Egyptian hieroglyphs

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Egyptian hieroglyphs" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Egyptian hieroglyphs
Hieroglyphs from the tomb of Seti I (KV17), 13th century BC
Script type	Logographic
Time period	c. 3250 BC – c. 400 AD
Direction	Right-to-left, left-to-right, boustrophedon
Languages	Egyptian language
Related scripts
Parent systems	(Proto-writing) Egyptian hieroglyphs
Child systems	Hieratic Proto-Sinaitic
ISO 15924
ISO 15924	Egyp (050), ​Egyptian hieroglyphs
Unicode
Unicode alias	Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Unicode range	U+13000–U+1342F Egyptian Hieroglyphs U+13460–U+143FF Egyptian Hieroglyphs Extended-A U+13430–U+1345F Egyptian Hieroglyph Format Controls
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs (/ˈhaɪroʊˌɡlɪfs/ HY-roh-glifs)^[1][2] were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters.^[3][4] Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet.^[5] Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system. Moreover, owing in large part to the Greek and Aramaic scripts that descended from Phoenician, the majority of the world's living writing systems are descendants of Egyptian hieroglyphs—most prominently the Latin and Cyrillic scripts through Greek, and the Arabic and Brahmic scripts through Aramaic.^{[not verified in body]}

The use of hieroglyphic writing arose from proto-literate symbol systems in the Early Bronze Age c. the 33rd century BC (Naqada III),^[6] with the first decipherable sentence written in the Egyptian language dating to the 28th century BC (Second Dynasty). Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs developed into a mature writing system used for monumental inscription in the classical language of the Middle Kingdom period; during this period, the system used about 900 distinct signs. The use of this writing system continued through the New Kingdom and Late Period, and on into the Persian and Ptolemaic periods. Late survivals of hieroglyphic use are found well into the Roman period, extending into the 4th century AD.^[7]

During the 5th century, the permanent closing of pagan temples across Roman Egypt ultimately resulted in the ability to read and write hieroglyphs being forgotten. Despite attempts at decipherment, the nature of the script remained unknown throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The decipherment of hieroglyphic writing was finally accomplished in the 1820s by Jean-François Champollion, with the help of the Rosetta Stone.^[8]

The entire Ancient Egyptian corpus, including both hieroglyphic and hieratic texts, is approximately 5 million words in length; if counting duplicates (such as the Book of the Dead and the Coffin Texts) as separate, this figure is closer to 10 million. The most complete compendium of Ancient Egyptian, the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache, contains 1.5–1.7 million words.^[9][10]