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How many hieroglyphs are there?
7 October 2026
About 750 to 900 in the classical language, and more than 5,000 by the end. Scribes of the Middle Kingdom and the early New Kingdom, roughly 2000 to 1300 BC, worked with several hundred signs, and Alan Gardiner's standard list describes about 760 of them. The priests who carved temples under the Ptolemies and the Roman emperors kept inventing new ones.
For reading, the number that counts is much smaller. A core of a few hundred signs fills most tombs, stelae and temple walls, and the same ones come back on every visit to a museum.
Why nobody gives one number
The script was in use for well over three thousand years, and its stock of signs never stood still. Any count depends on the period and on what you treat as a separate sign. The quail chick and its quick handwritten form, a small coil, both write w, yet lists give them separate numbers. Three plural strokes standing up and three lying down get two entries as well.
The great jump came late. In the temples of Edfu and Dendera, built under the Ptolemies, priests wrote with puns, rare variants and newly drawn signs, so a single wall there can hold signs no Middle Kingdom scribe ever used. That is where the totals of 5,000 and more come from.
Gardiner's list in 26 groups
Egyptologists still sort signs the way Alan Gardiner did in his Egyptian Grammar, first published in 1927. Each sign gets a letter for what it pictures and a number inside that group. The seated man is A1, the first sign of the first group. The owl is G17, the seventeenth bird.
There are 26 groups, A to Z without J, plus Aa for signs that fit nowhere else, many of them objects nobody has identified. The same codes now name the signs in fonts and in Unicode, which is why a museum database and a dictionary will both call the owl G17.
- A: men and what they do
- B: women
- C: gods and goddesses
- D: parts of the human body
- G: birds, from the vulture to the owl
- N: sky, earth and water
- Aa: unclassified signs
One word, four signs
The Egyptian word for cat shows why a reader needs fewer signs than the totals suggest. It is miw, said miu, and probably copies the animal's cry.
- Milk jug in a net: the two sounds mi
- Flowering reed: i, repeating the end of the jug's sound
- Quail chick: w
- A seated cat: silent, it shows the word names an animal
Sound signs, word signs and silent signs
In the cat word, three signs write sounds and one is a picture that is never said. Most signs in any text work like that. Twenty-four of them write single consonants, the owl for m among them. Around them sits a larger group writing two or three consonants at once, such as the heart and windpipe for nfr, 'good'.
Then come the word signs, which write the thing they show, and the silent determinatives at the ends of words. Many signs move between these jobs, so learning a few hundred well goes further than knowing a thousand by sight.
Looking a sign up
A sign you cannot place is easiest to find by what it pictures. The sign list on Hiero Lens opens with the common signs and their sounds, and a search reaches every one of the 1,072 signs in the main Unicode block, by name, sound, meaning or Gardiner code.
On a wall or a case label, the phone camera boxes each sign it finds and names it. A sign copied into a notebook can be drawn instead.
Questions
How many hieroglyphs are in Unicode?
Unicode 5.2 added 1,071 Egyptian hieroglyphs in 2009, and one more came in 2022, for 1,072. Unicode 16.0 added another 3,995 in 2024, in a separate block called Egyptian Hieroglyphs Extended-A.
How many hieroglyphs do I need to learn?
Start with the one-consonant signs: with them you can sound out most royal names. Readers of whole Middle Egyptian texts usually know several hundred signs, learned slowly from a grammar's sign list.
Is there a hieroglyph for every word?
No. Most words are spelled with sound signs and finished with a determinative, as English spells words with letters. Common words such as 'sun', 'house' and 'god' can also be written with a single sign of their own.
How long were hieroglyphs used?
The oldest known writing in Egypt dates to around 3250 BC. The last dated hieroglyphic inscription was carved at the temple of Philae in AD 394.
Where to see it
Temple of Edfu
The Temple of Horus at Edfu is the most complete temple in Egypt, and almost every surface is inscribed. Its texts describe the temple itself, its rituals and the battle of Horus against Seth.
SiteDendera Temple Complex
Dendera's Temple of Hathor is one of the most complete temples in Egypt, covered inside and out with late hieroglyphs. Here you can find Cleopatra VII's cartouche, an astronomical ceiling and texts in hidden crypts.
SitePhilae Temple
Philae, the island Temple of Isis near Aswan, is where hieroglyphic writing ended: its last dated inscription was carved here in AD 394. Its walls also helped Champollion decipher the script.
Sources
More to read
- How to read hieroglyphs How to read hieroglyphs: find the way the signs face, sound out the alphabet signs, spot the silent ones. A king's name read sign by sign.
- Which way do you read hieroglyphs? Which way do you read hieroglyphs? Toward the faces: birds, snakes and people look at the start of the line. Rows, columns and the odd exceptions.
- The hieroglyph alphabet: 24 signs and their sounds The hieroglyphic alphabet: the 24 one-consonant signs Egyptologists list, with the picture, the sound and how to spell an English name with them.