An early form of writing that uses picture signs. Several civilizations developed hieroglyphics on their own, including the Egyptians, Hittites, Mayans, and Cretans. The most well-known hieroglyphics are Egyptian.
Egyptian hieroglyphics started as pictures of the things they represented. For example, a circle with rays around it meant the sun. This writing began in Egypt around 3000 BC. People usually carved it in stone but sometimes wrote it on papyrus with a reed pen.
As papyrus became more common, the stone symbols were hard to write quickly. So scribes and bookkeepers created an easier-to-write version called hieratic. Later, they made an even shorter version called demotic.
As the writing changed, so did how the signs were used. At first, they were picture-symbols. Later, they represented sounds. For example, we might use a picture of ham for the word "meet" because "ham" and "meet" sound alike. The Egyptians did not turn these signs into an alphabet as many of their neighbors did.
Egyptians used hieroglyphics until the 5th century AD. Then they switched to alphabetic writing using Latin and Greek. During the Middle Ages, people did not know much about hieroglyphics. Interest grew again during the Renaissance, but scholars could not understand the writing.
Hieroglyphics remained a mystery until Napoleon's team found the Rosetta Stone in Egypt in 1779. This stone had writing in Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphic. Twenty-five years later, a Frenchman named Jean-Francois Champollion figured out how to read the hieroglyphics.