Class 7 English Question Answers | Chapter 12 Solutions | The Egyptians Invent Writing|Fullnoteshub

A. 

1. What have the Europeans learnt from the ancient Egyptians ?

Ans :  The Europeans had learnt a lot from the ancient Egyptians including farming , irrigation , building temples , making calender and also the art of writing.

3. How and by whom was the Rosetta stone discovered ?

Ans :  The Rosetta stone was discovered by a young French officer while exploring the ruins of the Nile delta.

4. Give a brief description of the Rosetta stone .

Ans :  The Rosetta stone was discovered by a young French officer while exploring the ruins of the Nile delta. Like everything else in Egypt it was also covered with little figures . But this particular slab of black basalt was different from anything that had been discovered before as it carried inscriptions in three scripts one of which was ancient Greek .

5. Who was Champollion ? How did his work help scholars to rediscover the history of ancient Egypt ?

Ans :  Champollion was a French professor .

As Champollion was able to discover the meaning of fourteen little figures embedded upon the Rosetta stone by the year 1823, it helped the scholars to rediscover the history of ancient Egypt.

6. In what ways was the ancient Egyptian writing different from pictorial or sign language ?

Ans :  The ancient Egyptian writing was an ingenious system of writing consisting of symbols to represent sounds and words , invented close to ten thousand years ago to preserve the spoken word .Each symbol used in Egyptian hieroglyphics meant a great deal more than the object which they represent making it different from pictorial or sign language .

7. How was the picture of an object transformed over years into a symbol representing a sound ? Explain with an example from the text ?

Ans :  It was called ” phonetic writing ” a system of characters  which reproduces the sound of the spoken word and which make it possible for us to translate all our spoken words into a written form,with the help of only a few dots and dashes and pothooks .

For example – Let us consider a picture of man with a ‘saw’ . The word ‘saw’ either means a certain tool which we would find in carpenter’s shop or it means the past tense of the verb ‘to see’ .First it had meant only the particular tool which it represented.Then it became the past participle of the verb .After several hundred years , the Egyptians lost sight of both these meanings and the picture came to stand for a single letter , the  letter S.

8. In what ways did the invention of writing help the people of Egypt ?

Ans :  The invention of writing helped the people of Egypt in sending messages to friends, to keep business accounts and also to keep a record of the history of their country.

B. 

1. (a) How was Egypt deprived  of  its independence ?

Ans: As Egypt was captured by the Romans in the first century BC , it got deprived of its  independence.

(b) Why does the writer say that ‘Egypt had become a store-house filled with important historical documents ‘ ?

Ans:  The walls of the temples in Egypt and even the palaces and endless reams of flat sheets were full of strange little pictures ,due to which  the writer had mentioned Egypt as a store-house filled with important historical documents .

(c) Why could no one decipher these documents ?

Ans :  As  even the last of the Egyptians priests who had understood  the mysterious holy art of making such pictures had died several years before , the writer says that  no one could decipher these documents.

Chapter 12 –  https://bit.ly/3Y5LYxU