Egyptian hieroglyphs

The persistent misreading of Egyptian hieroglyphs is that they are picture-writing — that an owl means an owl, and a text is a rebus to be puzzled out from its imagery. They are not, and the mistake is old enough to have cost the script fourteen centuries of illegibility. Classical and Renaissance scholars read the signs as mystical emblems of ideas, and every attempt at translation built on that premise failed.

What the pictures actually do, most of the time, is spell. The owl is the consonant m. The mouth is r. A hieroglyphic text is a phonetic record of the Egyptian language, written with signs that happen to be beautifully drawn objects — and the objects are frequently nothing to do with the word being written.

A script can look like pictures for three thousand years and be spelling the whole time.

What it does not write is vowels, the same convention the Semitic abjads would later inherit. Egyptologists insert a conventional e to make words pronounceable, which is why the transliterations look the way they do: the sounds are a modern courtesy, not a reading. Nobody knows precisely how Middle Egyptian was pronounced.

A hieroglyph does one of three jobs, and the same drawing can do more than one depending on where it sits.

As a phonogram it spells consonants — one, two or three at a time. The uniliteral signs are the interesting ones: roughly two dozen signs each standing for a single consonant, a complete working alphabet sitting inside the system for over three thousand years, never used on its own. Egypt had the alphabet and did not take it; it took a Semitic-speaking population to extract those signs and build a script out of nothing else.

As a logogram it stands for the word it depicts, usually flagged with a single stroke so the reader knows to take the picture literally for once.

As a determinative it is not pronounced at all. Placed at the end of a word, it tells you what class of thing the word belongs to — motion, speech, a divine name, an abstraction. In an unvowelled script where different words share a consonant skeleton, the determinative is what stops the ambiguity: it is a semantic disambiguator, doing silently the work vowels do elsewhere.

There are around a thousand signs in the classical inventory and several thousand by the Ptolemaic period, so no abecedary is possible and none is offered. The signs below are printed as forms. A sign's value depends on whether it is working as a phonogram, a logogram or a determinative in the particular word, and a table that fixed one reading per picture would reproduce exactly the error that kept the script unreadable until 1822.

Hieroglyphs are the clearest case in the collection of a script that announces its own direction. Signs depicting people and animals face one way or the other, and they face the start of the line. Confronted with an inscription, the reader looks at which way the birds are looking and reads towards them.

This makes the script genuinely reversible — right to left, left to right, or in vertical columns — and scribes chose the direction to suit the architecture, so that an inscription could face a doorway or mirror its twin across a wall. Direction here is a design decision made per surface, not a property of the writing system. Compare the fixed-direction scripts in the Directionality Studio.

The tradition has an unusually precise ending. The last securely dated hieroglyphic inscription was cut at the temple of Philae, near the First Cataract, on 24 August 394 CE — a graffito by a priest named Esmet-Akhom, carved as Christianity closed the old temple establishment. Demotic hangs on at the same site a few decades longer. Then the script goes silent for fourteen centuries, until the Rosetta Stone and Champollion's 1822 breakthrough.

Its most consequential descendant had left long before. Somewhere in the Sinai and the Egyptian Delta, around 1900–1700 BCE, Semitic speakers took a small number of Egyptian signs, kept the pictures, discarded everything except the first consonant of each picture's Semitic name, and built a script of about two dozen letters. That is Proto-Sinaitic, and it is the trunk of the alphabet — see Phoenician and the Hall of Lineages. Every letter on this page is a remote descendant of a picture drawn beside the Nile.