How Do You Read Hieroglyphics,,,,,,~?

Question

How Do You Read Hieroglyphics,,,,,,~?

Answer 1

You would do it best using the same method Napoleon's Army did.

We have little to thank Napoleon for but he does get credit for being in charge of the military unit in Egypt that stumbled upon the Rosetta Stone, after the harbor of the same name.

At least we can give them credit for recognizing the value of the discovery and preserving it, making it available to scholars who spoke Greek and/or one of the two Egyptian languages on the stone.

Answer 2

With great difficulty, would be my smart a$$ answer.

But the reality is that it has to be treated the same way as any code and painstakingly deciphered. The world had a little help with Egyptian glyphs when the Rosetta Stone was found. It contained translations which could be used.

Answer 3

Hieroglyic signs are read in three ways:

1. as phonetic signs just like your alphabet

2. as logograms with each sign representing a full word as in Classical Chinese

3. as grammatical determiners (semagrams) that help determine the grammatical function such as parts of speech but is not verbalised when read aloud.

It can be also noted that a reading of Egyptian hieroglypics does not necessarily "reconstruct" all the vowels as most vowels are left out when a word is written in phonetic signs.

More info can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hi...

Here is an example of writing that reads top-down, left-to-right as "P-T-O-L-E-M-I-I-S"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hi...

The copious marking of the vowels should be considered a late, Helenistic influence after the Ptolemian dynasty took control of Egypt following King Alexander's death.

Answer 4

Actually, hieroglyphic is an adjective that modifies the noun hieroglyph or hieroglyhphs in plural form.  Hieroglyphic writing is known best as the 'picture writing' of ancient Egypt.  However, there have been many example of such writing in the ancient world.  Such scriptive writing became more and more symbolic, and the lexical and logographic attributes became more and more abstract, resulting in the wonderful diversity of writing systems in the written and historic record ever since.

So, in short, it firstly depends upon the type of hieroglyphic writing you are wanting to  learn, followed by either a university led study of said texts, or a completely independent and self guided study, using library materials.

Jean Francois Champollion used the Rosetta Stone, discovered during Napoleon Bonaparte's Expedition to Egypt in 1798 to eventually decipher the up to then and hitherto unknown writings of ancient Egypt.

Answer 5

Hieroglyphics is quite an amazing writing system.  It wasn't invented to spread knowledge.  It was always a deep secret kept by priests and scribes - so that's why it was completely lost until the Rosetta Stone was found and interpreted.

Hieroglyphics can be read in any direction - and it is absolutely full of little puns we can only guess at.  It wasn't designed to be read widely - perhaps it was designed to be read by the gods.  

I've often heard it said that Hieroglyphics is extremely hard to translate - that any translation is largely a guess.  So I guess one should always take the translations of Hieroglyphics with a grain of salt.

Answer 6

There are many website that will tell you the basics of hieroglyphic reading. After learning the basics, lots of practice is required and eventually it will be mastered.

Answer 7

They can be written and read in columns top to bottom or right to left or soemtimes left to right.

Thats' if you're reading of an image of the original inscription.

Modern text books print them left to right.

Answer 8

Short answer: left to right or right to left, and sometimes top down.

The first hieroglyph in a row points in the direction it's to be read

Answer 9

upside down or reverse, i think

Answer 10

that depends on the culture from which they come from

Answer 11

It would depend on the age of message that is being looked upon. They became more complex in time.

See:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/pyramid/hie...