Deciphering Hieroglyphs
Times Online (George Hart)
Another new page has been added to the Times Online website, this time by George Hart (who was an absolute hit at the Bloomsbury Summer School in London this last summer).
Egyptian hieroglyphs are visually the most appealing way of writing yet devised. Their origins can be traced to a royal necropolis in southern Egypt, where archaeologists found the earliest signs incised on ivory tags more than 5,000 years old.
The ancient scribes regarded their writing as a gift of Thoth, the god of wisdom, and called it “god’s words”. In their eyes the picture-signs were endowed with a magical force that made the script ideal for its principal uses in tombs and temples. We owe our evocative word “hieroglyphs” to Ancient Greek tourists who invented it to describe the “sacred carvings” that they saw in Egypt.
Hieroglyphs are exceptionally versatile and could be written from right to left or vice versa, or vertically from top to bottom. The clue to finding the start of an inscription in a mass of hieroglyphs is to look for a recognisable picture, such as a bird like the Egyptian vulture because its beak will always point towards the start. The variety of signs seems almost limitless, with at least 750 pictures in the “classical” era of inscriptions, rising into the thousands when Egypt was under the rule of the Greeks and Romans.
See the above page for the full article. It is accompanied by a list of the single-consonant symbols in PDF format.
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