How Did Ancient Egypt Use Hieroglyphs?

Thousands of years ago in Egypt, this paper would only be understood by a few people professionally trained to read and write hieroglyphs. Only wealthy children in ancient Egypt were taught to read and write, and the language was kept complicated so that they were the only ones that could understand. Hieroglyphics are a very intricate system of writing that was very complex, was only mastered by scribes, and there are many interesting hieroglyphic discoveries in history.
The Egyptians invented hieroglyphs because they wanted their beliefs, their values, their religion, and their way of life to be passed down from generation to generation, and they thought the best way to do that was through writing (UkuleleCari). Egyptian mythology was passed down orally, but they needed a way to keep track of expenses and simple facts of trade more easily, so a written language became necessary (Wimmer 343). The first hieroglyphs were just labels for individual things such as names of people, contents in jars, and tombs. Eventually, hieroglyphs were used on a lot of things, including monuments, temples, and religious scrolls.(Hart, 34) Beetles or scarabs were usually carved on top of stamps. The

underside of the stamp included names, titles, or information that the owner would use to stamp on clay. (Hart, 35) They also used hieroglyphs to decorate jewelry and furniture. They carved the symbols into wood or stone and then they covered it and gold, silver, and other precious metals. (Guisepi, 12) The ancient Egyptians did not just use hieroglyphs for religious purposes. They used them to write royal documents, record important events, and measure how deep the Nile river was on certain days of the year among other calculations.(Guisepi, 11) Priests used hieroglyphs to write down spells, texts about the afterlife, and how to worship the gods. They also wrote hieroglyphs on tombs to help guide the spirits of the dead to the afterlife.(Guisepi, 10)
The earliest hieroglyphs that have been found dated back to around 3300 to 3200 B.C. Egyptians used hieroglyphs for around the next 3,500 years.(Guisepi 2) The last thing that the Egyptians wrote in hieroglyphics that we know of dated to the year 394 A.D.(Manuelian, 30) By that time only a few priests still understood hieroglyphs.(Wimmer, 343)
Hieroglyphs did not develop slowly over hundreds of years like most languages, but instead they emerged suddenly and then went unchanged for over three and a half thousand years. The Egyptians called their writing Medu-netjer which means “the god's words”, while the Greeks called it hieroglyphs which means “holy signs.” The Egyptians explain the rapid growth of hieroglyphs as a gift from the god the Thoth, God of knowledge. (Wimmer, 343)
Since hieroglyphs were very hard to make, Egyptians developed a faster script called hieratic, and over the years the characters were simplified even more.(Guisepi, 14) For contracts, letters, and stories Egyptians would use hieratic, which was a faster form of hieroglyphs which always ran from right to left, but later even faster script came along called demotic.(Hart, 34) Everyday texts were written just like how the language was spoken, but very important and official documents were written down in the high language.(Wimmer, 355) As time passed, different cultures started coming to Egypt and they brought their customs and beliefs. Eventually the Egyptians started to write with the Greek alphabet, which was easier for them to use, and only the priests continue to write in hieroglyphs.(Manuelian, 30) When Egypt was ruled by Greece, scribes had to also be able to write in Greek.(Hart, 34)
It is not surprising that a lot of people wanted to become scribes because if one became a scribe his name would become immortal in his writing.(Wimmer, 348)Scribe school was only available to high society children, so only a small percent of the population could actually read and write hieroglyphs. (Wimmer, 348) Boys from wealthy families usually started scribe school at six or seven years old. To learn their complex writing system they went to school for several years.(UkuleleCari) In scribe school, students learned by copying long texts, therefore hieroglyphs were learned in entire units rather than sign by sign. As an Egyptian student, a person would have to understand seven hundred symbols to be able to read and write.
Since only the scribes, priests, and administrators knew hieroglyphs, they did the reading and writing for everyone. They wrote letters, read the royal decrees, kept recordings of everyday things, and kept track of people's taxes.(Manuelian, 29) Other than professional scribes and workers responsible for decorating temple and tombs, those who learned to write were priests, officials, and possibly high-ranking military personnel.(Wimmer, 348) Hieroglyphs were kept complicated, so that not many people could learn it and scribes could keep their high position in society.(Hart, 34)
Soot was made into black ink, and ochre and hematite were used to make red ink. Red ink was used for calendar dates, for the beginnings of new chapters, and for correcting documents just as it is used today. Scribes used a thin brush to apply the ink, and they held the brush behind the ear so that they would always be ready to write something down. One end of the brush was chewed to form a tip and the other was smooth. Scribes sat with her legs crossed, on the ground, with their kilts pulled across his legs and knees to form a writing surface.
A scribe would put water on his writing surface before starting to write as an offering to Thoth, the god of knowledge.(Wimmer, 347) The papyrus scrolls opened to the right because of the direction Egyptians wrote. Lines ran across the page from right to left. Right-handed scribes had a disadvantage because they would smear the ink as they worked across the page. The Egyptians wrote right to left which is still quite common in other modern languages such as in Hebrew and Arabic.(Wimmer 347-348)
The ancient Egyptians wrote many books, but because they were made out of papyrus they broke down or they were lost over time unfortunately. Some people say that the Egyptians wrote books in the first dynasty 2950 BC.(Wimmer, 343) Remaining text from everyday life tell us about the joys and sorrows of the Egyptian people.(Wimmer, 355) Because of this, when something was really important they usually would carve it into stone.(UkuleleCari)
Ancient Egyptians had several thousand words, all made with a series of pictures. This type of writing was very complex and labor-intensive.(UkuleleCari) The Egyptians would write left to right, right to left, and top to bottom (Manuelian,29). The reader had to decide which way to read the hieroglyphs by which way they were facing. You read it towards the faces of the animals, as if you were talking to them.(Manuelian, 29)
The Egyptians did not learn hieroglyphs individually, but they learned them in large units.(Wimmer, 348) Not all hieroglyphs represented words, but also not all represented letters.

