Even before our era, Egypt was a fairly developed cultural state with its own written language. At first, these were separate images-drawings, then - hieroglyphs and identifiers for them. Why did the Egyptians use identification badges? Let's sort it out in order.
The beginning of writing
At the very beginning, the Egyptian writing was a set of pictures, each of which meant what, in fact, she depicted.
The Egyptian wanted to write “man” - he painted a little man, “bird” - he painted a bird, “river” - wavy lines depicting waves.
Such drawings “painted” the walls in dwellings (inside and out) and tombs, household utensils and dishes. There is sky, grass, snakes, birds, people - everything that happened in life, the Egyptians sought to "write."
But why did the Egyptians use identification badges, you ask. It's too early to talk about this, let's first get acquainted with the hieroglyphs.
Hieroglyphs
Writing developed very quickly. It soon became clear that it was impossible to draw everything. Some facts, events and actions present in a person’s life cannot be interpreted graphically, for example, a person’s name. To do this, simplified signs were made from the drawings, which depicted not only a specific word (action), but also the consonants present in this word.
To make it easier, we transfer the experience of the Egyptians into Russian. Let's say the oval "0" is a "ball". Now the sign "0" will mean not only "ball", but also the sounds "cp" in any word. That is, with this sign "0" we can write the words "ball", "breadth", "wider", "Shira", "Shura", etc.
The Egyptians did not indicate vowels on the letter, and signs for consonants were called hieroglyphs. There were more than 700 such letters in one or more sounds in the Egyptian alphabet.
Why did the Egyptians use identification badges? The answers are close.
Identification Badges
It is not difficult to guess that with this method of writing, when only consonants are represented, their combinations or whole words (such hieroglyphs were also), it was very difficult to understand what was written in the message.
Using our example, it would be easy to confuse the sphere with Shura, and the expanse with Lake Shira. This is where it finally becomes clear to us why the Egyptians used identification badges. These were the prompts that stood before the hieroglyph or hieroglyphs and helped to more accurately understand the meaning of the word written by them.
Identifier badges were not read, they carried exclusively semantic load. So, for example, if before “0” we drew wavy lines, then we would have got Lake Shira.