What are hieroglyphs and how do you read them?

People first created writing systems around 3000 BC. One well-known early writing system was created in ancient Egypt and is called hieroglyphs. 

The word comes from two Greek words: hiero (meaning ‘holy’) and glyph (meaning ‘carving’), so hieroglyph means ‘holy carving’. 

It was called this because hieroglyphs used small pictures of things in nature to stand for sounds. 

This writing system was used to write messages on statues, tombs and temple walls throughout Egypt. 

For most of modern history, people did not know how to translate or understand this old writing. 

Only a special group of people in ancient Egypt was taught how to read and write hieroglyphs. These people were known as ‘scribes’. 

Scribes learned each symbol from a young age. Their skill made them rich and influential in ancient Egypt.

Hieroglyphs worked in a way similar to our writing. But unlike English, it had more than 700 symbols, and each symbol represented a sound or a group of sounds. 

Each symbol was a small picture of something from the world around us, such as an animal, an object or a form. 

The Egyptians knew the name of each symbol and took the first sound of that name as the sound for the picture. 

For example, the Egyptian word for ‘mouth’ began with the ‘r’ sound, so the picture of a mouth was used to write ‘r’.

In other cases, some hieroglyphs represented a whole syllable, such as ‘ra’ or ‘in’. 

That arrangement allowed them to use one symbol for a combined sound rather than use a separate symbol for each sound. 

For instance, the word ‘bark’ could be written with one symbol for the ‘b’ sound and another symbol for the ‘ark’ sound. 

That choice meant they needed only two pictures instead of four letters like in English. 

Some symbols did not make a sound and appeared at the end of words to show which meaning was meant. 

That rule helped to clarify words that sounded alike. 

For example, in English, the word ‘bark’ can mean the sound made by a dog or the outside of a tree. 

In hieroglyphs, the scribe wrote the signs for ‘bark’ and then added a picture of a dog or a tree at the end of the word, so the reader knew which meaning it had.

Hieroglyphs were flexible and could be carved onto different surfaces. 

Most often, scribes carved them into the rock walls of temples and tombs. Since rock often had an uneven surface or odd forms, scribes changed the layout to make the symbols fit. 

Because of that, scribes could carve hieroglyphs in any direction: left to right, right to left, top to bottom or bottom to top. 

Sometimes, the same surface showed different directions in one inscription. 

To avoid confusion, scribes made sure all the animal and human figures in a line pointed toward the end of the line. 

This rule told the reader which way to move through the text. 

The Egyptians also had a rule for writing the names of very important people, such as gods and pharaohs. 

In those cases, they drew an oval shape around the signs to show a sacred rope. 

That oval shape and the name inside it was called a ‘cartouche’.

The ancient Egyptians valued hieroglyphs greatly. Because carving them into rock took so much time, they used hieroglyphs only for official messages from pharaohs or for religious texts. 

For everyday notes and letters, hieroglyphs were too time-consuming and too sacred. 

So, Egyptians developed two simpler writing systems for normal tasks. Those systems were called hieratic and demotic. 

Both systems began with hieroglyphs, but scribes then made their signs much simpler so they could write faster. 

Over time, those signs lost any resemblance to the original pictures and eventually looked like simple lines and marks. 

People who learned to write used these two faster systems. Only priests and scribes kept the skill to read original hieroglyphs.

After the Romans took control of Egypt, people wrote more in Greek and Latin than in Egyptian scripts. 

By the 4th century AD, writers stopped using hieroglyphs, and people soon forgot how to read them. 

For more than 1500 years, people kept trying to discover what the pictures meant, but the meaning remained a puzzle. 

When Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1799, he found a large stone inscription known as the ‘Rosetta Stone’.

It contained the same message in three writing systems: hieroglyphs, demotic and ancient Greek. 

Because scholars already knew how to read ancient Greek, they could use it to decode the hieroglyphs. 

Over the next twenty years, several scholars tried to translate the Rosetta Stone.

Finally, French scholar Jean François Champollion read texts that had been written thousands of years earlier.