Egyptian hieroglyphs are the formal script of ancient Egypt, in use for roughly 3,500 years from the late fourth millennium BCE to 394 CE. The Egyptians called them medu netjer, "the words of the god", and the system mixes signs that stand for whole words, signs that stand for sounds, and silent signs that tell the reader what kind of word is meant. It is a full writing system that recorded the Egyptian language, not a set of symbolic pictures.
That matters because almost everything people believe about ancient Egypt, from the names of the pharaohs to the meaning of temple walls, depends on reading this script correctly. It also matters because hieroglyphs sit at the centre of some of the most argued-over claims in alternative history, from the "lost knowledge" of Thoth to carvings in the Australian bush. Knowing how the script works is the best tool for judging those claims. For the wider context, start at the Ancient Egypt topic hub.
What does the word "hieroglyph" mean?
"Hieroglyph" comes from Greek, not Egyptian. Greek writers called the script tà hieroglyphikà grámmata, "the sacred carved letters", from hierós (sacred) and glýphein (to carve), because by their time it was seen mainly on temples and monuments.
The Egyptians' own term, medu netjer, is usually translated "words of the god" or "divine words". The phrase ties the script to Thoth, the ibis-headed god of wisdom, patron of scribes and "lord of divine words". The 4biddenknowledge pillar on who Thoth was and how he became Hermes Trismegistus traces that connection in detail.
When and where did hieroglyphic writing begin?
The earliest securely dated Egyptian writing comes from tomb U-j at Abydos, excavated in 1988 by Günter Dreyer of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo. The tomb held some 150 small ivory and bone labels, many bearing signs that most specialists read as early phonetic writing, along with inked inscriptions on pottery. The tomb belongs to the Naqada III period, and published dates for it range from the 33rd century BCE to around 3100 BCE, just before the First Dynasty.
That places Egyptian writing among the earliest anywhere, roughly contemporary with the first proto-cuneiform tablets of Uruk in Mesopotamia. Whether Egypt borrowed the idea of writing from Sumer is still debated, but because the Abydos signs are so early and so thoroughly Egyptian in form, many scholars consider an independent invention the more likely explanation. For the site itself, see the pillar on Abydos, the Temple of Seti I and the Osireion.
Early inscriptions are mostly names, titles and labels. The first complete sentence written in mature hieroglyphs so far found is on a seal impression from the tomb of King Seth-Peribsen at Umm el-Qa'ab, Abydos, in the Second Dynasty (28th or 27th century BCE).
How do Egyptian hieroglyphs actually work?
Hieroglyphs work by combining three kinds of sign: logograms, phonograms and determinatives. A single word often uses all three at once.
Logograms: a sign for a word
A logogram stands for a whole word, usually the thing it depicts. The sign of a house can simply mean "house", and a sun disc can mean "sun" or "day".
Phonograms: signs for sounds
Phonograms stand for sounds regardless of what they picture. There are 24 uniliteral signs, each representing a single consonant, which modern teachers sometimes call the "hieroglyphic alphabet". On top of these, hundreds of biliteral and triliteral signs each stand for a group of two or three consonants. Scribes often added uniliteral signs as phonetic complements, spelling out part of a multi-consonant sign so the reader would pick the right value.
Vowels were not written. Like Hebrew or Arabic in their basic forms, hieroglyphic spelling records consonants only, which is why Egyptologists insert an "e" by convention to make words pronounceable (nefer, netjer, medu).
Determinatives: silent classifiers
Determinatives are unpronounced signs placed at the end of a word to show its category. A seated man marks words for people or male roles, a walking-legs sign marks verbs of motion, a papyrus roll marks abstract ideas, and a seated god marks divine names. Because many words shared the same consonants, determinatives told the reader which word was meant.
How do you read the direction of hieroglyphs?
You read toward the faces. People, birds and animals in a line of hieroglyphs face the beginning of the text, so if they look to the right, you read from right to left. Right to left was the default, but scribes could also write left to right, in rows or columns, to suit a doorway or a symmetrical wall.
