Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, or hieroglyphics, were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters, and cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. In this atlas it is the script of Ancient Egyptian, kept apart from the Coptic alphabet, which was derived from the Greek alphabet.