As Wilkinson says the monumental nature of Egyptian buildings tends to over-shadow the literary culture of Ancient Egypt. And Egyptian literature is both carved in stone and written on papyrus. Writings from Ancient Egypt draws on examples from both. With the final closing of pagan temples in the 5th century, knowledge of hieroglyphic writing was lost. Although attempts were made, the script remained undeciphered throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The decipherment of hieroglyphic writing was finally accomplished in the 1820s by Jean-François Champollion, with the help of the Rosetta Stone. [8]

bꜣ, meaning " Bâ" (soul); the character is the traditional representation of a "bâ" (a bird with a human head); The glyphs have both semantic and phonetic values. For example, the glyph for crocodile is a picture of a crocodile and also represents the sound "msh". When writing the word for crocodile, the Ancient Egyptians combined a picture of a crocodile with the glyphs which spell out "msh". Similarly the hieroglyphs for cat, miw, combine the glyphs for m, i and w with a picture of a cat. When I was in college, the textbook that provided my first real look at Ancient Egyptian texts -- other than Budge's BOOK OF THE DEAD -- was James B. Pritchard's THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST: AN ANTHOLOGY OF TEXTS AND PICTURES (of which I had Volume I), and it was a marvelous introduction. It was already fifteen years old at the time, and I never got Volume II, partly because I was expecting something newer to come along. And maybe it did, but I was out of school, then, and didn't notice. Davidson, James, "At the British Museum", London Review of Books, vol. 45, no.3 (2 February 2023), pp. 26–27. These glyphs alone could be used to write Ancient Egyptian and represent the first alphabet ever divised. In practice, they were rarely used in the fashion.The standard inventory of characters used in Egyptology is Gardiner's sign list (1928–1953). A.H. Gardiner (1928), Catalogue of the Egyptian hieroglyphic printing type, from matrices owned and controlled by Dr. Alan Gardiner, "Additions to the new hieroglyphic fount (1928)", in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 15 (1929), p. 95; "Additions to the new hieroglyphic fount (1931)", in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 17 (1931), pp. 245–247; A.H. Gardiner, "Supplement to the catalogue of the Egyptian hieroglyphic printing type, showing acquisitions to December 1953" (1953). Unicode Egyptian Hieroglyphs as of version 5.2 (2009) assigned 1,070 Unicode characters. Many people have attempted to decipher the Egyptian scripts since the 5th century AD, when Horapollo provided explanations of nearly two hundred glyphs, some of which were correct. Other decipherment attempts were made in the 9th and 10th by Arab historians Dhul-Nun al-Misri and Ibn Wahshiyya, and in the 17th century by Athanasius Kircher. These attempts were all based on the mistaken assumption that the hieroglyphs represented ideas and not sounds of a particular language. Figuring out the meaning of texts written in hieroglyphic writing remains a big challenge for scholars, and requires a certain amount of subjective interpretation. Even reading them aloud isn’t easy.

There's just enough introduction to each type, and each text, to make them accessible. The variety, including betrayals of pharaoh, is interesting; though it is limited because literacy was extremely limited throughout the period. The breakthrough in decipherment came only with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon's troops in 1799 (during Napoleon's Egyptian invasion). Erman, Adolf (1894). Egyptian Grammar: with table of signs, bibliography, exercises for reading and glossary. Williams and Norgate. ISBN 978-3862882045. I hHieroglyphs can be read from top to bottom, and in two directions horizontally. You can see which way to read the text because the figures always face towards the beginning of the line. How do I write my name in hieroglyphics? Wilkinson has tried to draw in texts that aren't just about the elite - who were the literate class in the main. There are letters from a middle class farmer but they're mostly mentioned in passing and in 'The Satire of the Trades' pretty disdainfully but that's meant to be a father advising his son on why he should study hard as look what you might have to do for a living instead if you can't become a scribe. Silence toward what is heard is like a contagion, but it is painful to answer the ignorant, and contradicting an opinion creates enemies. The mind does not accept the Truth. There is no patience with the reply to an opinion: all a man loves is his own words. Everyone is crooked to the core; honest speech has been forsaken.