The Religious Symbolic Characteristics Of Hieroglyphs

Ancient Egyptian culture played an important role in human history. Hieroglyphsis an ancient script with mature picture and phoneme.There were still other scriptssuch as hieratic,demotic and Coptic in Egyptian history.. Hieroglyphs was a kind ofvisual representation which usually appeared on monuments of public locations, andwas used to record monuments texts,religious and historic texts.The other scripts wereused in business and administrative texts.The esthetic and function of hieroglyphs isinfluenced greatly by religion thought. It is an important representative symbolswhich appeared in decorum of religion.According to modern Archaeology, ancient Egyptian religion has one main Godand other minor Gods. And it has mature conception of spirit immortality. The famousthe Book of Dead guide dead spirit in other world to pass all kinds of adventures andreach to another start point of life. Ancient Egyptian paid more attention to after-deathlife and the ceremony&ritual for Gods. So they built lots of temples and tombs to holdrituals. We can say that the creation of ancient Egyptian art is the creation of religiousart. Qiuzihua mentioned the importance of Egyptian religion in his book The Historyof Oriental Art ,said that "Egyptian literature is almost anthem and prayer. Philosophyis basically religious teaching texts; statue and painting reflects religious conception.In a word, ancient Egyptian religion is an artistic religion, and Egyptian art is religiousart." Temple and tomb are classic architecture of Egyptian religious art, and are thelocations attached with divine symbols to celebrate ritual. In these two architectures,Writing and other representational art——statue,painting and relief form a symbolicsystem. And Writing is the core element symbol in this system.Architectures,statue,painting and relief are all static and silent art, it is the hieroglyphswhich activates these symbols, make the gods behind them to communicate with people.This guide of this text is semiotics methodology, from this point of view, thereligion is multi-symbols system with characters, pictures, language ,architecture andother ritual actions. Each symbol elements forms complementary relationship withother symbol elements. Therefore, hieroglyphs is part of this system of rituals, andhieroglyphs symbolic characteristic is defined by the mutual relationship with othersymbols in the system.The text consists of two parts:The first part introduces symbolic characteristic of hieroglyphs, refers to all kindsof religious characteristics as the divine letters, such as Iconicity Principle,Law offrontality, law of mutual infiltration and so on. And it has the same religiouscharacteristicsof Egyptian art.In the second part , Architectures,statue,painting,hieroglyphs,and relief form astable system of religious ritual.and hieroglyphs is the core element symbol in thissystem.they are mutual complementary .