ABSTRACT
There had been many attempts to decipher and understand the ancient Egyptian texts, but most scholars misconstrued the basic principle of hieroglyphs and claimed that the signs were symbols, representing individual ideas. In reality, some of the signs (which we now call phonograms or ‘sound-signs’) were alphabetic and provided the individual sounds of a word, while others (ideograms or ‘sense-signs’) were placed at the ends of words to convey their meaning, but were never pronounced. This basic error in understanding how the hieroglyphs worked prevented scholars from realising that they were a written version of the language of ancient Egypt. Until this was appreciated, no progress could be made in reading the inscriptions in order to gain new knowledge about the history of the civilisation, the names and chronological order of the kings, the religious beliefs, and many aspects of daily life, including law, medicine and education.
