Hieroglyphs, and what they sound like

Consonants, and no vowels

Egyptian writes consonants and leaves the vowels out, as Hebrew and Arabic traditionally do. That is why a god's name appears in English in several spellings — Nut, Nuit, Nwt — and why none records the original pronunciation. Egyptologists transcribe the consonants with signs of their own (ꜣ, ḥ, š, ḏ) and supply vowels by convention so the words can be spoken.

A sign can be a phonogram, standing for a sound: the foot is b and nothing else. It can be a logogram, standing for a word: the sun disc is the word for sun. Or it can be a classifier — the older books say determinative — a sign that is not pronounced at all and says what kind of thing the word before it is, so that a word followed by a pair of walking legs is a verb of motion. The same sign can do two of these jobs in two places, which is one reason the script took so long to crack, and the reason a single hieroglyph has no reliable meaning on its own.

The twenty-four signs that stand for one sound

Egyptian is not alphabetic, but it contains an alphabet. Twenty-four signs are worth exactly one consonant each, and because they are, they can spell anything — including a name the language had no word for. This is the set a scribe reached for when a Greek king had to be written down, and it is the set below. Each sound here is read out of the reference's own note on the character rather than typed in, so the table cannot say a sign makes a sound the reference does not give it.

The pointed letters are the Egyptological alphabet — ꜣ, ỉ, ꜥ, ḥ, ḫ, ẖ, š, ḳ, ṯ, ḏ. They are not English sounds and they are not guesses at the vowels; each is a conventional way of writing one Egyptian consonant that English has no letter for, and each is read here off the reference's own note about the character rather than typed in. Every sign in the reference.

One exception, said out loud: the reed's value is given by the reference as U+A7BD, and this page shows ỉ instead. U+A7BD, Unicode's Egyptological glottal i, is drawn by no font in common use; U+1EC9 is the older Egyptological yod and is drawn by all of them. The sound is the reference's; only the character drawing it is ours.

A sign adapted for a new sound

Egyptian has no l. When Greek and Roman names arrived with one in them, scribes pressed the recumbent lion into service for that sound, although the sign's Egyptian value remained rw. Its different use in royal names helped show that the signs within cartouches could function phonetically.

• Recumbent lion

  rw two consonants, in that order

  Gardiner E023

Write a name in them

It spells a name in the single-sound signs: one group of signs per letter typed, in the order typed, with the sign's own sound underneath. Fourteen English letters land on a sign whose Egyptian value is that sound. The rest — the five vowels, and c, j, v, x, z — land on a borrowed sign, and the box names every borrowing underneath rather than leaving a line of hieroglyphs looking uniformly Egyptian. The practice of spelling a foreign name out sound by sound is the Rosetta Stone's own; the table of English letters is this study's, built on it.

What this page will not do

It will not translate. A name spelled in these signs is a name spelled in these signs — the signs do not acquire a meaning by standing next to each other, and a sentence of English put through it would come out as a row of Egyptian consonants that no Egyptian could read. It will not supply vowels, because the script does not. It will not draw a cartouche, because a cartouche around a name says the name belongs to a king. And it will not offer a hieroglyph of its own invention: every sign on this page is a character in the reference, found by its official name, which is the rule the Goetia seals and Dee's letterforms already set.

The Rosetta Stone, and the year the signs started speaking →