Hieroglyphs were the writing system used by ancient Egyptians on monuments.
Egyptian hieroglyphs combine logographic, consonantal, and determinative signs. Some signs represent whole words, others represent one or more consonants, and determinatives clarify a word’s meaning without being pronounced. The system could be written in vertical columns or horizontal lines, with signs facing toward the beginning of the text.
The earliest known examples date to the late fourth millennium BCE. Hieroglyphs were used for formal religious, royal, and monumental inscriptions, while other Egyptian scripts, including hieratic and demotic, were more practical for everyday administration and writing on papyrus.
The Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799, was crucial to decipherment because it presents the same decree in Greek, Demotic, and hieroglyphs. Jean-François Champollion announced a major breakthrough in reading the script in 1822. The last known dated hieroglyphic inscription was made at Philae in 394 CE.