Hieroglyphics

The Egyptians created a way of using pictures to write down messages and stories thousands of years ago, which were called hieroglyphics. Roughly around 3000 B.C. these pictures were started to be carved into stone, which is how we know how the Egyptians wrote information down, today.

These pictures came from different things in the every day lives of the Egyptians. For example, the sound AHHHH is made by the mouth, which is open. Try it and see. Since the mouth makes this sound and the mouth is open, the picture of the sound became , which looks like an open mouth. Over time AHHHH, which sounds a lot like AHHHRRRR (try it) became more like our R sound, which we use today. So the original picture for AHHH, which is , now represents an R. This is how the Egyptian picture alphabet came about.

The Egyptian language is a lot like English and all other languages spoken today, in that it is based on an alphabet. Like English, the Egyptian alphabet has 24 basic letters. The Egyptian alphabet looks like this:

An explanation of what each picture is and how the picture is pronounced is next to each hieroglyphic.

The Egyptians used all sorts of other pictures as well as their basic alphabet to represent a new word. Or they just used a different symbol to represent something rather than spelling the whole word out much like we use symbols like "&" to mean "and", and "+" to mean "plus." Some of these hieroglyphs are shown here:

Hieroglyphics aren't always read left to right like we read in English. It actually can be read left to right, right to left, or up and down. the important clue to knowing how to read hieroglyphics is to read in a direction going toward the faces of the pictures. If one of the hieroglyphs is of a man facing right, you would read the word or words by starting at the right and reading toward the left.

Ancient Egyptians also had pictures to represent numbers. Like we do, the Egyptians had a number system using 1, 10, 100, etc... Here are a few numbers, and mathematical terms.

Writing fractions weren't so easy though. The symbol for "R", , is put in front of the number. This means a number less than one, or a fraction. means 1/10th. One-half had its own symbol: , as did 1/4th, which was .

Over time the Egyptian language was lost due to wars and invasions. Greek, Latin, Arabic and other languages began replacing Egypt's language. Eventually no one could understand how to read the Egyptian Hieroglyphics. That was until 1799, when someone discovered a sone in Rosetta (a city near the Mediterranean Sea), which has writings in three languages on it: Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Demotic (a less elaborate version of Egyptian Hieroglyphics), and Greek. This stone, called the Rosetta Stone, was very important in helping to translate Egyptian Hieroglyphics. The three languages all said the same thing; that the stone was one of several in Egyptian temples to honor a Greek king of Egypt named Ptolemy at around 200 B.C. One of the most famous men to translate the Rosetta Stone was Jean Francois Champollion in 1824.

For lesson plans related to Hieroglyphics click here.