We have already pointed out how among the Egyptian monuments, the sculptures on the tombs and temples, and in many of the more important _papyri_--as, for example, their Book of the Dead itself--we have specimens of all the three methods by which ideas may be conveyed to the _eye_. We have first the picture of some event--the king, say, offering sacrifice to a god,--then we have each separate word of the sentence first recorded by ideographs, then spelled by ordinary letters.
Another source of difficulty in deciphering the writing of the ancient Egyptians, is that they were not content with a single sign for a single sound; they had a great many different pictures for each letter, and used them in fanciful ways. For example, if _l_ occurred in the name of a king or god, they would use the lion-picture to express it, thinking it appropriate; but if the same sound occurred in the name of a queen, they would use a lotus-lily as more feminine and elegant. They had as many as twenty different pictures which could be used for the first letter of our alphabet _a_, and thirty for the letter _h_, one of which closely resembles our capital H in form, being two upright palm-branches held by two arms which make the cross of the H. No letter had fewer than five pictures to express its sound, from which the writer might choose according to his fancy; or perhaps, sometimes, according to the space he had to fill up on the wall, or obelisk, where he was writing, and the effect in form and colour he wished his sentence to produce. Then again, all their letters were not quite true letters (single breathings). The Egyptians never got quite clear about vowels and consonants, and generally spelt words (unless they _began_ with a vowel sound) by consonants only, the consonants carrying a vowel breathing as well as their own sound, and thus being syllabic signs instead of true letters.
Since much of the writing of the ancient Egyptians was used ornamentally as decoration for the walls of their houses and temples, and took with them the place of the tapestry of later times, the space required to carry out their complex system of writing was no objection to it in their eyes; neither did they care much about the difficulty of learning so elaborate an array of signs, as for many centuries the art of reading and writing was almost entirely confined to an order of priests whose occupation and glory it was. When writing became more common, and was used for ordinary as well as sacred purposes, the pictorial element disappeared from some of their styles of writing, and quick ways of making the pictures were invented, which reduced them to as completely arbitrary signs, with no resemblance to the objects intended, as the Chinese signs now are.