Hieroglyphic writing was a very complex, ambiguous system mixing at least four different styles of encoding: Alphabetic: Some signs represent a single sound like they do in modern Latin scripts.
P Barkley 02/19/2009 03:02 PM Hieroglyphics carved into stone might only be comprehensible to people who knew the language from which they were carved - eg Egyptian. In that case we have hieroglyphs representing 'logograms' (a specific logographic script), for example 𓎿𓊗- meaning 'heart'. Unique individual signs might be assigned arbitrary phonetic values, so 𓎿𓊗 might also be read as ba ('b') or ka ('k'). And finally signs might be combined together to create composite characters that could mean anything at all. For example, the entry for 5 in the table above is composed of two individual signs 𓄴𓆳 and