Harsimaja t1_iqxn64t wrote on October 3, 2022 at 9:04 PM

Reply to comment by Dicho83 in Archaeologists hail ‘dream discovery’ as sarcophagus of Ptah-em-wia is unearthed near Cairo by MeatballDom

Ancient Egyptian civilisation literally lasted for most of history (in the written sense).

Dicho83 t1_iqxs2ty wrote on October 3, 2022 at 9:37 PM

Ancient Egyptian civilization also existed before known written history.

Largely, because some Pharos had writings from previous eras intentionally destroyed or defaced.

So we really don't know how old Egyptian civilization really was, other than surviving references from other post-writen word civilizations....

Harsimaja t1_iqxsqr0 wrote on October 3, 2022 at 9:42 PM

Well, Egyptian writing ‘proper’ seems to have developed gradually from proto-writing over the course of the 4th millennium BC, so in a sense we have as good an idea as can likely be well-defined. We don’t have the very earliest ‘fully written’ records (and we’d never be able to prove they were first if we could even clarify what that meant) but we do have some bounds… and since the writing system seems to have gradually expanded to encompass the whole language, it’s fuzzy in reality in any case.

EDIT: I suppose one could argue that the moment Egyptian developed the monoliterals, it was technically a full writing system. Not sure how we’d ever possibly know exactly when that was, though.