Ancient scripts
Writing systems and their signs: how people first wrote, and how the forms changed.
- Chinese radicalsThe components that organise Chinese characters, and how they grew from pictures carved on oracle bones.21 entries
- Elder Futhark runesThe 24 runes of the oldest runic alphabet, the Elder Futhark, and what each rune’s name meant.24 entries
- Egyptian hieroglyphicsSigns from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing and religious art.14 entries
- Egyptian gods and their symbolsThe gods of ancient Egypt as tomb and temple art shows them, from jackal-headed Anubis and lioness-headed Sekhmet to Isis with the throne on her head, and the crowns, sceptres and animals that identify each one.18 entries
- OghamThe early Irish alphabet of strokes cut along the edge of a stone: each letter’s sound, its name, and the “tree alphabet” reading set beside what the names first meant.23 entries
About ancient scripts
Egyptian writing came in three forms, and the oldest is the one people now call hieroglyphs. The British Museum's 1909 guide describes it as purely pictorial, cut on temples, tombs, statues and gravestones. It was slow to write, so scribes shortened the pictures into hieratic, a running hand used by priests for copying books on papyrus, and later simplified that again into demotic, "the people's writing". Egyptians who became Christian wrote their language in Greek letters, with seven extra signs taken from demotic; this is Coptic.
This section covers Egyptian hieroglyphics: the signs, and the amulets and royal and religious art that used them.
How the script was lost
The guide records that by the end of Roman rule in Egypt hieroglyphs had fallen out of use, replaced by demotic. Priests seem to have studied them until the end of the fifth century AD, and soon after that the ability to read them was lost. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century no one, in the East or in Europe, could read a hieroglyphic inscription.
The Rosetta Stone and Champollion
In August 1799 a French officer of engineers, named by Budge as Boussard or Bouchard, found the Rosetta Stone, which carries the same decree in hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek. The decree was passed by Egyptian priests at Memphis in 196 BC to honour Ptolemy V. Thomas Young proved that the oval ring, the cartouche, held a royal name, and read the name Ptolemy on the stone.
In 1822 Jean-François Champollion corrected and greatly enlarged Young's list of sound signs. Coptic had never been forgotten, and Champollion, who had studied it from his youth, used it to work out the sounds of the signs. By comparing texts that wrote the same words in different ways, Budge wrote in 1913, he arrived at the system of reading hieroglyphs still substantially in use.
Sources
- A guide to the Egyptian collections in the British Museum, British Museum, 1909 (introduction by E. A. Wallis Budge), Harrison and Sons, London (Project Gutenberg), Chapter on Egyptian writing; Decipherment of Egyptian Hieroglyphics
- The Rosetta Stone, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1913, British Museum (Project Gutenberg)
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 30, 2026. How we research