Hieroglyphics

What is Egyptian
writing called?
The Egyptian writing called hieroglyphics
used pictures to represent different
objects, actions, sound or ideas. There
were more than 700 hieroglyphs. Some
pictures stood for whole words.

What does the word

hieroglyph
mean?
hieros meaning holy
glyphe meaning writing
So hieroglyph means holy
writing.

How do you know

which way to read
Hieroglyphs?
You need to look closely at the hieroglyphs to find out. It depends on which way the people or
animals are facing. For example, if an animal hieroglyph faces right, you read from right to
left. If it faces left, you read from left to right (the same way that we do). Just to confuse you,
sometimes they read Hieroglyphs from top to bottom.

What did Ancient

Egyptians use to
write with?

Hieroglyphs were written on

papyrus reed, which is a water
or marsh plant, with tall straight
hollow stems. The reeds were
flattened, dried, and stuck
together to make pages.
The Egyptians also carved
hieroglyphs onto stone and
painted them on the walls of the
tombs.

Where did the

Ancient Egyptians
use writing?
They used writing in a variety
of places including in scribe
schools, on tomb walls, in
fields, in temples, at war and in
the government.

How do we know
how to read
hieroglyphics ?

This writing was uncovered by

the Rosetta Stone.
Hieroglyphics uses small
pictures which represent the
sound of the object or an idea
associated with the object.

What do the
pictures mean?

Most of the pictures can stand for

the object they represent, but
usually they stand for sounds. In
Egyptian, the owl stands for the
sound 'm'. The Egyptian symbol
for a mouth can mean mouth but
it's usually read as the sound 'r'.
You can't exactly match our
alphabet to hieroglyphics,
because they are two very
different languages, but historians
have come up with a simplified
translation of our letters and
Egyptian hieroglyphs.