Ancient Egyptian Writing• By around 3000 B.C., Egyptians began to use a form of writing

called Hieroglyphs

• It comes from the Greek “hieros” meaning sacred and “glyphe”

meaning carving

• The development of hieroglyphics first began as simple

pictograms (pictures that represent the object that it actually

depicted)

• Later, pictures came to represent ideas, so that if you saw a sun

in a scene, it might symbolize not only the sun, but also

daytime, warmth, or light. These were known as ideograms.

• The problem with ideograms was that they could be hard to interpret. In some cases it

could be hard to tell if the writer meant daytime or the sun.

• Finally, the pictures began to represent not only the appearance of an object and related

ideas, but also the sound of a spoken word used to it describe it. Sun, then, might also

mean son.

• _______ __________ ________ ______ ___________

• So each picture took on a unique sound that could be used to form thoughts and ideas.

• Egyptian hieroglyphs were a combination of sound-signs, pictograms, and ideograms. This

made them extremely difficult for archaeologists to decode. Early Egyptians used more than

1000 signs, pictures, or symbols to indicate words or sounds

• Scribes learned to use this language at a young age and were employed to keep record of

business transactions, law codes, inventories, etc.

• Some scribes even worked for the Pharaoh recording architectural plans, and even writing

religious spells on the walls of their tombs

• Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics was not able to be translated into modern language until the

discovery of the Rosetta Stone