Signs were not strung out one after another like letters on a page. They were grouped into balanced, roughly square blocks, with tall signs side by side and flat signs stacked, read top to bottom within each block. Scribes also used honorific transposition: the name of a god or king was written first out of respect, even when grammar required it to be read later. A title such as "beloved of Amun" puts Amun's name at the front of the group.
What is a cartouche?
A cartouche is the oval ring, tied off with a short line at one end, that encloses a royal name. Most pharaohs had five names; the cartouche surrounded two of them, the throne name and the birth name (often called the prenomen and nomen). Some divine names were also enclosed. The ring is a stretched form of the shen sign, a loop of rope associated with eternity and protection, and the French word cartouche was applied to it because French soldiers of Napoleon's expedition thought the shape resembled a paper powder cartridge.
Cartouches were the doorway into decipherment. Because they flagged royal names, scholars could match the names Ptolemy and Cleopatra in Greek and Egyptian texts and assign sound values to signs.
How many hieroglyphic signs were there?
In the classical Middle Egyptian of the Middle Kingdom, about 900 distinct signs were in regular use. In the Greco-Roman period, temple scribes multiplied the inventory to more than 5,000 signs at temples such as Edfu and Dendera.
Modern Egyptologists organise the signs using Sir Alan Gardiner's Sign List, published in his Egyptian Grammar (first edition 1927). It sorts the signs into lettered groups (A for men, G for birds, N for sky and earth, and so on) and gives each a code such as A1 or G17. The same scheme underlies the Unicode standard, which encoded Egyptian hieroglyphs in version 5.2, released in October 2009.
Hieroglyphs, hieratic and demotic: what is the difference?
Hieroglyphs were one of three related Egyptian scripts. They were the formal, monumental form, carved or painted on temples, tombs and statues.
Hieratic is the cursive version written in ink with a reed brush on papyrus, ostraca and wood. It appears as early as the Naqada III period, roughly 3200 to 3000 BCE, and always runs right to left. In the later periods it was used mainly for religious texts, and priests kept writing it into the third century CE.
Demotic is a still more abbreviated script that developed in Lower (northern) Egypt around 650 BCE. It was used for administrative, legal and commercial documents, and under Amasis II in the sixth century BCE it became the official script for administration and law across the country. The Rosetta Stone carries the same decree in hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek, which is why it became the key to decipherment. That story, from the stone's discovery in 1799 to Jean-François Champollion's announcement of his breakthrough in 1822, has its own pillar: hieroglyphs and the Rosetta Stone explained.
Who could read hieroglyphs?
Reading and writing were the skills of a small scribal class, trained in temple and administrative schools. Estimates that only 1 to 5 percent of Egyptians were literate are widely quoted, but University College London's Digital Egypt resource points out that they rest on very limited evidence and mask differences between town and country.
Evidence from the Middle Kingdom town of Lahun, around 1800 BCE, where papyrus fragments turned up in ordinary houses as well as elite ones, suggests literacy in some urban communities was considerably higher than the old figure. Reading monumental hieroglyphs, as opposed to everyday hieratic, remained a narrower specialism.
When did people stop reading hieroglyphs?
The last known hieroglyphic inscription is the Graffito of Esmet-Akhom, carved on Hadrian's Gate in the temple complex of Philae and dated 24 August 394 CE, the festival of the birthday of Osiris. The last dated demotic text, also at Philae, followed in December 452 CE. As the temples closed and Coptic took over, the ability to read the old script died out.
What filled the gap was guesswork. The Hieroglyphica attributed to Horapollo, usually dated to the fifth century CE, offered 189 explanations of signs as symbolic allegories rather than sounds. Printed in 1505, it shaped Renaissance thinking, and the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, in works such as Oedipus Aegyptiacus in the 1650s, built elaborate mystical "translations" on the same assumption. Only in the 1820s, when Champollion showed that most signs were phonetic, could the texts be read again. The legacy post on six facts about hieroglyphic writing covers some of these turning points in brief.
What about Egyptian hieroglyphs in Australia?
