What are hieroglyphs?

Hieroglyphs are a complete writing system like any other: they write down a spoken language with its own grammar and vocabulary. The script appears in Egypt around 3200 BCE and stayed in use for over three millennia; the last dated hieroglyphic inscription was carved at the temple of Philae late in the fourth century CE. The word 'hieroglyph' is Greek and means 'sacred carving'. The Egyptians called their own script medu netjer, 'the words of the god'. These are not magic symbols or a secret code — they are letters and words.

What confuses newcomers is that a single sign can work in three different ways. Phonetic signs stand for one, two or three consonants — these are the closest thing to our letters. Logograms stand for a whole word by picturing it. And determinatives sit at the end of a word and are never pronounced at all: their job is to tell the reader what kind of thing the word is, whether a person, a place, or an act of movement. The determinative is what separates two words that are spelled with exactly the same consonants.

Egyptians wrote consonants and left vowels out, much as Arabic is normally written without its short-vowel marks. This is why nobody knows for certain how the words sounded. The pronunciations you hear for ancient Egyptian names today are a modern convention agreed among scholars to make the words sayable — not a reconstruction anyone can verify. Foreign names were handled differently: scribes pressed the weak consonants into service to hint at vowel quality, which is exactly the method we use to write your name.

Hieroglyphs run right to left, left to right, or top to bottom — the direction is not fixed. The rule that settles it is simple and rather beautiful: look at the faces. Birds, animals and people always face the beginning of the line. If the bird is looking to the right, you start reading from the right. Signs are also not strung out in a flat row; they are packed into balanced squares, which is what gives a real inscription its distinctive texture.

The script stayed unreadable for some fourteen hundred years after it fell out of use. Then in 1799 the Rosetta Stone was found, carrying one text written three times over: in hieroglyphs, in demotic, and in Greek. Because Greek was still read, it became the key. In 1822 the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion announced that he had cracked the system, having realised that the signs did not only stand for meanings but carried sounds as well. That was the insight that opened the door.

In the classical stage of the language, Middle Egyptian, a scribe worked with roughly seven hundred signs — the set Alan Gardiner organised in his famous sign list, whose codes scholars still use to name a sign: A1 for the seated man, G17 for the owl, and so on.

The number never stood still. In the Ptolemaic period, when temple priests elaborated the script, inventing new signs and new sound values for old ones, it grew to several thousand. That is why the inscriptions of temples such as Edfu and Dendera are far harder to read than texts of the Middle Kingdom.

The Egyptians counted in tens, with one sign for each power of ten, repeated as often as needed: a vertical stroke for one, a hobble for ten, a coil of rope for a hundred, a lotus for a thousand, a raised finger for ten thousand, a tadpole for a hundred thousand, and a seated man with raised arms — the god Heh, figure of the countless — for a million.

So 325 is written as three coils, two hobbles and five strokes. The system had no zero and no place value as we use it: each sign carries its value wherever it stands.

The carefully drawn signs of temple walls were not what an official wrote his day in. Beside them, from the earliest periods, ran a fast abbreviated hand written in ink on papyrus, potsherds and flakes of stone — hieratic — in which the signs flatten until only a trained eye can see the picture behind them. Letters, accounts, literature and medicine were written in it.

Around the seventh century BC demotic appeared, more abbreviated still, and became the script of administration and contracts into the Roman period; it is the middle script on the Rosetta Stone. Later the language was written in the Greek alphabet with a handful of added signs taken from demotic: that is Coptic, still the liturgical language of the Coptic Church.

Writing was a profession, and the scribe a man of standing. Few learned it; it was the road to office and influence, and Egyptian literature is full of texts praising the scribe's calling above every other trade.

His kit was a rectangular wooden palette with two wells for ink, red and black, and a slot for pens cut from rush stems, chewed at the tip into a brush. Black ink was soot, red was ochre, and red was kept for headings, the start of sections and corrections. The paper was papyrus: strips of the plant's stem laid in two crossing layers and pressed until they bonded, the sheets then pasted into rolls that could run for metres.

The oval frame around certain names in the inscriptions is the cartouche. It enclosed two of the king's five names: the throne name and the birth name. It is drawn as a loop of rope tied at one end, and many scholars read it as the king encircling all that the sun encircles. The Egyptians called it shenu; the word cartouche comes from Napoleon's soldiers, who saw in it a cartridge.

The cartouche was the key to decipherment itself: because a royal name was framed, scholars could find Ptolemy in the hieroglyphic text of the Rosetta Stone and set it against the Greek.