Home

Hieroglyphs

 

How do you write sentences in hieroglyphic?

To learn to write sentences properly in Egyptian, you would need to spend years studying from very thick books, getting lots of headaches as you did it. But here you can learn some of the basics, the easy stuff. 

Some words they don't have in Egyptian, and some words need to be put in a different place in the sentence. The thing to do is to write your sentence in English, then change it, still in English, before translating into Egyptian. Like this:

 

Rule

An example in English How you need to change it
1. There is no the or a The dog  dog 

2. You don't need to say am, are, or is

John is cool cool John (see rule 4)
  I am great I great

3. In a sentence, the verb comes first

I run run I
  I love you love I you
4. Adjectives swap round with nouns The beautiful girl girl beautiful
  The cat is clever clever cat
5. Words like my and your come after the word they describe My mother mother my
  Your dog dog your
A couple of other things to remember: There are no gaps between words in hieroglyphic, or even between sentences, so just run them all close together. And try to write as neatly as you can, with long thin hieroglyphs stacked next to each other.

Writing a sentence

So let's say you have decided on a sentence to write - say I love to kiss the beautiful sister.

1. Take out the or a if there are any.  So our sentence becomes 

        I love to kiss beautiful sister

2. Take out am, are or is. There aren't any in this sentence so you can forget this one.

3. Put the verb to the front of the sentence. The verb here is love, so the sentence becomes 

        Love I to kiss beautiful sister

4. Swap round adjectives and nouns. The adjective here is beautiful and it goes with sister, so we swap them round.

    Now our sentence is: 

        Love I to kiss sister beautiful.

5. Now all you have to do is find the Egyptian for each of these words, and write them down in that order. And here it is:

       

Why not try writing some of your own sentences?

back