There are many kinds of hieroglyphics, such as the word "wine", which is unitary if the three dots of water are removed, just like a wine bottle without wine.
The character "日" is like a circle with a point in the middle, much like the shape people see when looking directly at the sun.
It is worth mentioning that the original form of Chinese characters was hieroglyphic.
Although modern Chinese characters still retain the characteristics of hieroglyphics, after thousands of years of evolution, they have become far removed from their original images.
Therefore, it does not belong to hieroglyphics, but to morpheme characters of the ideographic system.
In addition, the "head font" and "geometry" of Mayan writing are also the same.
However, hieroglyphics have great limitations.
Because some physical things and abstract things cannot be drawn, its limitations become very great.
Therefore, based on pictographic characters, Chinese characters developed into phonetic characters and other character creation methods were added.
For example, in the six books, there are understanding, referring to things, pictographs, notes, and borrowings.
However, these new methods of character creation must still be based on the original pictographic characters.
It is mainly based on pictographs, combined, omitted or added or deleted symbolic symbols.
The words on the palm-sized stone slab in front of me were definitely hieroglyphics, but they were nothing like the oracle bone inscriptions that Chen Wenzhe knew.
Needless to say, it is definitely not a domestic oracle bone inscription, nor does it seem to have been unearthed in China.
However, this is still hieroglyphics, because hieroglyphs are still easy to recognize.
Moreover, Chen Wenzhe could tell that these hieroglyphics should be very ancient.
They are closer to ancient rock paintings, and more like later pictographs.
However, these are indeed not rock paintings, they should be text.
Of course, if you don't know how to do it, looking at this kind of thing is almost the same as looking at rock paintings.
After all, hieroglyphics are all developed from primitive pictures. No matter how they evolve, they will never deviate from their roots.
Therefore, with Chen Wenzhe's knowledge, he can also see that these are hieroglyphs.
"It's a bit like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs."
Soon, Chen Wenzhe determined that this might be a stone slab from ancient Egypt.
Because many such things have been unearthed in ancient Egypt before.
Especially very ancient rock paintings, many of which have been unearthed in Egypt, are very close to the pictures on this stone slab.
The original rock paintings of ancient Egypt are very old.
Although these rock paintings are not as old as European rock paintings, they have been around longer than Oceanic rock paintings.
Even a lot of time is more than 10,000 years old, making it one of the areas with the longest persistence of rock art in the world.
Based on the style and art, the color of the stone scales, the types of animals represented, clothing and weapons, etc., it is not difficult to determine where the rock paintings are, or to determine the hieroglyphs in that area.
For example, ancient Egyptian rock paintings can be divided into four phases according to their style.
The first is the ancient buffalo period, about 9000 BC to 3500 BC.
The second stage is the period of herding bulls, about 3500 BC to 1500 BC.
The third is the Horse Period, which lasted from about 1500 BC to the 2nd century AD.
The fourth period is the camel period, which began around the 2nd century.
These four periods are very distinctive and directly determine the productivity and combat effectiveness at that time.
The Saharan rock paintings in Africa are located on the Algier Plateau in the middle of the Sahara not far from the border between Algeria and Libya. It is recognized by scholars around the world as "the largest prehistoric art museum in the world."
By comparison, the slate hieroglyphs in Chen Wenzhe's hands are the closest to African civilization.
However, hieroglyphs are fundamentally pictures.
Therefore, we must strictly distinguish them, as they have similarities with rock paintings or pictographs in other areas.
For example, the hieroglyphs of ancient Yinsan are also derived from the development of pictures and are mainly distributed in the hilly areas of the Vindia Mountains in the central part of Yinsan.
The oldest rock paintings in the world can be traced back to the Upper Paleolithic Age, 20,000 years ago.
They are found all over the world and have different styles.
According to style, Yinsan rock paintings can be roughly divided into naturalistic rock paintings, which mainly depict individual wild animals and have simple and realistic shapes.
Stylized rock paintings began to extract lines from color blocks, using simple and thick lines to outline the outlines of people and animals.
Or it can be a silhouette-style flat painting, combined with a thick line of shallow drawing.
The animals are more realistic, while the characters are graphic and geometric.
Eclectic petroglyphs, mostly depicting horses, elephants or on foot and the use of metal.
The most important thing is that the ancients paid special attention to the wild beasts they domesticated.
Therefore, no matter which area's rock paintings, or hieroglyphs, are indispensable, they must have animal shapes.
For example, the Dawenkou Culture, this cultural site is one of the important remains of the late Neolithic Age.
It was named after it was first discovered at the Dawenkou site in Qilutai County. Its distribution range borders the Bohai Sea in the north, Jiangsu and Anhui in the south, and the Nanhe River in the west.
It began in 4300 BC and developed into the Longshan Culture around 2500 BC.
The pottery characteristics of the Dawenkou Culture are obvious, and the custom of tooth extraction during adolescence is prevalent among residents.
The social and economic development of Dawenkou Culture has developed to a relatively high level.
At the very least, many of the engraved symbols that have been discovered are considered to be the precursors of hieroglyphics.
From the animal bones, pottery, and patterns on stone tools unearthed later, it can be determined that semi-pictorial pictures and patterns and symbols appeared in our country tens of thousands of years ago.
Of course, there are also many animal-shaped rock paintings and glyphs.
Let’s talk about ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. This is quite different from other hieroglyphs.
Even very ancient pictographs similar to rock paintings have their own civilizational characteristics.
For example, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs developed into a system around 4000 BC (6000 years ago) after drawings and patterns developed tens of thousands of years ago.
In other words, it was during this period that the hieroglyphics broke away from the rock paintings and became real writing, which is the sacred script.
Like Sumerian script, ancient Seal script and our country's oracle bone inscriptions, it was independently produced from the simplest pictures and patterns in primitive society.
But this writing was initially just a pictorial writing, and later developed into hieroglyphics.
Later Egyptian hieroglyphs were composed of three types of symbols: ideographic, phonetic and radical.
Ideographic symbols are the use of pictures to represent concepts or definitions of something.
But ideograms cannot represent the pronunciation of words, so the ancient Egyptians invented phonetic symbols.
Phonetic symbols are also some graphics, which have a total of 24 consonants. On this basis, a large number of double consonants and triple consonants are formed.
For example, the mouth has a single consonant and makes the sound "y", the swallow has a double consonant and makes the "wr" sound, the beetle has a triple consonant and makes the "hpr" sound, etc.
However, these pronunciations have more than one meaning. In order to distinguish them, the ancient Egyptians invented radical symbols.
The function of this radical symbol is mainly to distinguish symbols from different categories, similar to the radicals in Chinese characters.