Carvings of birds, bottles, lions, feathers, hands… may not mean anything to modern life. However, for the educated people living in ancient Egypt, these images had certain meanings, and they were often called “medu netjer” – “the words of the gods”. For the ancient Greeks, they were called hieroglyphics.

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics is a surprisingly complex and nuanced writing system used by the ancient Egyptians to represent their language on stelae, monuments, religious complexes, and structures such as pyramids. It is one of the oldest writing systems in history and is believed by many to be the precursor to most writing systems in use today.

Egyptian Hieroglyphics

Throughout human history, many civilizations have used glyphs, but only the Egyptian ones are truly considered hieroglyphs, as they were the only ones encountered and christened as such by the Greeks.

So what exactly are they, and what makes them different from other writing systems? For starters, Egyptian hieroglyphs are surprisingly complex in their use. With each glyph representing a specific or abstract element in a stylized or simplified image that is still highly recognisable.

The exact meaning of each hieroglyph is thought to depend on the context in which it appears. The signs can act as graphemes, with each symbol representing a specific word, phonemes, where each symbol represents a specific sound, or as defining elements.

There can therefore be multiple characters that can represent the same letter and it will also change, evolving over the course of history – Ancient Egypt existed as a unified enтιтy for over 3,000 years so the number of symbols used is much larger than what the alphabetic system used. This would have numbered well over a thousand different hieroglyphs at various points in history, with an estimated peak of around 5,000 hieroglyphs during the Greco-Roman period, although these were almost always changing.

Hieroglyphics were therefore much more complex to read and write than the phonogram system, and were generally used by the educated elite. They were used primarily for religious texts or to decorate monuments and other important architectural structures.

Hieroglyphics was later adapted into Hieratic (ancient Greek for priestly) and Demotic (popular) scripts. These were simple scripts, developed in the third and first millennium BC respectively, and written with a reed pen using ink on papyrus sheets. They were used alongside hieroglyphics and were not meant to replace them.

The coexistence of hieroglyphics, Hieratic scripts and Demotic scripts is best illustrated by the Rosetta Stone, a stele dating to around 195 BC, which records an edict issued in Memphis after the coronation of King Ptolemy V – an edict establishing the new ruler’s divine cult.

The edict was written in hieroglyphics, Demotic and Ancient Greek to allow all citizens of the empire to understand the edict. The ancient Greek language represented on the stelae was that of the Ptolemaic Dynasty that ruled Egypt at the time, a Greek-Macedonian language that was placed on the throne of the empire after Alexander the Great’s conquest.

Hieratic was used primarily for administrative purposes, in business documents, and for literary, scientific, or religious texts. Demotic was used for general, everyday applications and for the wider Egyptian society as a whole.

The symbols used were similar in nature to today’s letters; they relied on pictures like hieroglyphs to convey different sounds, but the shapes were simplified. The development of Hieratic and Demotic writing is a great introduction to how modern writing systems evolved from ancient, pictorial writings.

The History of Hieroglyphs

We don’t know exactly when they were developed, but we do know they are very ancient. It is possible that the idea of ​​a hieroglyphic writing system being “imported” into Egypt began with Sumerian cuneiform, but this hypothesis is highly debated.

Our earliest evidence of proto-hieroglyphics dates from around 3500 BC, and the first full sentence in hieroglyphs actually dates from around 2800-2700 BC. Both examples are found in tombs, with paintings on vases buried during the Naqada II period and reliefs from tombs of the First Dynasty.

The hieroglyphs themselves were never lost – they were displayed in Egypt from ancient times and were known throughout the Roman Empire, as well as the Middle East and Africa from the Dark Ages to the modern period.

Hieroglyphs were regarded by the Egyptians as sacred, and they carried mystical ᴀssociations for those who did not know them. Knowledge of how to interpret this writing system gradually became restricted to fewer and fewer individuals (the priestly class) as the Demotic and Hieratic scripts became more widespread in Egyptian society and replaced the use of hieroglyphs in practical matters.

Around 380, Emperor Theodosius I insтιтuted a series of administrative measures known today as the “suppression of the pagans”. This severely affected the Egyptians who used hieroglyphs and the insтιтutions necessary to maintain knowledge of how they were formed and read.

As far as we know, the last hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt were carved in 450 AD, at the Temple of Philae. Although we cannot determine when the knowledge of how to read these signs was completely lost, it was most likely around this time. The hieroglyphs that survived after this time are the Hieroglyphica of Horapo, which retains the exact meaning of a few of the original hieroglyphs.

During the third century AD, hieroglyphic writing in Egypt was increasingly replaced by Coptic writing, which was itself derived from Greek. Then, during the Middle Ages, the Old Egyptian language itself was completely replaced by Arabic, and with it, the ancient Egyptian language and writing gradually died out over time.

The Meaning of Hieroglyphs

The meaning of hieroglyphs remained shrouded in mystery for a long time afterward. There were several attempts to decipher their meaning in the medieval Arab world, most notably in modern-day Egypt and Iraq, and in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, but they were all unsuccessful. They were hampered in part by a lack of reliable sources on which to base their interpretations.

In the 19th century, the key to unlocking the hieroglyphs was rediscovered in the form of the Rosetta Stone. The French philologist and Orientalist Jean-François “the Younger” Champollion used the Demotic portion of the text to decipher the meaning of the hieroglyphs. This, which finally restored the understanding of how to read hieroglyphs to the world, was published in Champollion’s 1828 book “Précis.”

So how exactly do you read these symbols? For starters, it is important to note that hieroglyphs are highly dependent on their context, which dictates how each symbol should be interpreted in any given situation. In this respect, reading hieroglyphs is as much an art as it is a method.

Hieroglyphs are carved in rows, either horizontally or vertically, with ordered rows/columns separated by lines. There are no spaces or punctuation marks, although some hieroglyphs often appear only at the end of words.

A good clue to how to read a line is to check which direction the asymmetrical hieroglyph is facing. For example, when a hieroglyph has a human or animal image facing left, it means that the text is read from left to right.

Hieroglyphs still adorn the walls of ancient Egyptian monuments, temples, palaces, and tombs. They are also quite popular on souvenirs and other items aimed at tourists or those who enjoy the mystical allure of ancient Egypt, although the quality of the translations on such products is debatable.

But if you want to try your hand at writing a line of hieroglyphs yourself, there are now scripts available as digital fonts for you to download and use. The Penn Museum also has a handy app set up that lets you translate your name into Egyptian hieroglyphs – although the order of the symbols is not historically accurate.