Egyptian hieroglyphic alphabet
π mdw-nαΉ―r ("the god's words")
Egyptian hieroglyphs mix word-signs and sound-signs, but at their core sit about 25 uniliteral signs β a one-sound-per-sign alphabet the Egyptians used to spell names and foreign words for over 3,000 years. This chart shows each alphabetic sign with its Egyptological transliteration and its approximate sound, so you can read a cartouche or write your own name the way a scribe would have.
All 25 characters
History
Hieroglyphic writing appears fully formed around 3200 BCE and stayed in use until the last dated inscription at Philae in 394 CE β the longest run of any writing system. Scribes wrote right-to-left, left-to-right, or in columns, always facing the signs toward the start of the line (modern charts standardize on left-to-right). The alphabetic uniliterals spelled names β including, on the Rosetta Stone, Ptolemy's cartouche, which gave Champollion the phonetic key to decipherment in 1822. Egyptian's descendant Coptic is still chanted in church today, written in a Greek-derived alphabet.
Things you might not know
- A cartouche β the oval ring around royal names like Tutankhamun's β is just the alphabet in action: the signs inside spell the pharaoh's name phonetically.
- Hieroglyphs have no vowels: scribes wrote consonant skeletons, and the conventional 'a/i/u' readings of κ£, κ½, and w are a modern convenience.
- The same sign can work three ways: as a sound (the mouth sign π = r), as a word ('mouth'), or as a silent classifier hinting at a word's meaning.
- Unicode has encoded 1,071 hieroglyphs since 2009 (with thousands more added in 2024), which is why this page renders real glyphs instead of images.