Egyptian hieroglyphs were designed for aesthetics first and readability and efficiency a distant second. After all, these were a gift from the gods to humans to allow them to make their words immortal, carving them on stone to last for untold millennia. It’s important to make those words look as good as possible!
This is why the signs were so elaborate—being able to tell the difference between a sparrow and a swallow can be vitally important, for example, since a sparrow means “evil” and a swallow means “great”—and they were usually painted in various colors after being carved, though that only survived if it wasn’t exposed to the elements.
But it also means they have a certain amount of error-correcting redundancy in them, which could make for a fun puzzle!
Most hieroglyphs either:
- Represent an entire word by depicting that thing (a house means “house”)
- Represent the consonant in that thing’s name (a house means p-r because the Egyptian word for “house” is paaru)
- Indicate the general category of thing that a word refers to (a house shows that the previous word refers to a type of house)
By combining these, you can indicate arbitrarily complex words! Just spell out all the consonants, then use one glyph to indicate what sort of thing you mean, which lets you tell the difference between house-bread-seeds purut “crops” and house-bread-sun peraayet “growing season”.
(The first option was the rarest, since most words can’t be drawn in an unambiguous way, so there was actually a special mark you had to attach to indicate “I mean the actual word here, not the consonants”.)
But it doesn’t hurt to add a bit of extra redundancy, too. So there’s an extra rule: if one sign indicates multiple consonants, and the signs immediately before or after it indicate a prefix or suffix of those consonants, those other signs are just for redundancy. In other words, since the house sign means p-r and the mouth sign means r, house-mouth should be read as p-r, not p-r-r. If you want to write p-r-r, you need a house and two mouths. Similarly, since a footstool means p, footstool-house should just be read p-r, and to write p-p-r, you need two footstools.
(Redundant suffixes are a lot more common than redundant prefixes, but you’ll sometimes even find both on the same sign. The purpose was mostly aesthetic, the same reason why they used multi-consonant signs when they already had one sign per consonant: more ways to write the same word means more options to fit it nicely into the inscription! It’s like Tetris, where there’s nothing worse than ending up with a sign that’s the wrong shape for the remaining space. If you use a long, flat sign, then a tall, narrow one, then another long, flat one, you end up with unsightly white space on the sides!)
As a result, it’s possible to have a word be missing some glyphs, where you have some information about what those glyphs are, but not full information. If a word goes ???-mouth (r)-bread (t), then the damaged glyph could be a house (p-r) or a hoe (m-r), but probably not a fish (j-n) or a penis (m-t). If a word goes water (n)-???-mouth (r), the damaged glyph could be a heart with attached trachea (n-f-r) or a pennant (n-ṯ-r), but probably not an ear (s-ḏ-m).
A puzzle using this redundancy to piece together several broken fragments of an ancient Egyptian inscription might be too difficult and tedious to explain, but you never know! Ancient Egyptian ruins are a classic adventure setting for a reason!
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