Egyptian Symbols Look Like Emojis! - Easy Egyptian

Those funny Pharaohs!
The Israeli Museum in Jerusalem has an exhibition making Egyptian symbols more accessible by likerning them to emojis.

This is the Egyptian symbol for life.

A fascinating article on Ancient Egyptian writing says that you could write in any direction, and faces were turned to show the direction of the writing. If the faces faced left you started reading from the left.

The word hieroglyph comes from the Greek words ἱερός (hierós 'sacred') and γλύφειν (glúphein 'to carve' or 'to write'), and it was first used to mean Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Greeks who came to Egypt saw the picture letters, which were often found carved on house walls, tombs and monuments.

Simple wiki makes it clearer and relevant to today's writing.

Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egyptians used pictures to make a phonetic alphabet, so that each sound could be written with a picture-word, a phonogram or pictograph. For example, a zig-zag for water

came to mean the letter "n", because the Egyptian word for water started with n. This same picture became our letter 'M' in the Latin alphabet, because the Semitic word for water started with m, and Semitic workers changed the symbols to fit sounds in their own language.

 In the same way, our Latin letter 'N' came from the hieroglyph for snake

Mark, Joshua J. "Ancient Egyptian Writing." Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 16 Nov 2016. Web. 05 Feb 2020.

Useful Websites
https://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/arts/israeli-museum-explains-the-emojis-of-ancient-egypt-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Museum

About the Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Please share links to your favourite posts.