14 Facts About Egyptian hieroglyphs

Egyptian hieroglyphs were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language.

Cursive Egyptian hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood.

The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian hieroglyphs scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet.

Use of hieroglyphic writing arose from proto-literate symbol systems in the Early Bronze Age, around the 32nd century BC, with the first decipherable sentence written in the Egyptian hieroglyphs language dating to the Second Dynasty (28th century BC).

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 made use of about 900 distinct signs.

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Around 800 Egyptian hieroglyphs are known to date back to the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom Eras.

Geoffrey Sampson stated that Egyptian hieroglyphs "came into existence a little after Sumerian script, and, probably, [were] invented under the influence of the latter", and that it is "probable that the general idea of expressing words of a language in writing was brought to Egypt from Sumerian Mesopotamia".

However, Egyptian hieroglyphs writing appeared suddenly at that time, while Mesopotamia had a long evolutionary history of sign usage in tokens dating back to circa 8000 BC.

Monumental use of Egyptian hieroglyphs ceased after the closing of all non-Christian temples in 391 by the Roman Emperor Theodosius I; the last known inscription is from Philae, known as the Graffito of Esmet-Akhom, from 394.

Kircher was familiar with Coptic, and thought that it might be the key to deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphs, but was held back by a belief in the mystical nature of the symbols.

Visually, Egyptian hieroglyphs are all more or less figurative: they represent real or abstract elements, sometimes stylized and simplified, but all generally perfectly recognizable in form.

However, certain Egyptian hieroglyphs appear particularly common only at the end of words, making it possible to readily distinguish words.

Egyptian hieroglyphs writing is often redundant: in fact, it happens very frequently that a word is followed by several characters writing the same sounds, in order to guide the reader.

Egyptian hieroglyphs were added to the Unicode Standard in October 2009 with the release of version 5.