It is a weirdly common urge. You’re sitting there, maybe watching a documentary or looking at a tattoo design, and you think: "I want to write in ancient Egyptian." You want to see your name in those crisp, bird-and-eye symbols that look so much cooler than our boring Latin alphabet. But honestly? It’s a mess. Most people think it’s just a simple swap—A is a vulture, B is a foot, and so on. That is basically 100% wrong.
If you try to use a "hieroglyphic alphabet" chart from a gift shop, you aren't actually writing like an Egyptian. You're just encoding English into pictures. Real Egyptian scribes would look at your "alphabet" and be completely baffled. They didn't think in letters; they thought in sounds, concepts, and a complex layering of symbols that makes modern shorthand look like child's play.
The Sound and the Image
Hieroglyphs are phonograms and ideograms mixed together. It's a dual-purpose system. Some signs represent sounds—like the "r" sound, which is a mouth—but others represent the entire idea of the thing they depict. This is where it gets tricky for anyone trying to write in ancient Egyptian today.
Take the word for "house." In Egyptian, it’s pr. You might draw a floor plan of a house to represent that sound. But if you want to say "to go out," which also has the pr sound, you use the house sign followed by a pair of walking legs. The legs tell you the "house" sign isn't about a building anymore; it's about the phonetic value pr coupled with the action of movement.
Jean-François Champollion, the guy who famously cracked the code using the Rosetta Stone in 1822, realized that the system wasn't just "picture writing." He saw that it was a sophisticated phonetic machine. Scribes were essentially the software engineers of the Bronze Age. They had to decide, on the fly, which signs would make the text look visually balanced while still being readable.
💡 You might also like: Human DNA Found in Hot Dogs: What Really Happened and Why You Shouldn’t Panic
You Can't Write Vowels (Mostly)
Here is the biggest hurdle. The Egyptians didn't write vowels. When you see a word like Nefertiti, the "e" and "i" sounds are mostly educated guesses by modern Egyptologists. We call this "Egyptological English." We stick "e" sounds between consonants just so we can actually pronounce the words out loud without choking.
The actual skeleton of the word is just consonants. This makes the act to write in ancient Egyptian an exercise in linguistic reconstruction. If you want to write "cat," you’re looking at miw. Yes, the word for cat was literally an onomatopoeia for "meow." You write the "m," the "i," and the "w," and then you add a little sitting cat at the end to make sure people know you aren't talking about something else that sounds similar. That little cat at the end? That’s called a determinative. It has no sound. It’s just there for context.
The Different Scripts Nobody Mentions
Most people think of the fancy carvings on temple walls. That’s Hieroglyphic. But no scribe was using a hammer and chisel to write a grocery list. That would be insane.
- Hieratic: This was the cursive version. It’s messy. It’s fast. It looks almost like Arabic or Elvish. This is what was actually used on papyrus for 90% of Egyptian history.
- Demotic: An even faster, later version of the script. By the time this showed up, the original hieroglyphs were mostly for religious "monumental" use.
- Coptic: This is the final stage. It uses the Greek alphabet plus a few extra signs borrowed from Demotic. It’s the only version that actually records the vowels, which is why scholars like Dr. James Allen use it to try and work backward to figure out how the ancient stuff sounded.
The Aesthetic Obsession
Egyptians were obsessed with symmetry. If you want to write in ancient Egyptian correctly, you have to care about the "square." Scribes hated leaving empty spaces. If a word ended and left a big gap in the line, they would stack the symbols or choose a different version of a sign to fill the void.
📖 Related: The Gospel of Matthew: What Most People Get Wrong About the First Book of the New Testament
They also wrote in multiple directions. You could write left-to-right, right-to-left, or top-to-bottom. How do you know which way to read? You look at the animals and people. If the birds are facing left, you read toward their faces—so, left. If they’re looking right, you start from the right. It’s an incredibly intuitive system once you get the hang of it, but it’s a nightmare for modern typists.
Dealing with Names
If you're trying to write your own name, you're looking for a "cartouche." This is the oval loop that usually surrounds the names of royalty. In the Roman period, when people like Cleopatra or Ptolemy wanted to write in ancient Egyptian, the scribes had to get creative. Since those are Greek names, they had to use hieroglyphs strictly as phonetic letters.
This is actually how the code was broken. Scholars noticed that these foreign names in the cartouches were spelled out phonetically. So, if your name is "Alex," you'd use the lion for "L" and the reed for "E" (which is actually a "Y" sound, but we use it for "E"). But remember, this phonetic-only style was considered a "lesser" way to use the script by the ancients. It was a workaround for foreign words.
Why Modern Tools Often Fail
There are plenty of "hieroglyph translators" online. Most are garbage. They use a 1-to-1 character swap that ignores the "Middle Egyptian" grammar which is the gold standard for the language. If you're serious about this, you need to look at the Gardiner’s Sign List.
👉 See also: God Willing and the Creek Don't Rise: The True Story Behind the Phrase Most People Get Wrong
Sir Alan Gardiner categorized nearly 800 signs into groups (A for Man, B for Woman, G for Birds). When you write in ancient Egyptian using this system, you're using a standardized "font" that scholars worldwide recognize. If you use a random online generator, you're likely getting a mix of signs from different eras that don't belong together. It's like mixing medieval Latin with 1990s internet slang.
Reality Check: The Difficulty Spike
Grammar is where the fun ends. Middle Egyptian has a "Verb-Subject-Object" structure. It uses "stative" forms and "suffix pronouns" that attach to the ends of words.
- Word Order: If you want to say "The man hears the sound," you actually write "Hears the man the sound."
- Gender: Every noun is masculine or feminine. You have to add a "t" (the loaf of bread sign) to make something feminine.
- Plurals: You don't just add an "s." You usually draw three lines or repeat the symbol three times.
It's tedious. It's beautiful. It's a puzzle that takes years to master. But if you just want to write a cool note or understand what's on a museum coffin, you don't need a PhD. You just need to stop thinking in English.
Actionable Steps for Aspiring Scribes
If you actually want to learn to write in ancient Egyptian rather than just faking it, don't buy a coffee table book. Start with these specific moves:
- Get a Copy of "How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs" by Mark Collier and Bill Manley. It’s the industry-standard workbook. It doesn't dump theory on you; it makes you translate real artifacts from the British Museum.
- Download a Hieroglyphic Keyboard. Look for apps that use the Manuel de Codage (MdC) system. This is the standard way Egyptologists type signs using a regular QWERTY keyboard.
- Practice the "Four-Square" Rule. When writing, draw a mental square. Try to fit your signs into that square neatly. Don't let a tall thin sign like a "reed" stand alone if you can tuck a small "loaf" under it.
- Focus on Middle Egyptian. This is the "classical" stage of the language from the Middle Kingdom. It’s what most people think of as "real" Egyptian and has the most resources available for study.
- Ignore the "Alphabet" Charts. Stop using them. Learn the "biliterals" (signs that represent two sounds) and "triliterals" (three sounds). These are the backbone of the language. If you only use single-letter signs, your writing will look like a toddler's scrawl to anyone who knows the language.
Writing this way is a slow process. It’s meditative. It forces you to think about the physical shape of your words. Whether you're doing it for art, for a tattoo, or just to flex your history muscles, doing it the "real" way is infinitely more rewarding than just clicking a translator button.