Egyptian hieroglyphics

About egyptian hieroglyphics

Egyptian symbols such as the Ankh and the eye of Horus are hieroglyphs, signs of the Egyptian writing system. The hieroglyphs were pictures, and each could work in more than one way. A picture could stand for the thing it showed, or for an idea: the British Museum's 1909 guide gives a wall leaning to one side for "falling" and the sky with a star hanging from it for "night". Signs used this way are called ideographs. Other signs stood for sounds, and scribes spelled words with them without any regard to what the pictures showed. Because a word spelled out in sounds could mean more than one thing, they added a sign called a determinative to say which was meant: the same word meant "to stand" when followed by a pair of legs, and "boat" when followed by a boat.

The pages here take thirteen of the signs, among them the Ankh, the Djed pillar, the Scarab and the eye of Horus, and follow each from the script into the amulets and the royal and religious art of ancient Egypt. What they meant is told as the Egyptians of the time believed it, and where the scholars who catalogued them disagreed, both readings are given.

Signs worn as amulets

Many of these signs were also made as amulets. Flinders Petrie, cataloguing the amulets at University College London in 1914, put them in a class that worked by symbolism rather than by likeness: the Djed pillar for stability, the shen for the fullness of life, the Cartouche to preserve a name. Wallis Budge's Egyptian Magic (1901) notes that the Tyet was usually made of a red stone, while the eye of Horus was made of almost anything, from gold to wood.

Signs of kings and gods

Others belonged to rulers and to the gods. A king's name was written inside a Cartouche; the crook and flail were emblems of rule; the Uraeus cobra sat on the royal brow. The winged sun disk was carved over the entrances to temples, and the feather of Maat was weighed against the heart of the dead at their judgment.

Which way do you read hieroglyphs?

Towards the faces. The people, birds and animals in a line of hieroglyphs look towards its beginning, so a reader starts from the side they face; Adolf Erman’s grammar of 1894 and Wallis Budge’s First Steps in Egyptian both give this rule. Erman adds that the writing properly ran from right to left, and from left to right only as an exception, for decoration. Signs were written in columns as well as in lines.

Who invented hieroglyphs?

The Egyptians gave the credit to Thoth, the ibis-headed god of the moon and scribe of the gods. The British Museum’s 1909 guide records that the invention of writing was assigned to him, and Erman describes him as the judge in heaven “who gave speech and writing”.