Egyptian Hieroglyphs: The Writings of Ancient Egypt

Jul 21, 2011
Ivan Castro

Cursive hieroglyphs - Public Domain

The hieroglyphs are a writing system used by ancient Egyptians that combined alphabetic and symbolic components to express ideas.

Unreadable until the early 19th Century, hieroglyphs – meaning sacred writings - have provided an invaluable wealth of knowledge about the continuous history and culture of ancient Egypt; a period of over 3,000 years.

A complex system that uses more than 2,000 characters, its reading is further complicated by the fact that each symbol represented an idea or sounded like the concept it wanted to communicate.

Hieroglyphs have four fundamental components. They are

:An alphabet;
Biliteral and triliteral glyphs, which are symbols that combine two and three charactersthat give contex
Standards, rules and principles that give the writing coherence and clarity.

Different from most European languages that are written left to right, hieroglyphs could be written either way; animal and human images always faced the beginning of the saying. In columns, the writing reads down even though, for the sake of symmetry the content in opposite columns was reversed.

Napoleon Lends a Hand

It is believed that the invention of hieroglyphs dates as far back as 3000 B.C. Through the years various styles were used and by 500 A.D. nobody could read them. They remained a mystery.

Then, in 1798, Napoleon invaded Egypt. The French leader brought with his army a party of 167 scholars, artists and scientists.

The findings, paintings and writing of these intellectuals started an Egyptian craze in Europe that was the basis for the new discipline of Egyptology and renewed interest in the hieroglyphs. The most important of those finding, was that of the Rosetta Stone in July 1799 by a young officer named Pierre Francois Xavier Bouchard. The French delegation would continue to work in Egypt until 1801 when Napoleon took his army back to France.

The Rosetta Stone

Discovered in the Eyptian Mediterranean port of Rosetta (Rashid), the stone has a list of a pharaoh’s, good deeds written in two languages: Egyptian and Classical Greek, the language of the Ptolemaic dynasty which ruled Egypt at the time. The Egyptian text is carved in two kinds of scripts; the formal hieroglyphs and the common demotic.

Imprinted in about 196 B.C. the stone provided the opportunity to decipher, at least some of, the hieroglyphs by comparing it to the Greek, which was known by many scholars. But it was not as easy as that.

Enter Jean Francois Champollion

Born in the southwestern French town of Figeac on December 23, 1790, Jean Francois Champollion showed an early attitude for languages. He practically taught himself Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese and, later, Coptic.

When he was 10 years old Champollion was accepted at the Lyceum of Grenoble. Six years later, he would astonish his teacher by presenting a work in which he argued that the language of the Coptic Christians of the time was the same as the one spoken by the ancient Egyptians.

A consummate and well known Egyptologist by the time he was 25, he tried for years to decipher the hieroglyphs. It would be his knowledge of Coptic that would allow him to succeed where so many others have failed

Coptic had been the language of Egypt during the Ptolemaic period. It used Greek letters but it kept the central structure of Egyptian.

Eventually Champollion was able to match seven demotic signs to the Coptic writing and then many more. The hieroglyphics had been deciphered and a lost world had been discovered.