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01b - Hieroglyphs Student Information Sheet

Egyptian hieroglyphs are one of the oldest writing systems, used for over 3600 years, characterized by complex signs that can represent whole words or consonants without vowels. They were primarily utilized for formal writing on monuments and sacred texts, while simpler writing systems like hieratic and Demotic were used for everyday purposes. Hieroglyphs required readers to interpret signs in multiple ways, making them challenging to decipher.

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23 views2 pages

01b - Hieroglyphs Student Information Sheet

Egyptian hieroglyphs are one of the oldest writing systems, used for over 3600 years, characterized by complex signs that can represent whole words or consonants without vowels. They were primarily utilized for formal writing on monuments and sacred texts, while simpler writing systems like hieratic and Demotic were used for everyday purposes. Hieroglyphs required readers to interpret signs in multiple ways, making them challenging to decipher.

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Egyptian

Hieroglyphs

Egytian hieroglyphs are one of the oldest writing systems in the world. The
earliest examples are around 5000 years old, but they were still being used
about 3600 years later. That’s far longer than our own alphabet has existed
for.
Hieroglyphs are a very
complicated way of writing,
and not just because the
signs are often quite detailed
drawings of animals, people
and birds. Hieroglyphic signs
can be read in more than one
way and there were less strict
rules about spelling and even
which direction the writing
goes. This might sound like
there’s less to learn, but
really it means that reading a
simple message can be a bit like solving a word search – except that the words
you’re finding might not be spelled the way you expect!
Sometimes hieroglyphic signs stand for whole words, like ‘house’ or ‘sun’.
Sometimes they stand for one or more consonants. There were no proper
vowels in Egyptian writing. Sometimes the sign might not be pronounced out
loud at all, but is there to tell you what kind of thing the word is – so you might
have a sign showing a man to tell you that the word you’re reading is a man’s
name. What makes hieroglyphic writing especially hard is that you need to
work out which of these ways you each sign you see should be read in. Imagine
if in our alphabet, every time you saw the letter A, you had to work out whether
it meant the sound ‘a’, the word ‘cow’ or was there to tell you that the word
you’re reading belonged to a certain group of things – for example, pet names.
Egyptians didn’t actually use hieroglyphs most of the time. They were only
really for the poshest kinds of writing – on monuments, tombs, sacred texts
and things like that. There were actually lots of other ways of writing in ancient
Egypt, depending on what you wanted to write.
When we think about Egyptian writing, we imagine two main kinds of writing
surface – carvings on stone walls, and papyrus. Papyrus is a kind of paper made
from reeds. Egyptians wrote their signs in different ways to make it easier
depending on what they were writing on. If they were writing hieroglyphs on
papyrus, they used simpler versions that were easier to draw with a brush – a
bit like the difference between printed letters and joined-up handwriting in our
writing.
Most of the time, though, when Egyptians wrote on papyrus, they didn’t use
hieroglyphs at all, but one of two other writing systems. Both were originally
derived from hieroglyphs, but were even more simplified and abstracted. The
original pictures were much less recognisable and they were much easier to
write quickly with a brush. The older one was called hieratic, and the later one
was called Demotic.

Left: hieratic
Below: Demotic

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