legal documents, accounts and literary texts written on papyri and ostraca.

Late Egyptian was used when scribes wanted to present an approximation of the spoken language, in letters, legal documents, accounts, and some literature.

It could be written in Hieroglyphs, but most often it written in Hieratic on papyri and ostraca. Middle Egyptian continued to be used alongside Late Egyptian, however, for religious texts like the Book of the Dead, historical inscriptions, and even some literary texts, either because they had become canonical, or because they emulated the style and prestige of the canonical texts.

Demotic was no longer written in Hieroglyphs or Hieratic, but instead used an even more cursive set of signs derived from Hieratic that was also called Demotic. Initially Demotic was only used for letters, legal documents and accounts, but in the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods it was also used for literary, historical and religious texts, restricting the use of Middle Egyptian, Hieroglyphs and Hieratic to some traditional religious texts and to temple inscriptions.

One of the highlights of the tour is the visit to Chicago House where you will meet our staff of Egyptologists and hear about their vital work documenting the reliefs and inscriptions of ancient Thebes. We will spend five days in Luxor exploring magnificent temples and tombs. Lanny Bell received his Ph. For the next 12 years he spent nine months a year at Chicago House in Luxor. The activities of the expeditions under his direction have ranged from epigraphy to excavation and conservation.

An expert on the Luxor area, his publications include articles on divine kingship and temple and society in Ancient Egypt, as well as a ground breaking chapter on Luxor Temple in Temples of Ancient Egypt published by Cornell University Press.

The field of Egyptology covers languages and texts, political, social, economic and medical history, religion, archaeology, art and artifacts, from the Pre-Dynastic origins of Egyptian civilization ca. Instruction in Egyptology at The University of Chicago concentrates upon a thorough grounding in the skills necessary for understanding and interpreting the original data of this 4, year civilization: five languages phases—as discrete from one another as Old and Modern English comprising Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian, Demotic, and Coptic—with assorted dialects.

Aside from linguistic and paleographical concerns, the student also examines a wide range of political, social, religious, economic, legal and medical documents from each of these phases.