Hieroglyphs

In our studies on Ancient Egypt, we have been learning about their languages. Any time Kenyon or Jacinta complain about having to do any writing, I now just have to remind them that they could be doing it all in hieroglyphs where every letter or sound was a picture and there were over 700 pictures used. That should make us all a little more thankful for our 26 letter alphabet, even with all of it's confusing and complicated rules. To have a small taste of the Egyptians written language, they each had to write their names. We used this chart from our book Ancient Egypt as a guide.

The writings we saw pictured in the book all were written from top to bottom instead of left to right like we are accustomed to. This is K*E*N*Y*O*N.

The chart does not show a picture for the letter J or the letter S. Since J and H make the same sounds in several languages, we decided Jacinta would use and H and then use and S for the C. J(H)*A*C(S)*I*N*T*A. She was really nervous about having to draw birds for the letter A, especially when I pointed out that she had 2 A's in her name, but I thought she did great. She did, however, discover one of the problems I am sure the Egyptian's encountered often-having the space to write the complete word. She made her first A way to big but was able to salvage the picture by scaling down for the remaining letters.