Introduction

Hieroglyphs are pictures used as signs in writing. Many depict living creatures or objects (or their parts):


And, as you might expect, some signs represent the object they depict. So, for example, the mouth sign is used to write the word for mouth, usually in combination with a stroke-sign:


However, very few words are actually written in this way.Instead, hieroglyphic picture-signs are used to convey the sound (and meaning) of the ancient Egyptian language, just as the letters of our own alphabet convey the sounds of English.

The purpose of this essay is to show how this is done.

How then can hieroglyphs be read to show us something of the sound of an ancient Egyptian word? The easiest way to see this is through looking at a real example. The sign depicts a schematic house (in plan) and is used to write the word for 'house' as follows (| is the stroke-sign already noted above):

As it happens, this word is based on the two consonants p and r combined to give pr. We shall discuss the way the Ancient Egyptian word is put into our own writing system-how it is transliterated. Now, there is another word which makes use of the same sound combination p and r, the word for 'go out' and 'leave'. In hierpglyphs this is written as: