Facts About Hieroglyphics
- The Ancient Egyptians used no punctuation (like full stops, commas or question marks) and they didn’t put any spaces between their words
- There were no vowels in Egyptian Hieroglyphs only consonants,so ‘Egyptians are Cool’ without vowels would be ‘Gyptns r Cl’ !!!
- There are over 700 hieroglyphics in the ancient Egyptian alphabet
- Hieroglyphs were not just written on tablets and temple walls they also used papyrus reed, The reeds were flattened, dried, and stuck together to make pages.
- The majority of the people of in Ancient Egypt did not read or write. The scribes and priests were the ones who did all the writing.
- Egyptian hieroglyphs could be written in both directions - right to left or left to right: now that is confusing!
- Sometimes scribes used a faster short form of hieroglyphics on papyrus called hieratic.
- A single picture symbol could stand for a whole word, called an ideogram, or a sound, called a phonogram. For example, a picture of an eye could mean the word “eye” or the letter “I”
- Hieroglyph comes from two Greek words meaning “sacred writing”. This in turn came from the Egyptians’ own word for their language meaning “divine speech”
- The Rosetta Stone was discovered by the French in 1799, and was instrumental in cracking hieroglyphs. The stone contained passages written in Middle Egyptian, Demotic and Greek and in the 1820s French historian Jean-Francois Champollion finally translated and cracked Egyptian hieroglyphs!