История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 106 стр.

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Pythagorean philosophies. It is unlikely, however, that therewas any well-defined

Hermetic community, or “church.”

Hermetism was extensively cultivated by the Arabs, and through them it

reached and influenced the West. There are frequent allusions to Hermes

Trismegistos in late medieval and in Renaissance literature.

HIEROGLYPHIC WRITING

Hieroglyphic writing is a system that employs characters in the form of

pictures. These individual signs, called hieroglyphs, may be read either as pictures,

as symbols for pictures, or as symbols for sounds.

The name hieroglyphic (from the Greek word for “sacred carving”) is first

encountered in the writings of Diodorus Siculus (1st century BC).Earlier, other

Greeks had spoken of sacred signs when referring to Egyptian writing. Among the

Egyptian scripts, the Greeks labeled as hieroglyphic the script that they found on

temple walls and public monuments, in which the characters were pictures sculpted

in stone. The Greeks distinguished this script from two other forms of Egyptian

writing that were written with ink on papyrus or on other smooth surfaces. These

were known as the hieratic, which was still employed during the time of the

ancient Greeks for religious texts, and the demotic, the cursive script used for

ordinary documents.

Hieroglyphic, in the strict meaning of the word, designates only the writing

on Egyptian monuments. The word has, however, been applied for about 100 years

to the writing of other peoples, insofar asit consists of picture signs used as writing

characters. The name hieroglyphics is, for example, always used to designate the

scripts ofthe Indus civilization and of the Hittites, who also possessed other scripts,

in addition to the Mayan, the Incan, and Easter Island writing forms, and also the

signs on the Phaistos Disk on Crete. Colloquially, the word hieroglyphics has been

extended to mean any sort of illegible or barely legible writing.