I Can’t Sleep - Egyptian Hieroglyphs | Calm Bedtime Reading for Sleep

Episode Date: July 30, 2025

Relax with a gentle bedtime reading about Egyptian hieroglyphs. Discover how this ancient writing system worked and the stories it preserved, all in a calm, slow pace that helps you rest. Benjamin Boster reads in a natural, soothing cadence— no whispering, no hypnosis, just fact-filled education to ease insomnia and late-night anxiety. Press play and let this sleep podcast help you drift off peacefully. Want More? Request a Topic: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/request-a-topic Ad-Free Episodes: https://icantsleep.supportingcast.fm/ Shop Sleep-Friendly Products: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/sponsors Join the discussion on Discord: https://discord.gg/myhGhVUhn7 This content is derived from the Wikipedia article on Egyptian Hieroglyphs, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license. Read the full article: Wikipedia - Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to a Glassbox media podcast. What if I told you that most of the modern day self-help advice you've been hearing could actually make you worse? The key to a better life isn't about feel-good gimmicks that sound catchy. The Mentally Stronger Podcast gives you access to a licensed therapist who shares science-backed tools that will actually change your life. Hi, I'm Amy Morin, psychotherapist, mental strength trainer, and international best-selling author. In each episode, we cover research-back strategies, like how to stop relying on willpower and start creating habits for lasting change. And the five mental strength-building exercises you can do from your couch.

I also speak to world-class experts like Dr. Nicole Kane, who shares how to permanently heal anxiety by addressing the root cause. With over 200 episodes in our catalog, this podcast is for you if you're ready to crush self-doubt, conquer challenges, and become stronger than ever with therapist-approved strategies that can change your life. Listen to Mentally Stronger with Therapist Amy Morin, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast, where I help you drift off one fact at a time. I'm your host, Benjamin Boster, and today's episode is about Egyptian hieroglyphs. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs were the formal writing system used in ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language.

Hieroglyphs combined ideographic, logographic, syllabic, and alphabic, and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters. Curseve 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-Sinitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system. Moreover, owing in large part to the Greek and Aramaic script,

had descended from Phoenician. The majority of the world's living writing systems are descendants of Egyptian hieroglyphs, most prominently the Latin and Cyrillic scripts through Greek and the Arabic and Brahmic scripts through Aramaic. The use of hieroglyphic writing arose from proto-literate symbol systems in the early Bronze Age, circa the 33rd century BC, Nakata the 3rd,

with the first decipherable sentence written in the Egyptian language, dating to the 28th century BC, Second Dynasty. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs developed into a mature writing system used for monumental inscription in the classical language of the Middle Kingdom period. During this period, the system used about 9.5. hundred distinct signs. The use of this writing system continued through the New Kingdom and late period and on into the Persian and Ptolemaic periods. Late survivals of hieroglyphic use are found well into the Roman period, extending into the 4th century A.B. During the 5th century,

the permanent closing of pagan temples across Roman Egypt ultimately resulted in the ability to read and write hieroglyphs being forgotten. Despite attempts at decipherment, the nature of the script remained unknown throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The decipherment of hieroglyphic writing was finally accomplished in the 1820s

by Jean-François Chappalo was the help of the Rosetta Stone. The entire ancient Egyptian corpus, including both Hieroglyphys, hieroglyphic and hieratic texts is approximately 5 million words in length. If counting duplicates such as the Book of the Dead and the coffin text says separate, this figure is closer to 10 million. The most complete compendium of ancient Egyptian,

the Wurtebuch der Egyptian Spraka, contains 1.5 to 1.7 million words. The word hieroglyph comes from the ancient Greek, hyoroglyphicos, meaning sacred carving. A compound of hyeras, sacred, and glypho, I carve engrave. From the Ptolemaic period, a third of the first centuries BC, the glyphs themselves were called Ta hieroglyphica grammata, the sacred engraved letters. The Greek counterpart to the Egyptian term Medunetcher, words of gods. Greek chiroglopos meant a carver of hieroglyphs. In English, hieroglyph as a noun is recorded from 1590, originally short for nominalized hieroglyphic. 1580s was a plural hieroglyphics. From adjective use hieroglyphic character. Hieroglyphs may have emerged from the pre-liorphs.

literate artistic traditions of Egypt. For example, symbols on Gerzian pottery from circa 4,000 BC have been argued to resemble hieroglyphic writing. Proto-writing systems developed in the second half of the 4th millennium BC, such as the clay labels of pre-dynastic ruler called Scorpion 1, Nakata the 3rd, a period circa 33rd century BC. recovered at Abidus, modern Oom El Cahab in 1998, or the Narmor Palate, circair, circa 31st century BC. The first full sentence written in mature hieroglyphs so far discovered was found on a seal impression in the tomb of Sess Peribson at Um al-Qa-Aab,

which dates from the Second Dynasty, 28th or 27th century BC. Around 800, hieroglyphs are known to date back to the old kingdom, middle kingdom, and new kingdom eras. By the Greco-Roman period, there were more than 5,000. Scholars have long debated whether hieroglyphs were developed independently of any other script or derived from cuneiform, the earliest writing system in human history that developed to write Sumerian in southern Mesopotamia during the late 4th millennium BC.

