Blog Post #1

Hieroglyphs

Nowadays, there are many icons and symbols that are used in many different places. Those that we see in digital apps or signs on the streets are called pictograms and ideograms. As an artist this allowed me to grow interested to wonder where and when this originated. To start with the definitions, pictogram is a symbol that represents the meaning from the analogy of physical objects. Ideogram is a symbol that is used to convey an idea or concept without any words. It seems like it is hard to define where this method specifically originates from but it can be argued that they have all started and used this method as a source of communication.

In this blog we will focus on the hieroglyphs that were used in ancient Egypt. In ancient Egypt hieroglyphs were used for recording purposes such as any of the war and stories about their gods and Pharaohs. There were more than 700 symbols of hieroglyphs that conveyed actual words and more than thousands of symbols that represented each individual single letter and sounds. It was studied that ancient Egyptians started using hieroglyphs around 3000 BC.

Hieroglyphics were written in rows and columns and could be read from either direction. Because the shapes of people and animals are always toward the beginning of the line, reading directions are divided, but hieroglyphs are composed of consonants without vowels, and there are no punctuation marks or spaces.