Ancient Egypt • Hieroglyphs

The Divine Writing of the Ancient Egyptians

Like the Pyramids and the Sphinx, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs rank amongst the most famous and recognized images in the world.

These evocative symbols first appeared around 3100 B.C. and would be used to adorn monuments until the time of the Roman Empire. Knowledge of hieroglyphic writing died out shortly thereafter, however, and the script would remain inaccessible for some 1,400 years.

The Rosetta Stone

The ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs breakthrough came in 1799, when a French soldier in Napoleon's campaign chanced upon a damaged black basalt stone during the construction of a fort at Raschid, near the mouth of the Rosetta branch of the Nile Delta.

Etched on the stone was a decree of 196 B.C., written by priests to honor the ruling ancient Egyptian pharaoh, Ptolemy Epiphanes. It featured three identical texts, two in Egyptian and one in Greek (the official language of Egypt at the time).

The top section of what would later become known as the Rosetta Stone featured hieroglyphic text; the middle section was in demotic, a later simplified version of hieroglyphs that could be written with greater speed and ease; and the bottom section was written in the Greek alphabet.

Jean Francois Champollion

Back in Europe, Egyptologists had little problem translating the Greek, but the pictorial nature of the hieroglyphs confused them. It was the Frenchman Jean Francois Champollion who finally realized that some of the signs made up an alphabet and represented sounds rather than things. His discovery allowed scholars to put together a grammar of the Egyptian language and decipher the ancient text in 1822.

Ancient Egypt's hieroglyphs did, in fact, begin as pictorial representations of actual objects that could be understood by anyone familiar with them, but they were highly restrictive in that they could not express abstract ideas. To address this problem, 24 hieroglyphs were set aside to represent the sounds of the Egyptian language.

In addition to these, hundreds of other hieroglyphs were retained in their original pictorial form to complement the phonetic symbols. This combination made hieroglyphic writing extremely complex - an art form of which the Egyptians were justifiably proud. In fact, they considered it no less than a divine gift of Thoth, the god of wisdom and learning.

Only those in the highest reaches of society, such as members of the royal family and key officials, were taught to read and write. Scribes themselves enjoyed a special status in society, a fact illustrated by the following text written on an ancient piece of papyrus which declared: "The scribe directs every work in the land . . . he pays no taxes . . . his tribute is paid in writing."

Some Hieroglyphs Were Sacred

Some ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs were considered extremely sacred. The "ankh", which was originally a hieroglyph representing a sandal with a loop, was especially powerful, coming to symbolize eternal life and widely used as an amulet.