Brad Grider, age 13, of Middletown, Ohio, for is question:
CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT HIEROGLYPHS?
Hieroglyphs are characters in any of several systems of writing in which the characters are pictorial, that is, represent recognizable objects. The term "hieroglyph" is however, most generally associated with the script in which the ancient Egyptian language was written. The ancient Greeks applied the term, meaning "sacred carving," to the decorative characters carved on Egyptian standing monuments.
The word "hieroglyphic" was later used to describe the pictorial writing systems of the Hittites, Cretans an Mayans, but their systems are in no way related to one another or to the Egyptian, having in common only that they are pictorial.
Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions are composed of two basic types of signs: ideograms and phonograms. Ideograms signify either a specific object drawn or something closely related to it. For example, a picture of the sun may mean "sun" or "day." Phonograms, or sound signs, were used purely for their phonetic value and have no relationship to the word they are used to spell.
Hieroglyphic inscriptions could be written either vertically or horizontally, usually from right to left. The direction for any given inscription is indicated by the individual signs, which normally face the beginning of the inscription.
The Egyptians continued to use hieroglyphics from the time of the dvelopment of the system in about 3000 B.C. until the time of the Roman Empire. The latest hieroglyphic inscription dates from AD 394.
But even by the beginning of the Old Kingdom in 2755 BC, the Egyptians had developed more cursive script that replaced hierglyphs for the enormous bulk of writing done with blunt reed pens and ink on papyrus. This script is called hieratic, so named by the Greeks because by about the seventh century BC it was largely limited to religious texts.
The Romans believed that Egyptian hieroglyphs were symbolic and allergorical, not phonetic. This theory prevailed into the time of the Renaissance.
The breakthrough came in 1799 when a soldier serving in Napoleon's campaign in Egypt discovered the Rosetta Stone, a bilingual stele inscribed (196 BC) with a decree in honor of Ptolemy V in Greek and in hierglyphic and demotic Egyptian.
Jean Francois Champollion, a French Egyptologist, realized that both Egyptian scripts were phonetic, although not alphabetic. Earlier, recognizing the relationship among hieroglyphs hieratic and demotic he had predicted the hieroglyphic spelling of various royal names based on the demotic. These spellings were confirmed by actual cartouches on the Rosetta Stone and other Ptolemaic monuments.
After identifying the names and titles of the Greco Roman rulers, he combined the phonetic values he had so derived with his knowledge of Coptic, the late stage of the Egyptian language. From this he was able to decipher earlier, Pharaonic cartouches. The writing system had been cracked.