In many cases a hieroglyph and a letter represent the same sound. But this is not always the case. English and ancient Egyptian are not from the same language family. Because of this, some of our sounds do not exist in Egyptian. There are also some English letters that sound like other letters. There are four English sounds you will not find in the Egyptian alphabet. The Egyptians did not hear the differance between F and V or between R and L.

Unlike the letters in our alphabet, hieroglyphs can be written in more than one direction. You can tell which way hieroglyphs are supposed to be read by looking at the direction they are facing. Ancient Egyptians usually wrote the hieroglyphs facing right however if used to decorate a building, the Egyptians often wrote the hieroglyphs in differant directions. When Egyptians wrote a word in hieroglyphs, they didnt just write one hieroglyph after another. They arranged them carefully, making them look attractive.

When an Egyptian scribe wrote a word, he left out the vowel sounds and wrote only the consonants. To be able to tell the meaning of the word Egyptians used what we call "determinatives". These are hieroglyphs written at the end of a word or sentance to indicate the general meaning. For example, the heiroglyph showing a village with crossroads, would be written after the name of a town. In the same way, the name of a woman was identified with the hieroglyphic sign of a woman. One other determinative, a single stroke is very common. It tells you to read a hieroglyph as a picture. For example, the forearm is usually used as a letter to spell words, but written with a stroke it means arm. Determinatives have no sound value, they just give a clue to the meaning of the word.

Now you can recognize the alphabetic hieroglyphs but there are over 6,000 hieroglyphs that have been identified so its obvious that there are a lot of hieroglyphs that I wont have here. Only about 700 hieroglyphs were used at any one time. only about 250 of the hieroglyphs are used frequently.

Some of these hieroglyphs represent two sounds and are called billiterals (bi meaning two). Others represent three sounds and are called triliterals (tri meaning three). Sometimes biliterals and trilliterals are used alone to represent entire words and sometimes they are combined with other hieroglyphs to form a word. In spite of the economy of the biliterals and trilaterals, Egyptians often repeated sounds, using more hieroglpyhs than they needed to spell a word, these are called "phonetic compliments". With such a complicated system of spelling, its no wonder that modern scholors needed many years to figure out how to decipher hieroglyphs.

Like members of every culture the Egyptians needed to count. Just like our counting system theirs was based on the number 10 (ten). But instead of using a differant symbol for the numbers 1 to 9, the Egyptians had one hieroglyph for 1, one number for 10, one or 100, and so on. The hieroglyph is repeated as many times as necessary to show the numbers 1 through 9. Start the numbers with the largest number then work your way down to the smaller digets.