The writing
It is not an alphabet drawn with pictures.
Egyptian runs three systems at once, in the same line: signs that stand for the word they depict, signs that stand for one, two or three consonants, and unpronounced signs at the end of a word saying what category it belongs to. The twenty-four below could in principle have written the whole language, and Egyptian never did that in three thousand years, which tells you the script was not straining toward an alphabet and being held back.
The single-consonant signs
Gardiner code, transliteration, sound
Egyptian vulture
A glottal stop. Conventionally read as a short 'a' by Egyptologists talking to each other, which is a convenience rather than a reconstruction.
Flowering reed
Roughly the 'y' in yes, or a glottal onset. Doubled, it writes the sound below.
Two diagonal strokes
A 'y'. Also the dual ending, which is why it turns up on words meaning a pair of things.
Forearm
A pharyngeal consonant with no English equivalent, made low in the throat. Read as 'a' by convention.
Quail chick
A 'w' or 'oo'. One of the commonest signs in the script, and the plural and passive endings both use it.
Lower leg and foot
A 'b'.
Reed mat or stool
A 'p'.
Horned viper
An 'f'. This sign is the reason the language is written with a snake in so many words.
Owl
An 'm'. Also the preposition 'in', written alone.
Ripple of water
An 'n'. Also the preposition 'to' and the genitive, so it is everywhere.
Mouth
An 'r'. Also the preposition 'to' or 'at', and the word for mouth itself.
Reed shelter in a field
An 'h' as in house.
Twisted wick of flax
An emphatic 'h', made further back in the throat. Distinct from the sign above and not interchangeable with it.
Placenta, or a sieve; the identification is disputed
The 'ch' in Scottish loch.
Animal's belly with teats
A softer 'ch', closer to the German ich. Distinguishing this from the sign above is one of the first things a student has to learn to hear.
Door bolt
An 's'. A second sign, the folded cloth, writes the same sound and the two had merged by the Middle Kingdom.
Pool or garden basin
An 'sh'.
Slope of a hill
An emphatic 'k' made at the back of the throat, like Arabic qaf.
Basket with a handle
A 'k'.
Jar stand
A hard 'g'.
Loaf of bread
A 't'. Also the feminine ending, which makes it one of the most frequent signs in the script.
Tethering rope
Originally 'tj' as in church, and it drifted toward a plain 't' over time.
Hand
A 'd'.
Cobra
Originally 'dj' as in judge, and it drifted toward 'd'. The word for cobra, and the sign in Djed and Djoser.
Codepoints were derived from Unicodeβs own Gardiner-coded character names rather than transcribed by hand, because a mistyped codepoint renders a different sign and nothing warns you. If these appear as empty boxes, your browser has not loaded the hieroglyph face.
No vowels are written
Egyptian records consonants only, like unpointed Hebrew or Arabic. Every vocalisation you have ever seen is a modern convention or a Greek transcription rather than a reading. Egyptologists insert a short βeβ between consonants to make names sayable, which is why nfr-tj-tj becomes Nefertiti and jmn becomes Amun. Nobody knows how any of it sounded.
How the three systems combine
- 01
A sign can be the word it draws
The mouth sign, D21, drawn alone with a single stroke beneath it, is the word for mouth. That is a logogram, and it is the simplest use of a hieroglyph and the least common.
- 02
A sign can be a sound instead
The same mouth sign, used phonetically, is just the consonant r, and it appears inside hundreds of words that have nothing to do with mouths. This is the rebus principle, and it is the step that turns a set of pictures into a writing system.
- 03
Signs can carry two or three consonants at once
Most Egyptian words are built from biliteral and triliteral signs rather than from the twenty-four above. The scarab writes αΈ«pr, three consonants in one sign. The ankh writes κ₯nαΈ«. These are the bulk of the script.
- 04
Uniliterals are then used as phonetic complements
A triliteral is frequently followed by one or two uniliterals repeating consonants it already contains, which looks redundant and is not: it tells the reader which of several possible readings of an ambiguous sign is meant, the way a spelling confirms a word.
- 05
An unpronounced sign at the end says what kind of thing it is
Determinatives are not read aloud. A pair of walking legs after a word marks it as motion; a seated man marks a man or a personal name; a roll of papyrus marks an abstraction. They resolve the ambiguity that comes of writing no vowels, and they are why Egyptian could function without them.
- 06
Direction is not fixed, and the signs tell you which way to read
Text runs left to right, right to left, or in columns. To know which, look at any animal or human sign: they FACE THE START of the line. If the birds look right, you read right to left. This is the single most useful thing a visitor to a museum can be told.
How it was actually deciphered
The script died out with the last inscriptions at Philae in the fifth century CE, and with it the ability to read fourteen centuries of records. What replaced understanding was a confident wrong theory: that hieroglyphs were purely symbolic, each sign encoding a mystical concept rather than a sound. Athanasius Kircher produced elaborate translations on that basis in the seventeenth century, and every one of them was invention.
The Rosetta Stone, found in 1799, gave the same decree in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. That was necessary and nowhere near sufficient. Thomas Young established that the cartouches held royal names spelled phonetically, and worked out several signs, but held to the view that phonetic writing was a special case used for foreign names.
Jean-Francois Champollion's move in 1822 was to see that the phonetic principle ran through the whole script, native words included, and the evidence that convinced him came from Coptic: the late form of the Egyptian language, written in Greek letters and still used liturgically, which he had learned. Reading the name Ramesses, he could hear that the signs spelled a word meaning 'born of', which is Coptic mise, and the system opened.
The lesson worth keeping is that the stone was not the key. The surviving descendant of the language was.