Hieroglyphs are little pictures representing words.
The way round this problem adopted by the ancient Egyptians was to use the spoken sounds of words. The Egyptians had a bases 10 system of hieroglyphs for numerals. By this we mean that they has separate symbols for one unit, one ten, one hundred, one thousand, one ten thousand, one hundred thousand, and one million. Here are the numeral hieroglyphs . Note that the examples of 276 and 4622 in hieroglyphs are seen on a stone carving from Karnak, dating from around 1500 BC, and now displayed in the Louvre in Paris.