Hieroglyphic writing first began around 5000 years ago by ancient Egyptians. It's rich with figures and signs used in writing, and it describes the history of ancient  Egyptian civilization and life. Can you imagine what hieroglyph means? It's composed of two syllables "hiero" meaning "sacred" and "glyph" meaning "sculpture". You can see hieroglyphic writing on the walls of temples and tombs in Egypt.

     Hieroglyphs can be read in many ways. Like English writing, Hieroglyphs could  be read from left to right. But sometimes they read right to left like Arabic writing, or even in up and down columns. You can tell which way hieroglyphs are supposed to be read by looking at the people, plants and animals.  If the face right, start reading from the right. If the face left, start reading at the left.

       When Egyptians wrote, they didn't just write one hieroglyph after the other, like letters in a word . They arranged them neatly in rows and columns to look nice.

     Hieroglyphic writing first began around 5000years ago by ancient Egyptians. Ancient Egyptians wrote in hieroglyphs up to about 400 AD, after that they wrote in a short-hand cursive style called demotic.

      In 1799, a soldier digging a fort in Rosetta, Egypt found a large black stone with different types of writing on it.

  The writing was a message about Ptolemy V, who was ruling Egypt at the time.  Because the message was written during the time when the Greeks ruled Egypt, one of the three languages was Greek. The other two were demotic and hieroglyphic. People realized that the three languages on "the Rosetta stone" said the same. And even though people could read Greek, they couldn't figure out how to match up Greek words with hieroglyphic words.

     Finally, in 1822, a French Egyptologist named Jean François Champollion figured out how to decipher hieroglyphic writing. He realized that the hieroglyphs that spelled "Ptolemy" were enclosed in a cartouche, so he was able to match it up to the Greek spelling. This discovery enabled him to equate the unfamiliar hieroglyphs with familiar  Greek words and to translate the entire message.