Hieroglyphs were used at first by a small group of scribes to keep records. Print out copies of the list of 'letters' for later use. The hieroglyphic alphabet can be viewed at the EDSITEment-reviewed website Nova: Pyramids. They include vowels sounds, although in Egyptian the sound would have been that of a vowel linked with a consonant, such as ahhhhh or uhhhhhh. Although there are thousands of symbols, the most commonly occurring are a set of 24, which modern archaeologists use as a working alphabet. The names of royalty were surrounded with an oval, known as a cartouche. (They all faced in the same direction.) There was no punctuation, and to save space, two small symbols often occupied the space of one larger one. To read a horizontal line, one moved toward the faces of the animal symbols. Hieroglyphs were written vertically (top to bottom) or horizontally (left to right or right to left). For this reason, we don't know exactly what ancient Egyptian sounded like. Vowels were not written, but were added (usually eh or ah) by the reader. This is the closest the Egyptians ever came to creating an alphabet. Several symbols were written together to make a word. (A rebus is a representation of a word or phrase that uses pictures that sound like the word or phrase, or its syllables.) An English example of a rebus is a bee and a leaf drawn side by side when read aloud, they sound like the word 'belief.' But this approach to writing could become cumbersome and confusing.Įventually, a system evolved in which a symbol was drawn to represent a specific sound (a consonant). This was the ancient Egyptian version of a rebus. So they resorted to a system of drawing symbols of things that sounded like what they were trying to convey. But certain objects, and more particularly ideas, were difficult to represent with a single drawing. A simple drawing of the sun represented the sun, a drawing of a vulture signified a vulture, a drawing of a rope indicated a rope, and so on. Each picture was a symbol representing something they observed in their surroundings. The ancient Egyptians created a form of picture-writing known as hieroglyphs around 3100 BCE.

Ancient egyptian glyphs