The most distinctive and well-known feature of ancient Egypt is the hieroglyphic writing on temple walls, obelisks, and stelae. These symbols have always been fascinating to the observer, no more so that when their meaning was completely unknown, and they were fancied to contain esoteric knowledge. They are, however, merely a means of writing the ancient Egyptian language, and express no more than that language did when it was current. In this short article, I will sketch the history of the understanding of hieroglyphs and some of their characteristics for anyone who would like to know a little more about them.
Writing begins with the pictures drawn to represent objects and occurrences.
The critical step is when the pictures become a representation of the spoken language, rather than of the objects themselves. Hieroglyphs express the consonant sounds beginning the words the pictures originally represented, either one, two, or three consonants for each conventional symbol. The vowels are not represented. The speakers of Egyptians could fill in the appropriate vowel sounds when the consonants and the general meaning of the word was known. These vowel sounds are not known, so we cannot speak ancient Egyptian correctly.