The best-known contested case is the Gosford (or Kariong) glyphs in Brisbane Water National Park, New South Wales: close to 300 Egyptian-style carvings on two sandstone walls. A local surveyor, Alan Dash, reported first noticing them in 1975, and he described new glyphs appearing on later visits through the late 1970s.
Egyptologists who have examined them, including Naguib Kanawati and Boyo Ockinga of Macquarie University, judge them to be modern. Ockinga has pointed out that the carvings combine the name of Khufu, a Fourth Dynasty king of around 2500 BCE, with signs not used until the Ptolemaic era some 2,200 years later, and that they are cut in a disorganised way unlike real Egyptian rock inscriptions. When a National Parks and Wildlife Service geologist inspected the site in 1983, he reported some cleanly cut glyphs estimated to be less than a year old. Taken together, the evidence points plainly to modern carving, though opinions differ on whether the first ones date to the 1920s or later.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson approaches the hieroglyphs as more than a bureaucratic tool. Taking the Egyptian name medu netjer at its word, he treats them as the sacred script of Thoth, whom he calls Tehuti, and he reads Thoth not as pure myth but as a historical teacher whose knowledge was later mythologised. That view runs through his work on the Emerald Tablets and through the pillar on the Book of Thoth, the legend and the modern books.
He has also promoted the Gosford/Kariong carvings as evidence of Egyptian contact with Australia. In the podcast episode "Ancient Australia: Egyptian Glyphs and Star Origins", part of his 4bidden tour series, he describes figures at the Kariong site that he identifies as Thoth and Maat and argues for cultural connections across continents. That is his interpretation; as the section above sets out, the Egyptologists who have studied the carvings conclude that they are modern.
More recently Carson has presented an AI tool for reading ancient texts in a video titled "Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics Decoded by AI - Try FREE". This article makes no claim about the accuracy of its readings.
Watch, read and go deeper
The 4BK TV series Egyptian Mystery School explores the temples, texts and teachings behind the script. For Carson's account of the Kariong carvings in his own words, listen to the Ancient Australia episode of the 4biddenknowledge Podcast. The Book of Thoth pillar linked above follows the legend of Thoth's own writings into the modern books, and for the full map of related articles, return to the Ancient Egypt topic hub.
Frequently asked questions
Are Egyptian hieroglyphs an alphabet?
Not exactly. The script includes 24 signs that each represent a single consonant, which work like an alphabet, but it also uses hundreds of signs for two or three consonants, signs for whole words and silent determinatives. Vowels were not written at all.
Which way do you read hieroglyphs?
Read toward the faces of the people and animals in the line. If they face right, start on the right and read leftward. Within each square group of signs, read top to bottom.
What does a cartouche mean?
A cartouche is an oval ring around a royal name, marking it as the king's. It usually enclosed the pharaoh's throne name and birth name, and its shape derives from the shen ring linked to eternity.
When was the last hieroglyphic inscription written?
The last known one is the Graffito of Esmet-Akhom at Philae, dated 24 August 394 CE. The last dated demotic inscription, also at Philae, comes from December 452 CE.
Are the Gosford glyphs real Egyptian hieroglyphs?
Egyptologists who have examined them, including Naguib Kanawati and Boyo Ockinga, say no. The carvings mix signs from periods thousands of years apart, are cut unlike genuine Egyptian inscriptions, and a 1983 inspection found some freshly carved glyphs. Billy Carson reads the site differently, and his case is set out in the podcast linked above.
Sources and further reading
- Alan H. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar: Being an Introduction to the Study of Hieroglyphs (Oxford, first edition 1927), including the Sign List.
- James P. Allen, Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs (Cambridge University Press).
- Günter Dreyer et al., Umm el-Qaab I: Das prädynastische Königsgrab U-j und seine frühen Schriftzeugnisse (German Archaeological Institute, 1998).
- University College London, Digital Egypt for Universities, pages on literacy and on Lahun.
- Richard B. Parkinson, Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment (British Museum Press, 1999).
- Erik Iversen, The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition (Princeton University Press).
- Horapollo, The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo, translated by George Boas (Princeton University Press).
