Hieroglyphs: Ancient Egypt's Picture Alphabet

Long, long ago in Egypt, people did not write with letters like A, B, C. They wrote with pictures! A tiny picture of an owl, a lion, or a wavy line could all be part of a word. This picture-writing is called hieroglyphs, and some of it is over 4,000 years old!

In this lesson you will: - Learn what hieroglyphs are and who used them - Meet the Rosetta Stone, the rock that helped us read hieroglyphs again - Learn what a cartouche is - Try writing your own name using picture symbols

Ancient Egyptians used more than 700 different picture-symbols. Some pictures stood for a whole word — a picture of the sun could mean 'sun' or 'day.' Other pictures stood for a sound, kind of like our letters. Egyptians wrote on a special paper called papyrus, made from a reed plant that grew along the Nile River.

For a very long time, nobody remembered how to read hieroglyphs. Then in 1799, soldiers in Egypt found a big stone slab with the same message carved on it three times — once in hieroglyphs. A scholar named Jean-François Champollion studied that stone for years, and in 1822 he finally figured out how to read hieroglyphs again. That famous stone is called the Rosetta Stone.

When Egyptians wrote the name of a pharaoh — a king or queen — they drew an oval loop around it called a cartouche. The oval told everyone, 'the name inside this loop is extra important — it's a royal name.'