Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was not an alphabet like English. It used hundreds of signs that could represent sounds, whole words, or clues to a word’s meaning. Among them were about 24 single-consonant signs, sometimes called uniliteral signs, which function somewhat like alphabetic letters.
Modern “hieroglyphic alphabet” charts match these signs to English letters as a convenient learning tool, but the correspondence is only approximate. Ancient Egyptian writing usually did not record vowels.
Additional Information
Since hieroglyphics could represent whole words, single sounds, or silent grammatical markers all at once, they were far more complex than a simple picture-for-word code.
The writing system remained largely unreadable to modern scholars for centuries, until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 gave translators a side-by-side comparison with Greek.
Egyptian hieroglyphics were in continuous use for well over 3,000 years, one of the longest-running writing systems in human history.