Hieroglyphs and Egyptian Writing: How the Egyptians Wrote, and How Their Script Was Read Again
A Script Designed for Eternity
Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is among the most visually striking systems humans have ever devised. It is also among the most intellectually complex, combining phonetic signs, logographic signs, and determinatives in a system that took specialist scribes years to master and that remained entirely illegible to the outside world for roughly 1,400 years between the closing of the last temple schools in Late Antiquity and the decipherment in 1822. The signs themselves — the seated human figure, the horned viper, the owl, the loaf of bread, the eye of Horus — are immediately recognisable as distinctively Egyptian, and they appear carved on temple walls, painted in tombs, inlaid on coffins, and stamped on small faience amulets from roughly 3200 BC onwards until the last dated hieroglyphic inscription, carved at Philae on August 24 of 394 AD.
The earliest hieroglyphic inscriptions are from the late Predynastic and early Dynastic periods — labels and tags from the tomb of U-j at Abydos, dated to roughly 3200–3150 BC, and the Narmer Palette from around 3000 BC with its early royal titulary. From the very beginning the script served a commemorative and institutional purpose: recording the names of rulers, the ownership of goods, the deeds of the divine order. It was never a system designed primarily for everyday administrative use, though administrative texts exist in abundance in the related scripts of hieratic and, later, demotic.
How the System Works
The central complication of Egyptian writing — and the key to why it took so long to decipher — is that it is not a simple alphabet. It is a mixed system. Some signs are phonetic: they represent one, two, or three consonants. Some are logographic: they represent the word for the object they depict. Some are determinatives: they are written but not pronounced, added at the end of words to indicate the semantic category — whether a word belongs to the realm of motion, of water, of divine beings, of negative concepts. The same word can be written phonetically, with a determinative, with an additional logographic component, or in all three ways at once.
The phonetic component represents consonants only — the vowels were not written, following a convention shared with Semitic scripts like Hebrew and Arabic. Egyptologists supply conventional vowels when pronouncing Egyptian words, but these are scholarly reconstructions rather than ancient usage. The script could be written left to right, right to left, or vertically, and the direction in which the human and animal signs face indicates the reading direction: you always read toward the faces.
Hieratic, a cursive script written with a brush on papyrus, appeared at almost the same time as hieroglyphic and was used for administrative, religious, and literary documents throughout the Pharaonic period. Demotic, an even more cursive and abbreviated script, developed in the Late Period (roughly 7th century BC onwards) and was used for contracts, letters, literary texts, and eventually — on the Rosetta Stone — official proclamations alongside hieroglyphic and Greek.
Centuries of Misreading
After the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641 AD, knowledge of how to read hieroglyphic writing was lost within a generation or two. The last Egyptian scribes who could have taught the system died without passing their knowledge on, and the script became an enigma. Medieval Arab scholars like Ibn Wahshiyya made inventive guesses, mostly wrong. European scholars of the Renaissance and Baroque eras — impressed by the visual complexity of hieroglyphs and inclined toward mystical interpretation — concluded that the signs were purely symbolic, each one encoding a hidden philosophical meaning rather than phonetic content. The Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher published elaborate symbolic 'translations' in the 17th century that were entirely fabricated.
This fundamentally incorrect assumption — that hieroglyphs conveyed mystical meaning rather than language — blocked progress for centuries. The correct insight, that hieroglyphs included phonetic elements, was not systematically pursued until the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment
The discovery of the Rosetta Stone by French soldiers during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign in 1799 — at Rashid (Rosetta) in the western Nile Delta — provided the essential tool for decipherment: a single text written in three scripts, hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek, all versions of the same decree issued by priests at Memphis in 196 BC honouring Ptolemy V. Since Greek was legible to European scholars, the parallel text offered a potential key.
The English polymath Thomas Young made crucial early progress in 1814–1819, correctly identifying that royal names were enclosed in oval cartouches, demonstrating that some hieroglyphic signs were phonetic, and partially deciphering the name of Ptolemy. But it was the French scholar Jean-François Champollion who made the decisive breakthrough. Champollion had an exceptional command of Coptic — the latest stage of the Egyptian language, written in a modified Greek alphabet and still used in the Egyptian Christian church — which gave him access to the vowel patterns of Egyptian. By comparing the hieroglyphic spelling of Ptolemy's name with the phonetic values he could deduce from the Greek, and then testing those values against the cartouche of Cleopatra on the Philae obelisk (published by William John Bankes), he worked out enough of the phonetic alphabet to begin reading other inscriptions. His 'Lettre à M. Dacier', presented on September 27, 1822, is the founding document of Egyptology.
Hieratic, Demotic, and the Papyri
The bulk of ancient Egyptian written production did not use hieroglyphs but the faster, more practical cursive scripts. Hieratic papyri include the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, copied around 1600 BC but reflecting medical knowledge probably dating from the Old Kingdom (roughly 2600–2100 BC), which describes case studies of traumatic injuries including spinal cord damage with remarkable clinical detachment. The Ebers Papyrus, also dating to around 1550 BC, is a vast compendium of medical recipes and procedures. The Westcar Papyrus preserves stories of magical feats performed at the court of Khufu — the builder of the Great Pyramid — and includes the earliest version of the tale of a ruler predicting the birth of a royal dynasty.
Demotic papyri, now housed in collections from the British Museum in London to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, have proved particularly rich for social history. Demotic contracts, letters, temple accounts, and literary texts give detailed pictures of daily life in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt that the monumental inscriptions do not provide. The Demotic Magical Papyri include a remarkable body of spells and rituals that blend Egyptian, Greek, Jewish, and Mesopotamian religious elements.
Reading the Walls Today
Champollion's decipherment opened the enormous corpus of ancient Egyptian writing to modern scholarship. Temple walls that had been appreciated as impressive but opaque now yielded detailed accounts of ritual, royal ideology, military campaigns, and the organisation of the divine world. Amenhotep III's 'boastful lists' at Luxor, Ramesses II's account of the Battle of Kadesh carved at Abydos, Karnak, the Ramesseum, and Abu Simbel, Hatshepsut's account of her expedition to Punt at Deir el-Bahari — all became readable historical documents rather than pictorial decoration.
Open the map to explore the temples, tombs, and monuments of Egypt and Nubia where hieroglyphic and hieratic texts survive — from the early inscriptions at Abydos and Saqqara to the Ptolemaic temples at Edfu and Kom Ombo, where the walls are covered floor to ceiling in hieroglyphic texts that Champollion's breakthrough finally unlocked.