Hieroglyphs: Egypt Unlocked

Times Online (Richard Morrison)

What explains our fascination with hieroglyphs? In part, surely, it is their sheer expressive beauty. We in newspapers are always looking for more elegant typefaces to catch your eye and enhance our limping prose. But however pretty the chosen font, our words — and the alphabetical symbols that they contain — remain intractably abstract. You may look at the word “bird” or “custard” and conjure in your mind’s eye a beautiful plumed creature or a tub of the gooey yellow stuff. But you don’t see them on the page. Whereas with hieroglyphs, you do. Or at least, you think you do — though that impression can be mightily deceptive, as we shall see.

So, as with Mandarin, there is pleasure to be derived from looking at the exquisite pictographs of the Ancient Egyptians, irrespective of whether one has the foggiest notion of what they mean. But there’s an even more thrilling quality about hieroglyphs. It’s that they look less like a dead language than a secret code, full of oddly familiar yet inscrutable signs which, we feel sure, hold the answers to centuries of riddles.

This code-like quality isn’t surprising. For about 1,200 years, from when Egyptians stopped writing hieroglyphs in the 6th century to the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone in 1822, a secret code is exactly what they were — and one, moreover, that had resisted countless attempts to break it.