Valley Ridge Academy PTO

Hieroglyphics

The Ancient Egyptians used picture words to write called hieroglyphics. It is a very old form of writing that they starting using as early as 3,000 B.C. Hieroglyphics was a very complicated way of writing involving thousands of symbols. Some of the symbols represented sounds, like our letters, and others represented entire words.

Hieroglyphics was different from how we write in many ways:

• It could be written in almost any direction; left to right, right to left, or top to bottom. The reader would figure out which way to read it by the direction of the symbols.

• They didn't use any punctuation.

• One of the goals in writing hieroglyphics was that the writing would look like art and be beautiful to look at.

• A single picture symbol could stand for a whole word, called an ideogram, or a sound, called a phonogram. For example, a picture of an eye could mean the word "eye" or the letter "I".