I highly recommend that you read the book “Hieroglyphs: A Very Short Introduction” which I expect you will enjoy as much as I did: https://academic.oup.com/book/470
In short: Hieroglyphics were phonetic, but they eluded translation for centuries because only a small number of people could read and write them, and (importantly) the directions that the pictographs faced determined the direction that you’d read in.
My favorite fact from this book is that the hieroglyphic word for “cat” is the combination of the sounds for “me” and “ew”
The Very Short Introduction series is fantastic - they really do a great job of distilling the core of a subject to give a lay person the conceptual framework to appreciate the topic. I’ve enjoyed every one I’ve read.
> My favorite fact from this book is that the hieroglyphic word for “cat” is the combination of the sounds for “me” and “ew”
In short: Hieroglyphics were phonetic, but they eluded translation for centuries because only a small number of people could read and write them, and (importantly) the directions that the pictographs faced determined the direction that you’d read in.
My favorite fact from this book is that the hieroglyphic word for “cat” is the combination of the sounds for “me” and “ew”