The ancient Egyptians called their script mdju netjer, or "words of the gods." Hieroglyphs were the earliest form of an Egyptian script and also the longest-lived. It is the most familiar to the modern observer when staring in awe at the columned halls at Karnak, the beautiful tomb paintings in the Valley of the Kings and Queens, and on sarcophagi and coffins.
The ibis-headed god Thoth was considered to be the patron deity of writing and scribes. A relief from the temple of Ramesses II at Abydos shows the god sitting on a throne, holding a long scribal palette in one hand and the other, holding the reed with which he plans to write. King Ramesses himself is shown assisting the god by holding a water pot.
The first hieroglyphs appear on labels and pottery objects dated 3100 BCE in the late Predynastic Period. The last glyphs appear on the island of Philae in a temple inscription carved in 394 ACE. Originally, hieroglyphs were used to write different kinds of texts on different surfaces. Still, as hieratic developed, the hieroglyphic script became confined to religious and monumental usage, mostly carved in stone. Upon seeing these temple and other religious inscriptions, the Greeks called the script hiera grammata, "the sacred letters," or ta hieroglyphica, "the sacred carved letters."
A hieroglyphic inscription is arranged on its surface either in columns or in horizontal lines. There are no punctuation marks or spaces to indicate the divisions between words. The signs are generally inscribed facing rightward (though the opposite orientation does appear in certain contexts) and are usually read from right to left; if they appear in horizontal lines, one reads from upper to lower.
The hieroglyphic script is largely pictorial. Most are recognizable pictures of natural or man-made objects, often symbolically colour-painted. The ground plan of a simple house, or pr, might stand for the word for "house." These are called ideograms. We do something similar when we use a picture of a heart to represent the word "love" in this sentence "I love New York."
The hieroglyphic script also includes phonograms, sign-words for concepts that a simple picture cannot convey. The "rebus principle best represents the phonogram." A rebus is a message spelt out in pictures that represent sounds rather than the things they are pictures of; for example, the picture of an eye, a bee and a leaf in English might be used to make the English sentence "I Believe," or "eye-bee-leaf." The sentence itself has nothing to do with eyes, bees or leaves.
A broader example of this is found in the writing of the name Amun. "Amun" was the great state god of Thebes, and his name was written usually with the reed-leaf, I + the playing board with game pieces read as men and for absolute clarity, the letter n.
One example of the rebus in sculpture is a statue of Senenmut, adviser to the female king Hatshepsut. Her throne name was MaatKaRe. The statue shows Senenmut kneeling behind the horned cobra-uraeus, which represents Ra with the sun-disk between the horns and the goddess Maat, who is often called the daughter, or Eye of Ra. Below the uraeus is the upraised arm sign for the word ka.
Words spelt with phonograms usually have an ideogram added at the end. This extra sign is now called a determinative. It shows that the signs before it are to be considered phonograms and not ideograms, and it indicates the general idea of the word. Since the goose represents both the bird itself and the word "son," often the determinative of the man appears after the goose to show that that goose is not herein meant.
Hieratic
Hieratic is an adaptation of the hieroglyphic script, the signs being simplified to make their writing quicker. Hieratic was the administrative and business script throughout most of its history and recorded documents of a literary, scientific and religious nature. It was most often used on papyrus rolls or sheets or bits of pottery or stone ostraca.
The earliest body of hieratic texts thus far are estate records that date from the Fourth Dynasty. It was supplanted by demotic script in the Late Period around 600 BCE. After that time, the script was used only for religious documents, acquiring its name hieratika, meaning "priestly" in Greek.
Hieroglyphs were written with a reed brush and ink on papyrus, leather or wood, and on those surfaces, it was harder to attain the crisp quality and detail of the signs as carved on stone. So cursive hieroglyphic was merely a simpler form of each hieroglyphic sign. A hieratic sign was not always as clear a counterpart to its hieroglyphic sign as was cursive hieroglyphics.
Hieratic should not be confused with the cursive hieroglyphic script, though the two resemble each other. The cursive hieroglyphic script is usually written from right to left in columns. Just as with hieroglyphic, it could vary and is found almost exclusively in religious texts such as the Book of the Dead. Hieratic could be written in columns or horizontal lines, but it always read from right to left. It also sometimes contained punctuation in the form of a small dot to separate units of thought.
Demotic
Demotic texts were generally administrative, legal and commercial, though there are a few literary compositions and scientific and religious texts. The Rosetta Stone contains a section inscribed in demotic along with hieroglyphic and Greek.