Skip to content

The ancient Egyptians created a highly flexible hieroglyphic system of writing. Hieroglyphs could be arranged in both columns and rows and could be read from the left or from the right, depending on how they were written. This allowed the ancient Egyptians to effortlessly integrate their writing with art, blurring the boundary between art and script. In the example below, the god Amun, imn, is written each of the possible combinations.

Transliteration is the method of converting one script into another, also referred to as transcription. The hieroglyphs in the alphabet are called “uniliterals,” because they represent a single consonant. The ancient Egyptian language also contains biliterals and triliterals, which represent two and three consonants, respectively. The alphabet can be found in the chart below.

It will be helpful to memorize the alphabet not only because they occur often in texts, but also because Egyptologists arrange dictionaries in this order. So if you are unsure of the meaning of a word, but know how to transliterate it, knowing the alphabet will help you find the word faster than flipping frantically between the four different types of “H’s” to find the right one.

The Alphabet