Hieroglyph

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Hieroglyphs (or Hieroglyphics) are a type of writing. They use symbols or pictures to stand for sounds and words.

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs are the most well-known form, but other societies also used them. Hieroglyphs have been found in Turkey, Crete, United States, Canada, Central America, and other countries. Ancient Egyptians used pictures to make a phonetic alphabet, so that each sound could be written with a picture-word, or pictograph. For example, a zig-zag for water

came to mean the letter "n", because the Egyptian word for water started with n. This same picture became our letter 'M' in the Latin alphabet, because the Semitic word for water started with m, and Semitic workers changed the symbols to fit sounds in their own language. In the same way, our Latin letter 'N' came from the hieroglyph for snake

since the word for "snake" started with n in Semitic; but in Egyptian, this picture had stood for a sound like English "J" because of their word for snake.

The word hieroglyph comes from the Greek words ἱερός (hierós 'sacred') and γλύφειν (glúphein 'to carve' or 'to write'), and was first used to mean the Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Greeks who came to Egypt before and during the Ptolemaic Period (305 BC - 30 BC) saw that while a cursive script called demotic was used for every day writings, the picture letters were often found carved on temple walls, tombs, and monuments. These glyph forms of writing were eventually phased out when Christianity took hold of Egypt. Inscriptions in hieroglyphs grew more rare until, finally, the last known inscription was made in A.D. 396.