The Secrets of Egyptian Hieroglyphics: A Beginner’s Introduction

Egyptian hieroglyphics, one of the world’s most renowned ancient scripts, have captivated onlookers for centuries. These pictorial scripts, etched in stone and papyrus, have held their secrets close for thousands of years. However, despite its popularity, our understanding of how the Egyptians came to use hieroglyphics and how they understood it remains somewhat shrouded in mystery.

The actual origin of Egyptian hieroglyphs remains obscure, much like other ancient languages. One of the most popular theories was that Egyptian hieroglyphs came from rock pictures made by prehistoric hunting communities that lived in the desert west of the Nile River. These communities were believed to be familiar with communicating using visual images.

Some of the motifs found on those rock pictures were also found on pottery of Pre-dynastic cultures in Egypt. This was especially prominent during the Naqada period from 3500 to 3200 BCE. These pottery vessels were found buried in tombs as well as in the tombs of the Naqada III/Dynasty 0 period from 3200 to 3000 BCE, when the earliest examples of these hieroglyphs were found.

The Different Types of Egyptian Hieroglyphics

Egyptian hieroglyphs are made up of three types of elements: Logographic, phonograms, and determinatives. Logograms represent words, phonograms represent sounds, and determinatives are placed at the end of the word to clarify the meaning. These three elements are combined with around 1,000 distinct characters. Thus, the signs used by the ancient Egyptians were higher compared to other alphabetical systems.

The number of hieroglyphs was reduced to 750 during the Middle Kingdom, from 2055 to 1650 BCE. There are two cursive forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs: Hieratic and demotic. Hieratic was the form used to write on papyrus scrolls often for religious purposes. Demotic was used for everyday documents and literary works.

However, Egyptian hieroglyphs were used on other surfaces like ceramic, metal, and stone, but likely in its two other forms. Egyptian hieroglyphs would later be the basis of other forms of written languages. Such written languages include the Phoenician alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic to name a few. It’s also possible that Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was an ancestral language of the Brahmic family of scripts through the Phoenician, Aramaic, and Greek.

Logographic Hieroglyphs

Perhaps what most of us know Egyptian hieroglyphs to be, logographic hieroglyphs made use of pictures of objects used as the words for the objects. They would then be followed by an upright stroke to signify that the word is complete in one sign. Logographic hieroglyphs are the most frequently used common nouns and are accompanied by a mute vertical stroke which indicates their status as a logogram.

In theory, all Egyptian hieroglyphs can be used as logograms and can be accompanied by phonetic complements.

Syllabic Hieroglyphs

Egyptian syllabic hieroglyphs represented a combination of two or three consonants. One other language that makes use of a syllabic system is Sumerian, which makes use of the cuneiform writing style.

Alphabetic Hieroglyphs

Alphabetic hieroglyphs represented a single sound. Unlike most alphabets, including those we use today, Egyptians did not care much about vowels at the time. It remains to be discovered how ancient Egyptians formed words.

The standard spelling in Egyptian is also looser compared to modern languages. This is because there are one or several variations of almost every word in ancient Egyptian. There are redundancies and omissions of graphemes, whether deliberate or not. There are also substitutions of one grapheme for another, which would make it almost impossible to determine if it’s a mistake or an alternative spelling.

And, there’s also an error of omission in drawing the signs. This makes it even more complicated when it’s done in hieratic, but especially in the demotic form. But these supposed errors come down to an issue of chronology as spellings and standards changed over time. So, what might have been the standard in the Old Kingdom may not always apply in the New Kingdom.

Determinatives

Determinatives are pictures of an object used in Egyptian hieroglyphs to help the reader understand. Also known as semagrams or semantic symbols specifying meaning, determinatives are placed at the end of a word. Some examples of determinatives include divinities, humans, human body parts, animals, and plants, among others.

However, certain determinatives have both literal and figurative meanings.

Most of the non-determinative Egyptian hieroglyphic signs are phonograms, and therefore, their meanings are determined by their pronunciation. Phonograms are formed with one consonant called unilateral signs, with two consonants called bilateral signs, and three consonants with triliteral signs. There are 24 unilateral signs in the Egyptian hieroglyphic alphabet.

As the writing style developed over time, Egyptians would also include older spellings of certain words to the newer versions.

How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphics

Even as we have gained knowledge on how to read Egyptian hieroglyphics, the meaning remains a challenge for scholars. Deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphic writing needed some subjective interpretation, and not even reading this aloud would be easy.

What’s more, readers needed to know ancient Egyptian grammar to be able to properly read Egyptian hieroglyphics. This was because Egyptian hieroglyphics did not have spaces between words or punctuation. Readers needed to know the proper context to be able to tell words, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters apart.

It’s also important to note how ancient Egyptians tended to leave out vowels in their hieroglyphics. However, reading hieroglyphics could be done phonetically, which, as said earlier, is based on the pronunciation. There’s also semantic reading, which means characters can also be read for their meaning.

The Direction of Writing

During the 1820s, a man named Jean-Francois Champollion deciphered these hieroglyphs using the Rosetta Stone with the triple text of Hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek. The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799 by Napoleon Bonaparte’s men during an expedition to Egypt near Rashid.

Champollion identified the name of Ptolemy V on the Rosetta Stone by comparing the hieroglyphs with its Greek translation. He continued to study the names with an obelisk from Philae, which had the name of Ptolemy and Cleopatra on it. This continued study led to the conclusion that Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was a mix of signals that represented sounds, ideas, and words rather than a common alphabet.

