Carl Newlin, age 14, of Leaksville, Pd.C., for his question:

 What are hieroglyphics?

This lovely sounding word means sacred writings. Originally it meant the sacred writings of ancient Egypt ‑ if you can call them writing. For the characters were little drawings. Perhaps it is more accurate to call these ancient inscriptions picture‑writing.

It is easy to see how this type of writing developed. Suppose you wished to send a message to a friend who could not read. You wanted to meet this friend in the schoolyard at six o’ clock. You could set down this message in pictures. There would be a rough outline of the school with a fence around the yard. You might add a clock with the hands pointing at six otelock. There would be an arrow pointing to the exact meeting place and a sketch of yourself and your friend greeting each other.

True, this is a clumsy way of writing and often confusing. But it is the way all writing began. The Egyptians developed it to a fine art and hieroglyphic writing was also practiced by the ancient Mexicans and the Mesopotamians. Even the Indians of North America used a simple picture writing,

In ancient Egypt picture writing was practiced and understood only by the priests and scribes. It was a difficult and mysterious art. Samples of these hieroglyphics have been discovered in the tombs of the old pharaohs and inscribed on stones dating back thousands of years, Imagine how difficult it was for modern scholars to decipher these sacred writings.

The ancient hieroglyphics were, in fact, a mystery until the Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799. This ancient basalt tablet was inscribed with a priestly decree in three forms. At the top, the message was written in ancient hieroglyphics. Below this was a translation in demotic, a primitive alphabet writing used in Egypt in the seventh century, B.C. And below this was a translation of the edict in Greek.

With the help of the Greek and demotic scripts, scholars could now decode the hieroglyphics. They discovered, strange to say, that those old picture writings were the ancestors of our smooth, slick alphabet.

The hieroglyphrorriters used a simple drawing of the eye to represent the eye, or denote to sec. Through the ages this picture was streamlined into a circle and our letter O. They used a drawing of a bull's head which later became alpha of the Greek alphabet, a triangle with a tail. Alpha, of course, became our letter A. Our letter B is the Greek betas our capital B facing in the opposite direction from the Greek symbol.

Its ancestor was a rectangular hieroglyph which represented a building. Our letter E dates back to the hieroglyph of a man lifting his arms aloft ‑ representing boy. Hieroglyphic writing was streamlined about 2,500 years ago. Previously, a picture had been used as a word. Now it was used as a sound, Drawings were simplified into letters, words were built up from the sounds of the letters and the ancestor of our alphabet was born.