Instead the language was a combination of words and letters. The alphabet was divided into two different categories, phonograms and ideograms. Ideograms represented whole words while phonograms represented the letters to spell out the different sounds of the words.(UkuleleCari) Ideograms either represented an object or something related to the object. For example the hieroglyph for legs could also represent movement, and when they were combined with other hieroglyphs, it could represent concepts like “approach” or “give directions.” (Guisepi, 7) Phonograms represented a sound in a word. (Guisepi,

5)
Christianity brought Greek letters to Egypt. Greek letters were used because they were easier to write than hieroglyphs, but they still used Egyptian letters for some sounds that were not known in the Greek language. This is the same language that they currently use in the Egyptian Christian church.(Wimmer, 343) When people first found hieroglyphs on mummies, statues, and monuments, they thought that they were secret coded magical spells.(Manuelian, 29)The Byzantine Empire banned hieroglyphs because they thought they were pagan, so hieroglyphs disappeared for centuries. (Wimmer, 343)
When the last temple in Egypt closed, hieroglyphs were lost for centuries until people found the Rosetta Stone(Hart, 35) In 1822, after years and years of studying the Rosetta Stone, a man named Jean-Francois Champollion finally cracked the code of hieroglyphs. The Rosetta Stone had three different languages on it, Greek and two forms of Egyptian.(Manuelian, 29) The bottom section of the Rosetta Stone is in Greek, the center is in demotic, and the top section was in hieroglyphs.(Hart, 35) Since Greek is still understood, he used it to decipher the hieroglyphs. (Manuelian, 29) The message written on the Rosetta Stone was an elaborate thank you note to a ruler of Egypt who had given favors to the priests. (Hart, 35) The Rosetta Stone is located in the British Museum in London. Because of the stone we can read almost everything that the ancient Egyptians wrote. (UkuleleCari)
The Rosetta Stone was one of the most famous hieroglyphic discoveries which led us to understand this complex and beautiful writing system that only a few people understood in history. Hieroglyphs were used for many purposes in ancient Egyptian times, and the more they were used, the simpler the language became. Scribes were the masters of hieroglyphs, and they combined picture words and letters to create their intricate written language. Christianity morphed hieroglyphs into a combination of Greek and Egyptian that is currently the structure used, and the Rosetta stone helped us figure out the original hieroglyphic language. Hieroglyphics was one of the first written languages and allowed Egyptians to pass down their culture through facts instead of myths and oral history, so now we better appreciate the importance of the Egyptians in the history of civilization.