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if you've ever seen ancient Egyptian artifacts like a sarcophagus or

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an obelisk, you might have noticed that they're covered in tiny little drawings [Egyptian artifacts shown]

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or stuff like herbs and baskets, well these drawings weren't the works of

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graffiti artists who were really into birds and baskets. they are

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hieroglyphics. hieroglyphics are an ancient Egyptian alphabet that uses

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pictures of common objects and animals instead of letters. think of it like you

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know ancient wingdings. these symbols also known as glyphs can

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be divided into two main categories- phonograms and ideograms. well phonograms

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are kind of like the letters in english with each one representing a different

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sound. so instead of using our tried-and-true or W for the wood sound

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an ancient Egyptian would draw a quail chick. which you have to admit is a whole

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lot cuter than a W there. ideograms on the other hand represent objects or [bird next to a "w"]

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ideas. that means if you wanted to express an idea like movement instead of

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writing out all those letters well you just draw a pair of legs. it's

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pretty smart. that saves you the time of writing to eight characters that make up

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the English version of MOVED. but it could be a real pain to write if you get

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too focused on and getting those ankles just right. but we guess it was best not

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to be too much of a perfectionist when writing in hieroglyphics. with all those [man draws cartoon legs]

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phonograms and ideograms the hieroglyphic alphabet ended up being

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quite vast containing over 700 pictures. well you can kind of imagine why the

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hieroglyphic typewriter never really caught on .despite having all those

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symbols there weren't any for punctuation or spaces. that said if you

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have trouble remembering the rules for commas and are tempted to switch to

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hieroglyphics where we really don't recommend it here at shmoop. your teacher [woman frowns over papers]

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probably doesn't want to spend hours translating from an ancient writing

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system just because you're not a huge fan of comas. even though the Egyptians

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used hieroglyphics for over 3,500 years there was a long period of over a

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thousand years when no one could figure out what those drawings meant. it wasn't

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until Napoleon's army found the Rosetta Stone in 1799 that things started to make

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sense. well this stone had three texts-[ napoleon and army pictured]

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written in the strange hieroglyphics but one written in a more familiar Greek

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script which was used to translate the hieroglyphs. well it took a lot of work

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but you can imagine the thrill of discovering that a picture of an owl

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means the n sound. yeah well maybe thrill is a strong word. [man smiles behind stack of papers]

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