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Neferchichi's Tomb
The history of hieroglyphic writing So you want to write like an Egyptian, huh? Well it took several years for aspiring scribes to learn how to do it, so for the sake of time we'll just cover the basics. Hieroglyphic writing first began around 5000 years ago. Egyptians wrote in hieroglyphs up to about 400 AD, after that they wrote in a short-hand cursive style called demotic. Eventually everyone forgot how to write in hieroglyphs. But now we are able to decipher hieroglyphs thanks to a special chunk of rock and a determined Egyptologist. In 1799, a soldier digging a fort in Rosetta, Egypt found a large black stone with three different types of writing on it. The writing was a message about Ptolemy V, who was ruling Egypt at the time. Because the message was written during the time when the Greeks ruled Egypt, one of the three languages was Greek. The other two were demotic and hieroglyphic. People realized that the three languages on "The Rosetta Stone" said the same thing. And even though people could read Greek, they couldn't figure out how to match up Greek words with hieroglyphic words. For years no one was able to understand how the hieroglyphic message corresponded to the Greek one. Finally, in 1822, a French Egyptologist named Jean François Champollion figured out how to decipher hieroglyphic writing. He realized that the hieroglyphs that spelled "Ptolemy" were enclosed in a cartouche, so he was able to match it up to the Greek spelling. This discovery enabled him to equate the unfamiliar hieroglyphs with familiar Greek words and to translate the entire message.
The hieroglyphs There were a few different types of hieroglyphs. Some stood for entire words, others were used for individual sounds, and still others represented groups of sounds or syllables.
The type we will about is the second type, where symbols stand for certain sounds. Let's start out with an example, the word freight. While the F, R, and T sound the "normal" way, the G and H are silent and the E and I make one sound (long A). There are 7 letters in the word, but only 4 sounds (F, R, long A, and T) are heard. So to spell freight with hieroglyphs, you'd use the symbols for those 4 sounds:
Four different sounds are used to say "freight," so four symbols or hieroglyphs are needed to write it the Egyptian way. No more, no less!
Writing English words with hieroglyphs Sometimes run in to trouble when we try to write English words with hieroglyphs, because our spelling is more complicated than it needs to be. For example: Alone or in pairs, vowels stand for lots of different sounds. And sometimes they're silent. When any English letter (whether it's a vowel or a consonant) is silent, don't include a hieroglyph for it. English and ancient Egyptian aren't from the same language family, so some of the sounds they said don't exist in our alphabet. And some of the sounds we make did not exist in Egyptian. For example, they didn't need a hieroglyph for the TH sound because they didn't say any words containing that sound. In cases like this, we have to substitute it with the closest sound possible. You'll notice in the hieroglyph chart that some sounds (like F and V) that are different to us weren't distinguished by the ancient Egyptians, so we have to use the same hieroglyph. Why F and V? Because these two sounds are articulated in roughly the same place in your mouth. The difference between them is whether or not your vocal cords are vibrating. Try saying "ffffff" and then change it to "vvvvvv" while touching your thoat to feel the vibrations of your vocal cords. Feel the difference? Determinatives Egyptians often used only hieroglyphs for consonant sounds to write their words. Ignoring the vowels, you could spell freight like this: F-R-T or But that's the same way you'd spell fort and ferret! So how do you know which word it's supposed to be? You would have to look at the word in the context of the rest of the sentence to figure it out. Or, you could rely on a special silent hieroglyph called a determinative. Determinatives were added at the ends of words to give the reader a hint about the general meaning. You could use these determinatives to clarify the meaning of F-R-T:
The three determinatives above are just a few of the thousands that were used by ancient Egyptians. Now you can understand why it took several years for a scribe to learn how to write!
Hieroglyphs can be read in many ways Like our writing, hieroglyphs could be written from left to right. But sometimes they were read right to left, or even in up and down columns. You can tell which way hieroglyphs are supposed to be read by looking at the people, plants, and animals. If they face left, start reading at the left. If they face right, start reading from the right. When Egyptians wrote, they didn't just write one hieroglyph after the other, like letters in a word. They arranged them neatly in rows and columns to look nice. For example, here are a few ways freight, fort, and ferret could have been written:
Congratulations, you are now done your first lesson of scribe school. By now you should be able to at least spell your name, and maybe even share cryptic messages with your friends!
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