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How to read hieroglyphs

4 October 2026

To read hieroglyphs, start where the faces point. People, birds and snakes in a line of signs look toward its beginning, so you read into their faces, and inside each little block of signs you read the top before the bottom.

Then give every sign one of three jobs. It writes sounds, it writes a whole word, or it silently tells you what kind of word you have just read. Most signs in a text do the first job, so a few dozen sound signs already let you spell out many of the kings' names in a museum.

Three jobs a sign can do

The owl (G17) is a sound: m. The ripple of water (N35) is n, and the mouth (D21) is r. These one-consonant signs are the closest thing Egyptian has to letters. Other signs carry two or three consonants at once: the heart and windpipe writes nfr, said nefer, and the scarab writes ḫpr, said kheper.

A sign can also write the very thing it pictures. A single stroke (Z1) under it usually marks this use: the mouth with a stroke is the word r, 'mouth', and the house with a stroke is pr (per), 'house'.

The third job is silent. A determinative closes a word and names its field: a seated man (A1) after a man's name or title, walking legs (D54) after verbs of movement, a papyrus roll (Y1) after abstract ideas. Egyptian wrote no spaces, so determinatives also show where one word stops.

Owl Ripple of water Mouth Heart and windpipe Single stroke Seated man Walking legs Papyrus roll

A king's name, sign by sign

Sneferu, who built the Bent Pyramid and the Red Pyramid around 2600 BC, wrote his birth name with four signs.

Folded cloth (S29): s
Heart and windpipe (F35): nfr, three consonants in one sign
Mouth (D21): r, repeating the last sound of nfr
Quail chick (G43): w, the end of the name

Folded cloth Heart and windpipe Mouth Quail chick

See Sneferu's cartouche

Putting the sounds together

Joined up, the four signs give snfrw. The mouth adds nothing new. It confirms how the sign before it ends, and scribes used such helpers, now called phonetic complements, all the time, because many signs could be read more than one way.

The script gives no vowels, so Egyptologists slip an e between consonants and turn w into u: snfrw is said Sneferu. The name is built on nfr, 'beautiful', and is translated 'he who makes beautiful' or '(he) has made me beautiful'. Nobody knows exactly how Sneferu's own court pronounced it.

Blocks, lines and columns

Scribes never strung signs out in single file. They packed them into neat rectangles: a tall sign stands alone, two flat ones sit one above the other, and small ones fill the corners. When a block is done, move on to the next one in the direction the faces point.

Lines run left or right, and columns run top to bottom. One wall can mix both. A caption often stands in short columns beside the person it names, with a long text in rows underneath.

Where beginners go wrong

Gods jump the queue. Out of respect, a god's name is written first even when it is spoken later. Tutankhamun's birth name opens with the reed, the game board and the ripple of water, which spell Amun, yet Amun is the last part you say. Thutmose III's throne name, Menkheperre, puts the sun disc of Ra at the top and reads it last.

One sign often does several jobs. The owl is m in a name and the word 'in' inside a sentence; the ripple of water is n and also 'of'. Read the signs around it before deciding.

Pictures mislead. An owl in a cartouche is a sound. A determinative is never spoken, however striking its picture.

Flowering reed Game board Ripple of water Sun Scarab beetle

Practice on real signs

Reading speeds up once the one-consonant signs come back at a glance. The scribe school asks you to draw each one from memory and brings back the ones you miss.

In a museum, point the phone camera at a stela. Each sign gets a box and a name, and you can check your own reading against it. A drawing works too, for a sign you copied into a notebook.

Learn the sound signs at scribe school

Questions

How long does it take to learn to read hieroglyphs?

The one-consonant signs take a few evenings, enough to read royal names. Whole texts mean learning Middle Egyptian grammar and a few hundred signs, usually a year or more of steady study.

Can I read hieroglyphs if I don't know the Egyptian language?

You can sound out names and spot common words such as 'life', 'god' and 'king'. Sentences need the grammar, just as knowing Latin letters does not let you read Latin.

Are hieroglyphs letters or pictures?

Both. Every sign pictures something, but most are used for their sound, the way a rebus uses a picture of an eye for 'I'.

What book do people use to learn hieroglyphs?

Many start with Alan Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar (first published 1927), whose sign list gives the codes used here, such as G17 for the owl. Newer textbooks, among them James Allen's Middle Egyptian, teach the same classic stage of the language.

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Where to see it

Monument

Bent Pyramid

The Bent Pyramid has almost no writing on its walls; its hieroglyphs came from the valley temple below, where reliefs named Sneferu and his estates. Built around 2600 BC, it starts steep and changes to a gentler slope halfway up.