by Maurice Sassoon

Created on: August 19, 2008

Hieroglyphics is a kind of writing with pictures instead of with letters. It was used by the ancient Egyptians thousands of years ago. Drawings were made of birds, men, trees, as well as various other objects that conveyed a meaning. The word, hieroglyphics, means "sacred carvings" in Greek. The oldest hieroglyphics used to be carved on stone. The carvings were considered to be sacred because they were done by priests and were discovered in places that were holy, such as temples, monuments and tombs. Around the period when hieroglyphics were common, the priests were the only Egyptians who were taught to read and write the hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphics consisted of more than six hundred signs. It took the priests many years to master the signs.

Of course, those that could read and write hieroglyphics could not draw pictures of words, such as "quick," or "clever," or "love," and, therefore, had to use a picture of something to stand for an idea that was connected with such words. If we wrote this way, we might draw a picture of a bird to mean "fly" or "quick. This kind of picture is called an ideogram, or "sense sign." Because each sign might denote several meanings, the "sense signs" were very difficult to read.

The hieroglyphics could not be read for thousands of years. Suddenly, in the year 1799, a stele, which was an engraved pillar of stone, was discovered. It was called the Rosetta Stone and was found at Rosetta in Egypt. This piece of stone had the same message written on it in Greek and in hieroglyphics. By comparing the two, a French scholar, by the name of Champollion was able to tell what the hieroglyphics meant. This enabled the scientists to learn a great deal about ancient Egypt. The discovery of hieroglyphics in the ruins of ancient tombs and temples made it possible to delve into the traditional practices of the ancient Egyptians.

Hieroglyphics served as the forerunner of alphabets, necessitating the introduction
of putting an idea down on paper by alphabets. Our alphabet has come to us gradually from picture writing that began with hieroglyphics. The picture writing from which our alphabet is descended was done in ancient Egypt. The Chinese and American Indians developed methods of writing in pictures. But there was not much that could be said that way and it would have taken hundreds of thousands of pictures to express everything - many more than a person could hope to learn in a lifetime.

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