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Egyptian hieroglyphs are visually the most appealing way of writing yet devised. Their origins can be traced to a royal necropolis in southern Egypt, where archaeologists found the earliest signs incised on ivory tags more than 5,000 years old.

The ancient scribes regarded their writing as a gift of Thoth, the god of wisdom, and called it “god’s words”. In their eyes the picture-signs were endowed with a magical force that made the script ideal for its principal uses in tombs and temples. We owe our evocative word “hieroglyphs” to Ancient Greek tourists who invented it to describe the “sacred carvings” that they saw in Egypt.

Hieroglyphs are exceptionally versatile and could be written from right to left or vice versa, or vertically from top to bottom. The clue to finding the start of an inscription in a mass of hieroglyphs is to look for a recognisable picture, such as a bird like the Egyptian vulture because its beak will always point towards the start. The variety of signs seems almost limitless, with at least 750 pictures in the “classical” era of inscriptions, rising into the thousands when Egypt was under the rule of the Greeks and Romans.

We can get to grips with the basics of this complex system of writing but are left wondering why the Egyptian scribes never simplified it. Perhaps the reason was that its mystique and limited accessibility kept their profession respected and themselves in some of the most powerful jobs in the country, comparable with the rank of, say, a high priest.

Here are some of the rules and conventions in writing hieroglyphs. The script consisted only of consonants, missing out the vowels of a word (which scribes would automatically know). Any vowels that you come across in famous Egyptian names such as Rameses are either educated guesses or merely insertions between consonants to make words pronounceable for us. Otherwise, how could we say the name of the terrifying crocodile god, which is made up of three consonants, unless we spoke it as “Sobek”?

Now, here is the first crucial thing about how the writing system worked. We can identify a series of about 25 hieroglyphs which are conveniently classed as an “alphabet”. In other words, each sign represents a single sound or letter of the Ancient Egyptian language. Charts of these are common, and if you go to Egypt and want your name written in hieroglyphs on a piece of jewellery or a galabeya robe, the pictures will be chosen from these “alphabetic” hieroglyphs.

Although the signs show diverse objects, animals, people and natural phenomena, the underlying principle is that each individual hieroglyph is used to convey a sound in the language, and in no way represents what the picture shows. So the alphabetic hieroglyph of an “owl” stands for the letter “m” and not for the bird or any aspect connected with it, such as “night”. Similarly, the sign of the “horned viper” is “f” and not the threat of the venomous snake.

The complication, for us, comes from the fact that the ancient scribes, in addition to the “alphabet”, frequently invented new signs to cover groups of two or three consonants running consecutively. So for the three consonantal sounds in “nefer” — a popular word meaning “beautiful” — a new hieroglyph was used, which was the picture of the “heart and windpipe”.

— George Hart is an Egyptologist, formerly of the British Museum

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