by Sarah Todd

Created on: December 15, 2008

More than 2,000 hieroglyphic characters have been identified in ancient Egyptian writing. At any time up to 700 hieroglyphs were regularly used, and many of them had up to three possible interpretations. Even then their meaning could be phonetic or representative of the picture depicted, and completely unrelated to the word they created.

Sounds complicated? Perhaps, especially when one analyses English, which uses an alphabet of 26 letters to create words, placing them in sequence to form a sentence, which then joins other sentences to form a story. Ancient Egyptian writing was considered very difficult to learn. Although the identity of the people who created hieroglyphics is not known, their use dates back to 3000 BC, and the characters underwent many changes during the centuries Egyptian hieroglyphs were used.

One of the oldest examples of hieroglyphic writing is contained on the Narmer Palette, discovered in the 1890s at an archaeological dig at Hierakonpolis in Egypt. Dating to the 31st century BC, it is believed to have been an object from an ancient temple. It is very well preserved, with excellent hieroglyphic characters thought to depict the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under King Narmer. In 1998 more than 300 clay tablets dating back to the 33rd century BC were discovered in a tomb in the central Egyptian town of Umm el-Qa'ab, making these the oldest examples of Egyptian hieroglyphs discovered to date.

Egyptians called hieroglyphs "the words of God", and they were mainly used to decorate temples and monuments. Hieroglyphics were carved into or painted upon stone, as well as being written on papyrus with pen and ink.

Hieroglyphics were first used to maintain a record of the king's possessions. A picture of a cow or boat would be followed by a glyph representing a number. A thorough numerical system using glyphs was developed, with the number one represented by a single vertical stroke. The number ten was displayed as an arch, while an upright asp or snake indicated ten thousand. One million was written as a person kneeling, arms to the elbow extended outwards horizontally with the forearms raised vertically to the sky.

Basic hieroglyphic characters are read as the sound of the object they depict. They spell out names and words that cannot be represented by other characters. Ancient Egyptians did not usually apply vowels to their writing, unless the first letter of a word began with a vowel. If a word, particularly a personal name, was difficult

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>