Pocket Guide to Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs

A compact and stylishly produced guide from the British Museum that teaches you how to read and write like an Ancient Egyptian. The beautiful and strange picture sign language of hieroglyphs turns out to be quite tricky to decipher, for there are around 750 different symbols, some representing words or ideas, others representing sounds or groups of sounds. The Ancient Egyptians loved word play, so you also have to learn ‘determination signs’, essential for example for distinguishing between the word for ‘beautiful woman’ and ‘cow’. Learning how to ‘transliterate’ hieroglyphics, ie turn the pictures into letters, is of course only useful if you speak Ancient Egyptian, but you can learn to recognise groups of symbols for words such as pharoah or king. Most useful will be the alphabet to enable you to write English words as hieroglyphs – either in the traditional pictorial form or as a quick version more like handwriting. Author Richard Parkinson, Assistant Keeper in the Department of Ancient Egypt at the BM, includes lots of lovely detail on how hieroglyphs can act as speech bubbles to tell you what is going on in a painting, and even swear words too rude to translate. He not only drew all the hieroglyphs in this book, but was responsible for many of the photographs taken on his travels in Egypt. A first-class guide for older readers, it is still hard to beat the Metropolitan Museum’s Hieroglyph pack for younger children.