Egypt Facts: Writing in Hieroglyphics

With over 700 ancient Egyptian symbols representing actual words and thousands of others used for individual sounds, some quite intricate, it took quite a long time to learn to write in hieroglyphics. Young boys from wealthy families usually entered schools around age six or seven, in order to learn to write in hieroglyphics. After a while, only priests could read and write in hieroglyphics, and they were only used for very special purposes, like the wall paintings on tombs or inscriptions in temples, but at the time of Moses, every well-to-do child in Egypt was taught to write in hieroglyphics.

Hieroglyphics were first employed on buildings and tombs, such as the Tutankhamen sarcophagus symbols. Hieroglyphics obviously played an important role in conveying the history of the Egyptian nation and particularly the accomplishments and feats of the Egyptian pharaohs. The Ancient Egyptians wrote hieroglyphics right to left.

Egyptians wrote in hieroglyphs up to about 400 AD, after that they wrote in a short-hand cursive style called demotic. Eventually everyone forgot how to write in hieroglyphs. But now we are able to decipher hieroglyphs thanks to a special chunk of rock and a determined Egyptologist. He realized that the hieroglyphs that spelled "Ptolemy" were enclosed in a cartouche, so he was able to match it up to the Greek spelling. This discovery enabled him to equate the unfamiliar hieroglyphs with familiar Greek words and to translate the entire message.

In 1799, a soldier digging a fort in Rosetta, Egypt found a large black stone with three different types of writing on it. People realized that the three languages on "The Rosetta Stone" said the same thing. The most amazing facts about hieroglyphics contained on the Rosetta Stone was that they came with a Greek translation. It was discovered that the Rosetta Stone contained affirmations in hieroglyphics quotes regarding the legitimacy of a ruling family around 196 B.C.