How hieroglyphs work

1 A script for 3,500 years

Egyptians were writing with hieroglyphs by about 3000 BC, when the first kings ruled the whole country, and the last hieroglyphic inscription we know of was carved at the temple of Philae in AD 394. They called their writing mdw nṯr, “the god’s words”; our word comes from the Greek hieroglyphika, “sacred carvings”.

Hieroglyphs were for monuments: temple walls, tombs, statues and stelae. For letters, accounts and stories, scribes wrote with a reed brush in hieratic, a quick, joined-up form of the same signs, and from about 650 BC in the even quicker Demotic. This page is about the hieroglyphs of Middle Egyptian, the classical language of about 2000 BC that scribes kept copying and imitating for two thousand years.

2 Most signs stand for sounds

A sign can show a thing and still be used only for its sound, the way a picture of an eye and a saw could write “I saw” in a rebus. The mouth 𓂋 is read r, and the ripple of water 𓈖 is read n; together they spell rn, “name”, which has nothing to do with mouths or water.

Only consonants are written. Egyptian had vowels, but the script left them out, as written Arabic and Hebrew usually do. We know the consonants of most words for certain, but how the vowels sounded is known only for some words, mostly from Coptic, the last stage of the language, which was written in Greek letters plus a few signs taken from Demotic. So Egyptologists use a convention to say words aloud: put an e between consonants, and say ꜣ and ꜥ as a, j as i and w as u. rn is said “ren”, nfr “nefer”. That is a modern habit, not how Egyptians spoke.

3 The “alphabet”: signs for one sound

About two dozen signs write a single consonant. Egyptologists list them in a fixed order, like an alphabet, and write each sound with a letter of their own: the transliteration. Several of these letters have dots or hooks, because Egyptian had sounds English doesn’t: ḥ is a breathy h made in the throat, ḫ is the ch of Scottish “loch”, and ꜥ is a sound made deep in the throat, like Arabic ʿayn. Egyptian never used these signs on their own as an alphabet, though; they mixed them with all the other kinds of signs below.

Drill them on the alphabet flashcards, and type them with the typing helper (the second column is what you type). Some old books write yod ꞽ or i instead of j, and ś or s for the door bolt z; the sounds are the same.

4 Signs for two and three sounds

Many more signs write two consonants (biliterals) or three (triliterals). The house plan 𓉐 writes pr, the basket 𓎟 nb, the heart and windpipe 𓄤 nfr and the ankh 𓋹 ꜥnḫ. Again only the consonants count: the basket writes nb “lord” and also starts nbt “lady”, a different word with the same two consonants plus the ending t.

5 Helper signs: phonetic complements

Scribes often added one-sound signs that repeat part of what a bigger sign already says, to make the reading certain. In nfr “good, beautiful” the viper (f) and the mouth (r) repeat the last two sounds of 𓄤. You read the word once, nfr, not nfr-f-r.

Notice how the viper and the mouth sit one above the other. Signs are packed into neat blocks (Egyptologists call them quadrats), and you read a block top to bottom before moving on.

6 Word signs and the stroke

Some signs do mean what they show. These are word signs (ideograms or logograms), and a short stroke 𓏤 under one says “this sign means the thing itself”. The house plan with a stroke is the word pr, “house”.

7 Determinatives: silent signs for meaning

Because vowels were not written, many words looked alike. So scribes ended most words with a determinative, a sign that is not read aloud but tells you what kind of thing the word is about: a seated man for men and their jobs, a seated woman for women, walking legs for motion, a papyrus roll for writing and ideas, three hills for foreign lands. Here the duck zꜣ and the loaf t (the feminine ending) spell zꜣt, and the seated woman shows the word means a woman: “daughter”.

Determinatives also mark where a word ends, which helps, since Egyptian left no spaces between words. Three strokes 𓏥 after a word mark the plural.

8 Which way to read

Hieroglyphs can run right to left (the most common way), left to right, or down in columns. The rule for finding the start: people, animals and birds face the beginning of the line. If the owl’s face looks right, start reading at the right. Here is the same phrase, ḥtp-dj-nsw, “an offering that the king gives”, the first words of thousands of tomb inscriptions, written both ways.

The sedge plant for “king” (nsw) is written first even though it is read last. Scribes put the king or a god in front out of respect; this is called honorific transposition. Books like this one usually print hieroglyphs left to right, to run with the English.

9 Cartouches and royal names

A king had five names. The two most important, his throne name and his birth name, were written inside an oval loop of rope with a bar at one end: the cartouche (French for “cartridge”, the name Napoleon’s soldiers gave it). The loop is usually explained as a stretched shen ring, a sign of encircling and protection. Cartouches were the key to decipherment: in 1822 Jean-François Champollion showed that the signs in the cartouches of Ptolemy and Cleopatra spelled their Greek names, and then read the old Egyptian names Ramesses and Thutmose the same way.

Read more royal names in the cartouche maker, and write your own there (a modern game, since Egyptians wrote only royal names in cartouches).