Egyptian hieroglyphs could be read in columns from top to bottom or in rows from right to left. The orientation of the written signs served as an indicator of which direction an inscription was to be read. Signs would normally face toward the start of the text, indicating the beginning.

Reading or writing hieroglyphics from right to left was more observed in its hieratic form. It was rare for written individual signs to be reversed in orientation, and were usually done for either religious or decorative purposes.

Monuments in ancient Egypt were decorated in accordance with strict principles of symmetry. Thus, the hieroglyphic texts in these monuments would face in both directions to give a sense of balance to the overall look. The inscriptions would either be written in horizontal rows or vertical columns, which suited the decoration of monumental walls, doorways, and lintels.

As for the tools, Egyptians used chisels and hammers for stone inscriptions of hieroglyphs. For wood and other smooth surfaces, craftsmen used brushes and colors.

The Meaning of Hieroglyphs

The word hieroglyph comes from the Greek words “hiero,” which means “holy,” and “glypho” which means “writing.” This was because prominent Greeks saw this form of writing as sacred. In ancient Egypt, hieroglyphs were called “medu netjer” which meant “the gods’ words,” as they believed that the gods invented writing.

According to Egyptian tradition, it was the god Thoth who created writing to make the Egyptians wiser and their memory sharper. However, Ra, the sun god, disagreed. Ra said that bringing hieroglyphs to humanity would only make them question their memory and history in the written word rather than actual memories and stories passed down through word-of-mouth. He believed that writing would only serve the opposite purpose of what Thoth hoped – weakening humanity’s memory and wisdom.

Thoth ultimately gave the techniques of writing to a small group of Egyptians called scribes. The scribes were held in high regard in ancient Egypt because of their knowledge and skill in using this gift.

In pictorial scenes that have human or divine figures, Egyptian hieroglyphic texts were more associated with the figures they are referred to. This means the identifying name, description, and utterance of an individual would be oriented in the same direction the figure is facing. The Egyptian writing system of right-to-left definitely affected the development of three-dimensional art.

The Importance of Egyptian Hieroglyphics

Egyptian hieroglyphs were used similar to how cuneiform was used. They were for record-keeping, as well as monumental displays of the gods and goddesses they worshipped. As they were the oldest form of writing in Egypt, they were usually found on monument inscriptions and funerary contexts.

Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was also used in a labeling sense, to identify a pictorial representation with a royal or an event like a hunt or a battle. This was what brought the writing form to a monumental scale. If there were hieroglyphs added to a scene, it meant that the picture represented a certain war.

Its hieratic form was used for administrative and non-monumental texts from the Old Kingdom from 2613 to 2160 BCE, as it was handwritten and easier to write. The priests and scribes encouraged this form of writing to make the process simpler. This was where Egyptian hieroglyphs eventually became stylized and derived into the “priestly” script. Incidentally, it is believed that the hieratic form was invented and developed almost simultaneously with the hieroglyphics.

Some of the hieroglyphic scripts found in tombs dating 3200 – 3000 BCE were in the form of royal “serekhs.” This was a stylized format of the king’s name. There were “serekhs” written on pottery that had hieroglyphs in cursive form, which is likely an early version of hieratics. Hieratic hieroglyphics were written from right to left and were always written from right to left.

The demotic form of Egyptian hieroglyphs was used in the Late Period from 661 to 332 BCE and was a more abbreviated version. Demotic was used around the 7th century BCE and Egyptians at the time called it “sekh shat” or “writing for documents.” Unlike hieratic, demotic has no pictorial traces of hieroglyphics. It eventually replaced the hieratic in use.

The Decline and Fall of Egyptian Hieroglyphics

Much like most, if not all, ancient languages, Egyptian hieroglyphs also eventually declined until it was no longer used. It was in the Ptolemaic period from 332 to 30 BCE and the Roman period from 30 BCE – 395 AD in Egypt that Greek and Roman culture became more influential. By that time, only priests were able to read Egyptian hieroglyphic writing as a text meant for larger audiences was written in demotic instead.

By the 2nd century AD, Christianity also began to displace some of the traditional Egyptian cults. Egyptians who were converted developed the Coptic alphabet, which is based on the Greek uncial alphabet. This became the last stage in the development of the Egyptian language. Egyptian hieroglyphics soon died out for some time until several centuries later when it would be rediscovered.

The Coptic alphabet has 32 letters and was recorded as early as the 2nd Century. The use of this alphabet highlighted not only the expansion of Christianity in Egypt but also showed a major cultural breakup. This was because Coptic was the first alphabetic script used in the Egyptian language. Egyptian hieroglyphs were eventually replaced by the Coptic script and only a few signs from the demotic script survived in the Coptic alphabet.

Egyptian hieroglyphs were described by the Nag Hammadi texts as “writings of the magicians” and “soothsayers.”

Conclusion

Overall, Egyptian hieroglyphics are a fascinating aspect of ancient Egypt to learn about. Broken down into three forms, these forms tell a lot about how often it was used, where it was used, and who would use them – from the oldest hieroglyphics to its simplified version of hieratic and then onto the more abbreviated form demotic.

These were often used by priests, scribes, and possibly authority figures in Egypt at the time. Egyptian hieroglyphs would be found on religious or royal monuments as well as documents to keep records or tell stories. It certainly helped historians know and identify the kings and prominent figures in their tombs.

While it takes years of serious study to be able to read and understand, at least the discoveries made throughout the centuries brought most of us a step closer to doing so. As we learn more about this ancient language, we can only hope to one day have a fuller understanding of what this ancient civilization was like.

Want more Egyptian content? Dive into all our articles on Egyptian film, travel, culture, history, and more (there’s a bunch more to come)!