hieroglyphic

Hieroglyphic refers to the formal writing system used in ancient Egypt that employed pictorial signs to represent objects, ideas, syllables, or sounds. The script emerged in the late fourth millennium BCE, primarily in Upper Egypt, and was used for monumental inscriptions in temples and tombs as well as for religious texts. Hieroglyphs combine logograms (signs that denote words or morphemes), phonograms (signs that convey sounds), and determinatives ( signs that clarify meaning without sounding). Signs were carved in stone or painted on surfaces and could be arranged in vertical columns or horizontal lines, read from the direction the signs faced.

Hieroglyphic was part of a broader Egyptian writing system that included hieratic, a highly cursive script used for everyday administrative and literary texts on papyrus, and later demotic. It remained in use alongside these scripts for well over two thousand years, gradually declining after the late antique period as Christianization and Arabic became dominant. The modern understanding of hieroglyphs began with the 1799 French expedition to Egypt and was revolutionized by the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone in 1822 by Jean-François Champollion, who demonstrated a Greek text parallel to hieroglyphic and demotic scripts and established the phonetic values of many signs.

Today, hieroglyphic is used in scholarship to refer specifically to the Egyptian system, and the term is also used more broadly to describe pictorial or symbol-based writing in other contexts. In Egyptology, the study of hieroglyphs continues with sign lists, transliteration conventions, and philological analysis, helping to reconstruct ancient language, culture, and daily life.