So you want to write like an Egyptian, huh? Well it took several years for aspiring scribes to learn how to do it, so for the sake of time we'll just cover the basics.

Hieroglyphic writing first began around 5000 years ago. Egyptians wrote in hieroglyphs up to about 400 AD, after that they wrote in a short-hand cursive style called demotic. Eventually everyone forgot how to write in hieroglyphs.

But now we are able to decipher hieroglyphs thanks to a special chunk of rock and a determined Egyptologist. In 1799, a soldier digging a fort in Rosetta, Egypt found a large black stone with three different types of writing on it. The writing was a message about Ptolemy V, who was ruling Egypt at the time. Because the message was written during the time when the Greeks ruled Egypt, one of the three languages was Greek. The other two were demotic and hieroglyphic.

People realized that the three languages on "The Rosetta Stone" said the same thing. And even though people could read Greek, they couldn't figure out how to match up Greek words with hieroglyphic words. For years no one was able to understand how the hieroglyphic message corresponded to the Greek one.

Finally, in 1822, a French Egyptologist named Jean François Champollion figured out how to decipher hieroglyphic writing. He realized that the hieroglyphs that spelled "Ptolemy" were enclosed in a cartouche, so he was able to match it up to the Greek spelling. This discovery enabled him to equate the unfamiliar hieroglyphs with familiar Greek words and to translate the entire message.

The hieroglyphs

There were a few different types of hieroglyphs. Some stood for entire words, others were used for individual sounds, and still others represented groups of sounds or syllables.

		= "giraffe"
		= N sound
		= shortcut for a syllable containing these sounds: N + F + R

Writing English words with hieroglyphs

To write an English word with hieroglyphs, first listen to the sounds that make up the word. Don't think about which letters are used to spell it, because many of our words have letters that are either silent or sound like other letters when pronounced aloud. Then, find the find the hieroglyphs that correspond to each sound from the chart at the end of this page.

English and ancient Egyptian aren't from the same language family, so some of the sounds they said don't exist in our alphabet. And some of the sounds we make did not exist in Egyptian. For example, there is no hieroglyph for the TH sound because the ancient Egyptians didn't say any words containing that sound. In cases like this, we have to substitute it with the closest sound possible. So instead of spelling this and that, you have to spell dis and dat.

Notice in the hieroglyph chart that F and V sounds share the same hieroglyph (the horned viper). These two sounds weren't distinguished by the ancient Egyptians, so we have to use the same hieroglyph. Why F and V? Because these two sounds are articulated in roughly the same place in your mouth. The difference between them is whether or not your vocal cords are vibrating. You can feel the difference by saying "ffffff" and then changing it to "vvvvvv" while touching your thoat to feel the vibrations of your vocal cords.