alt Hacker NewsI am sorry but this like saying that "chinese cannot represent abstract notions" because "picture" .
In middle egyptian (the language you probably assume) "pictures" are just syllables. They are phonetic, not semantic, in the same way letter of modern language correspond to sounds, not meanings.
Egyptians had no problem expressinyg conplex concepts and they also had cursive writing, which is much easier to write.
Replies
As a language matures, it moves away from concrete things towards abstract things. Eg cave paintings -> pictorial scripts -> modern languages which are very detached from pictorial/phonetic meaning (even modern chinese). These days we have programming languages which do not have any phonetic or pictorial representation. And this trend will keep going on. I think I still stand by my point that this script isn't as refined as a modern language. Just like the great pyramids aren't as refined as burj khalifa.
Nit pick: the Egyptian writing system never had any symbols for syllables.
The phonetic symbols included in the Egyptian writing system represented 1 consonant or 2 consonants or 3 consonants, not syllables. Any syllables or short syllable sequences with the same consonants were written with the same symbol.
This makes the Egyptian writing system an exception, as all other writing systems that have developed completely independently, instead of being inspired by an existing system, have used phonetic symbols for syllables.
This is the very reason why the Egyptian writing system has generated the ancient Semitic alphabet with 29 consonannts, from which all later Semitic consonantic alphabets have been derived, then the Greek alphabet and other European alphabets, and the Indian writing systems and other Asian writing systems derived from them.
Since the beginning, the Egyptian writing system had two variants, depending on the writing instruments: hieroglyphic for inscriptions carved in stone and hieratic for texts written with a reed brush on papyrus. The latter is what you mean by "cursive". "Cursive" is not really appropriate, as hieratic was still a very complex script, difficult to write, even if it was simplified in comparison with hieroglyphic. Millennia later, a more cursive form of hieratic developed into the demotic script.