Scholars like Jeffrey Sampson argued that Egyptian hieroglyphs came into existence a little after Samarian script and probably were invented under the influence of the latter, and that it is probable that the general idea of expressing words of a language in writing was brought to Egypt from Samarian Mesopotamia. Further, Egyptian writing appeared suddenly, while Mesopotamian had a long evolutionary history, was antecedent signs, use and tokens for agricultural and accounting purposes, as early as circa 8,000 BC.

While there are many instances of early Egypt-Messabitamia relations, the lack of direct evidence for the transfer of writing means that no definitive. determination has been made as to the origin of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt. Since the 1990s, the above-mentioned discoveries of glyphs at Abidos, dated between 3,400 and 3,200 BC, have shed further doubt on the classical notion that the Mesopotamian symbol system predates the Egyptian one. A date of circa 3,400 BC for the earliest Tobitus glyphs challenges the hypothesis of diffusion from Mesopotamia to Egypt, pointing to an independent development of writing in Egypt. Rosalie David has argued that the debate is moot,

since if Egypt did adopt the idea of writing from elsewhere, it was presumably only the concept which was taken over, since the forms of the hieroglyphs are entirely Egyptian in origin and reflect the distinctive flora, fauna, and images of Egypt's own landscape. Egyptian scholar Gamal Makhtar argued further at the inventory of hieroglyphic symbols derived from fauna and flora used in the signs which are essentially African, and in regards to writing, we have seen that a purely nilotic, hence African origin, not only is not excluded, but probably reflects the reality. Hieroglyphs consist of three kinds of glyphs,

phonetic glyphs, including single consonant characters that function like an alphabet, logographs representing morphemes, and determinatives, which narrow down the meaning of logographic or phonetic words. As writing developed and became more widespread among the Egyptian people, simplified glyph forms developed, resulting in the hieratic, priestly, and demotic, popular scripts. These variants were also more suited than hieroglyphs for use of papyrus. Hieroglyphic writing was not, however, eclipsed, but existed alongside the other forms, especially in monumental and other formal writing.

The Rosetta Stone contains three parallel scripts, hieroglyphs, Demotic, and the Greek alphabet. Hieroglyphs continued to be used intermittently under Persian rule in the 6th and 5th centuries, as well as during the ensuing Ptolemaic and Roman periods that followed after Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt. It appears that the misleading quality of comments from Greek and Roman writers about the hieroglyphs came about at least in part as a response to the changed political situation. Some believed that hieroglyphs may have functioned as a way to distinguish true Egyptians from some of the foreign conquerors. Another reason may be the refusal to tackle a foreign culture on its own terms,

which characterized Greco-Roman approaches to Egyptian culture generally. Having learned that hieroglyphs were sacred writing, Greco-Roman authors imagined the complex but rational system as an allegorical, even magical system, transmitting secret mystical knowledge. By the 4th century A.D., few Egyptians were capable of reading hieroglyphs, and the myth of allegorical hieroglyphs was ascendant. Monumental use of hieroglyphs ceased after the closing of all non-Christian temples in 391

by the Roman Emperor Theodosius I. The last known inscription is from Filey, known as the Graffito of Esmet Ockham, from 394. The hieroglyphica of Horapollo, circa 5th century, appears to retain some genuine, genuine knowledge about the writing system. It offers an explanation of close to 200 signs. Some are identified correctly, such as the goose hieroglyph, representing the word for sun, spelled S-O-N. A half-dozen demotic glyphs are still in use, added to the Greek alphabet when writing Coptic. Knowledge of the hieroglyphs had been lost completely in the medieval period. Early attempts, attempts at decipherment were made by some, such as Dool Noon-Missary and Ibn Washiyah,

9th and 10th century respectively. All medieval and early modern attempts were hampered by the fundamental assumption that hieroglyphs recorded ideas and not the sounds of the language. As no bilingual texts were available, any such symbolic translation could be proposed without the possibility of verification. It was not until Athanasius Kirker in the mid-17th century that scholars began to think the hieroglyphs might also represent sounds. Kerker was familiar with Coptic and thought that it might be the key to deciphering the hieroglyphs,

but was held back by a belief in the mystical nature of the symbols. The breakthrough and decipherment came only with the discovery of the Rosetta's stone by Napoleon's troops in 1799. As the stone presented a hieroglyphic and a demotic version of the same text in parallel was a Greek translation. Plenty of material for falsifiable studies in translation was suddenly available. In the early 19th century, scholars such as Sylvester de Sossi Yulhan David Okarblad and Thomas Young studied the inscriptions on the stone and were able to make some headway.

