Melodie Allen, age 11, of St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, for her question:

WHAT ARE HIEROGLYPHICS?

In the early days of Egyptian civilization, hieroglyphic writing was used mainly for inscriptions on stone monuments. It served as a decoration for the monuments and also helped to identify them. The direction of the writing varied. It would go from left to right part of the time and then switch from right to left or very often from top to bottom.

The ancient Egyptian writing called hieroglyphics was actually picture writing. Hieroglyphic is a Greek word meaning sacred or priestly carving since the early Greeks believed that only Egyptian priests understood and used the writing system.

Scholars believe that hieroglyphic writing probably started in Egypt about 3000 B.C. Simple pictures were used at first to pass on ideas. These were called pictographs or ideograms. As time passed, pictures indicated words or syllables that were pronounced the same as the object drawn, but which might have a completely different meaning. This use of picture writing was called syllabic: a picture of a ham, or meat, could be used for the verb "meet."

A third type of development in hieroglyphic writing was a system of symbols that represented the sounds of the language.

Writing usually goes through the ideographic, syllabic and then alphabetical stages. The first two types of writing are usually discarded after the alphabetical symbols have been perfected. The Egyptians, however, continued to use the ideographic and syllabic systems, even after they worked out a system of 24 alphabetical symbols.

As writing knowledge spread in Egypt, a search was made for a material that would be easier to use than stone. They found the answer in the plant called papyrus. This river reed was mashed and then flattened into sheets of pulp and dried. It provided a good writing surface for a mixture of soot and water that was applied by a sharpened reed.

With papyrus available as a writing material, it was decided that the elaborate symbols were not really needed. There developed a cursive or flowing form of hieroglyphics called hieratic writing. Still later they developed an even simpler and speedier script which was called demotic. The word comes from the Greek (ital) demos (unital), meaning of the people, and refers to the fact that most Egyptians used this form of writing.

Knowledge of reading and writing hieroglyphics had been forgotten by about 500 A.D. It wasn't until about 1800 that scholars were able to understand the symbols again.

Some of Napoleon's soldiers found a tablet near the Rosetta mouth of the Nile in 1799. Now called the Rosetta stone, the tablet had the same information written on it in three languages: Egyptian hieroglyphic, Egyptian demotic and Greek. With this stone, scholars were able to translate all of Egypt's early scripts.

Today trained linguists can easily read Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. Dictionaries and complete grammars of the writing are also available.