When you undertake your Nile Cruise and begin to visit sites such as The Valley of the Kings, Kom Ombo, Karnak Temple, etc, you will be shown examples of hieroglyphs by your Egyptologist/Guide.
When you first see the rows of script you will, if you are anything like me, simply see rows of figures and symbols. However, on reading the Guardian Ancient Egypt Guide, I now know that:
- 1) “Hieroglyph” is a Greek word and means “sacred carving”.
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2) It was used continuously in Egypt for almost 4000 years – much longer than our alphabet has been used.
3) When Egypt became a Christian country the traditional temples were closed and the ancient script was abandoned but the same language was used but written with a form of the Greek alphabet known as Coptic.
4) There are roughly 750 hieroglyphs.
Eventually it was realised that even though they look like pictures most hieroglyphs are “sound signs”. They are used because they depict an object, the word for which starts with, or is, a particular sound.
There are “single sound” symbols comprising of signs that record the 24 consonantal sounds of the ancient Egyptian language and there are “multi-sound and picture” symbols. For example a picture of the ground plan of a house is a “sound” sign pronounced “per”. It can also be used for any word that starts with the sound “per”.
Then, simply by placing a single stroke underneath the sound sign makes it a picture sign. In this instance the sign would simply mean “house”.
Hieroglyphs can also “face” to the left or the right and can be written horizontally or vertically. The direction in which animal and human figures are facing can tell you where to start – usually they face towards the beginning of the text.
The Guardian Guide really gives a brief overview but enough to give you a better understanding of Hieroglyphs. Sufficient, I think, to make your visits to the temples and tombs a lot more interesting and rewarding.
If you would like a copy of the Guardian Guide to Ancient Egypt I’m sure there are still copies available for the Guardian.co.uk website. Just go to their Readers Offers section and choose “Ancient World”.