Finally, Jean-Francois-Champillon made the complete decipherment by the 1820s. In a letter he wrote, it is a complex system, writing figurative, symbolic and phonetic all at once, in the same text, the same phrase. I would almost say in the same word.

Visually, hieroglyphs are all more or less figurative. They represent real or abstract elements, sometimes stylized and simplified, but all generally perfectly recognizable in form. However, the same sign can, according to context, be interpreted in diverse ways, as a phonogram, phonetic reading, as a logogram, or as an idiogram, semogram, determinative, semantic reading. The determinative was not read as a phonetic constituent, but facilitated understanding by differentiating the word from its homophones.

Most non-determinative hieroglyphic signs are phonograms, whose meaning is determined by pronunciation, independent of visual characteristics. This follows the Rebus principle, where, for example, the picture of an I could stand not only for the English word I, as an E-Y-E, but also for its phonetic equivalent, the first-person pronoun, I.

Phonograms formed with one consonant are called unilateral signs, with two consonants, biliteral signs, and with three trilateral signs. 24 unilateral signs make up the alphabetic elements. Egyptian hieroglyphic writing does not normally indicate vowels, unlike in aiform, and for that reason has been labeled by some as an abjad, i.e. an alphabet without vowels. Thus, hieroglyphic writing representing a pintail duck is read in Egyptian as sa, derived from the main consonants of the Egyptian word for this duck,

S, Aleph, and T. Note that alif, or two half-rings opening to the left, sometimes replaced by the digit three, is the Egyptian Aleph. It is also possible to use the hieroglyph of the pintail duck without a link to its meaning, in order to represent the two phonemes, S and alif, independently of any vowels that could accompany these consonants. And in this way, write the words Saa, Sun, S-O-N, or when complemented by other signs detailed below,

Sa, Keep, Watch, and Sachu, hard ground. For example, the characters S-A-A-Laf, the same characters used only, in order to signify, according to the context, Pintail Duck, or with the appropriate determinative Sun, S-O-N, two words having the same or similar consonants. The characters saw as used in the word Sa'u, Keep, Watch. As in the Arabic script, not all vowels were written in Egyptian hieroglyphs. It is debatable whether vowels were written at all. Possibly, as with Arabic, the semi-vowels, W and J, as in English W and Y, could double as the vowels U and I.

In modern transcriptions, an E is added between consonants to aid in their pronunciation. For example, N-F-R, Nefer, or Good, is typically written N-E-F-E-F-R. This is not reflect Egyptian vowels which are obscure, but as merely a modern convention. Likewise, the aliph and ah are commonly transliterated as A, as in Ra. Hieroglyphs are inscribed in rows of pictures arranged in horizontal lines or vertical columns. Both hieroglyph lines, as well as signs contained in the lines, are read with upper content having precedence over content below. The lines or columns and the individual inscriptions within them read from left to right

in rare instances only, and for particular reasons of that. Ordinarily, however, they read from right to left. the Egyptians prefer direction of writing. Although for convenience, modern texts are often normalized into left to right order, the direction toward which asymmetrical hieroglyphs face indicate their proper reading order. For example, when human and animal hieroglyphs face or look toward the left, they almost always must read from left to right and vice versa. As in many ancient writing systems, words are not separated by blanks or punctuation marks.

However, certain hieroglyphs appear particularly common only at the end of words, making it possible to readily distinguish words. The Egyptian hieroglyphic script contained 24 uniliterals, symbols that stood for single consonants, much like letters in English. It would have been possible to write all Egyptian words in the manner of these signs, but the Egyptians never did so, and never simplified their complex writing into a true alphabet. Each unilateral glyph once had a unique reading,

but several of these fell together as old Egyptian, developed into Middle Egyptian. For example, the folded cloth glyph seems to have originally been an F, and the doorbolt glyph of TH sound, but these both came to be pronounced S, and the TH sound was lost. A few uniliterals first appear in Middle Egyptian texts. Besides the unilateral glyphs, there are also the biliteral and trilateral glyphs, to represent a specific sequence of two or three consonants, consonants and vowels, and a few as vowel combinations only in the language.

