Hieroglyphics

Hieroglyphics is a writing system invented in Egypt around 5000 years ago. It is the second oldest form of writing, originating a few hundred years after cuneiform, which uses wedge-shaped characters and was devised by the Sumarians of Mesopotamia. The Egyptians were once thought to have got the idea of writing from the Sumarians, but their system is now generally believed to have emerged independently, although the details of its origins remain mysterious.

Hieroglyphs take the form of pictures, each representing an entire word, syllable, or phoneme (the units of sound from which spoken language is built). The Ancient Egyptians referred to these scripts as “the gods’ words”, a phrase translated by the Ancient Greeks as “sacred carvings”, which gives us “hieroglyphics”. Strictly, the word applies only to the writing on Ancient Egyptian monuments. However, these days, it is used more loosely to describe other, unrelated, picture-based scripts including those employed by the Hittites in Anatolia, the Minoans in Crete and the Maya of Mesoamerica.

Egyptian hieroglyphs are written in rows and columns. They are read from top to bottom, and either left to right or right to left – with the heads of the human and animal characters pointing toward the start of the line. The earliest texts remain largely indecipherable, except for names within them, even though many contain hieroglyphs used in later inscriptions. However, during the 3rd dynasty (between about 2650 and 2575 BC) hieroglyphics became regularised. From then, it continued with the same 700 or so signs for more than 2000 years.

Although hieroglyphics are no longer used, some of the Ancient Egyptian signs live on in modern alphabets. For example, the letter M takes the same form as the hieroglyphic water wave sign from which it derives.