Egyptian writing is often redundant. In fact, it happens very frequently that a word is followed by several characters writing the same sounds in order to guide the reader. For example, the word NFR, Nefer, beautiful, good, perfect, was written with a unique trilateral that was read as NFR. However, it is considerably more common to add the tritur. trilateral, the unilaterals for F and R. The word can thus be written as N-F-R plus F-plus R,

but one still reads it as merely nefer. The two alphabetic characters are adding clarity to the spelling and the preceding trilateral hieroglyph. Redundant characters accompanying biliteral or trilateral signs are called phonetic compliments or complementaries. They can be placed in front of the sign, rarely, after the sign, as a general rule, or even framing it, appearing both before and after. Ancient Egyptian scribes consistently avoided leaving large areas of blank space in their writing,

and might add additional phonetic compliments, or sometimes even invert the order of signs, if this would result in a more aesthetically pleasing appearance. Good scribes attended to the artistic and even religious aspects of the hieroglyphs. It would not simply view them as a communication tool. Notably, phonetic compliments were also used to allow the reader to differentiate between signs that are homophones or which do not always have a unique reading. Finally, it sometimes happens that the pronunciation of words might be changed because of their

connection to ancient Egyptian. In this case, it is not rare for writing to adopt a compromise in notation, the two readings being indicated jointly. For example, the adjective BNJ, sweet, became B and R. Besides a phonetic interpretation, characters can also be read for their meaning. In this instance, logograms are being spoken or idiograms, and semograms, the latter, are also called determinatives. A hieroglyph used as a logogram defines the object of which it is an image. Logograms are therefore the most frequently used common nouns. They are always accompanied by a mute vertical stroke indicating their status as a logogram. In theory, all hieroglyphs would have the ability to be used as logograms.

Logograms can be accompanied by phonetic complements. Determinatives or semograms, semantic symbols, specifying meaning, are placed at the end of a word. These mute characters serve to clarify what the word is about, as homophonic glyphs are common. If a similar procedure existed in English, words with the same spelling would be followed by an indicator that would not be read, but which would fine-tune the meaning. Rort, chemistry, and retort, rhetoric, would thus be distinguished. A number of determinatives exist. Divinities, humans, parts of the human body, animals, plants, etc. certain determinatives possess a literal and a figurative meaning.

For example, a role of papyrus is used to define books, but also abstract ideas. The determinative of the plural is a shortcut to signal three occurrences of the word. That is to say, it's plural, since the Egyptian language had a duel sometimes indicated by two strokes. Rarely the names of gods are placed within a cartouche. The two last names of the sitting king are always placed within a cartouche. A filling stroke is the character indicating the end of a quadrat that would otherwise be incomplete. Some signs are the contraction of several others. These signs have, however, a function and existence of their own.

For example, a forearm where the hand holds a side. is used as a determinative for words meaning to direct, to drive, and their derivatives. The doubling of a sign indicates its dual. The tripling of a sign indicates its plural. The vertical stroke indicates that the sign is a logogram. Two strokes indicate the dual number, and the three strokes indicate the plural. The direct notation of flexional endings. standard orthography, correct spelling in Egyptian, is much looser than in modern languages. In fact, one or several variants exist for almost every word. One finds redundancies, omission of graphemes, which are ignored whether or not they are intentional,

substitutions of one grapheme for another, such that it is impossible to distinguish a mistake from an alternate spelling. errors of omission in the drawing of signs, which are much more problematic when the writing is cursive, hieretic writing, but especially demotic, where the schematization of the signs is extreme. However, many of these apparent spelling errors constitute an issue of chronology. Spelling and standards varied over time, so the writing of a word during the old kingdom might be considerably different during the new kingdom. Furthermore, the Egyptians were perfectly content to include older orthography, historical spelling, alongside newer practices, as though it were acceptable in English to use archaic spellings in modern texts. Most often ancient spelling errors are simply misinterpretations of context. Today, hieroglyphists use numerous cataloging systems to clarify the presence of determinatives,

idiograms, and other ambiguous signs in transliteration. Egyptian hieroglyphs were added to the Unicode standard in October 2009, with the release of version 5.2, which introduced the Egyptian hieroglyphs block, U plus 1 3000-0-0-U-4-2F. As of 2013, four fonts, Egyptus, New Gardner, Notos sends Egyptian hieroglyphs, and J.Sesh font support this range. Another font, Sego UI Historic, comes bundled with Windows 10, and also contains glyphs from the Egyptian hieroglyphs block. The Egyptian hieroglyph format controls Unicode block. is U plus 13430-U-U-plus-1345F.

It was added to the Unicode Standard in March 2019, with the release of version 12.0. The total number of distinct Egyptian hieroglyphs increased over time, from several hundred in the Middle Kingdom to several thousand during the Ptolemaic kingdom. In 1928 and 29, Alan Gardner published an overview of hieroglyphs, Gardner's Sign List, the basic modern standard. It describes 763 signs in 26 categories, A to Z roughly.

Georg Mureler combined more extensive lists, organized by historical epic, published posthumously in 1927 and 1936. In Unicode, the block Egyptian hieroglyphs 2009 includes 1,071 signs, organization based on Gardner's List. As of 2016, there is a proposal by Michael Everson to extend the Unicode standard to comprise Merler's list.