Among the thousands of characters of Egyptian hieroglyphics, there are a few, limited in number, which have a special feature-each symbol represents a single letter or phoneme.These special characters are considered the Egyptian hieroglyphic 'alphabet'.
All other symbols represent whole words or ideas and unfortunately they need to be learned by heart . The good news is that Alan J. Garder (a 19th century writer and pioneer in Egyptology) has done all the hard work for us.He organized the symbols and grouped them into thematic categories.His work is the main reference for professionals and amateurs today.
You should also take into consideration that the above script actually consists of consonants only, as in Arabic and Phoenician.The first letter,for example,the 'a', was actually a consonant, a guttural sound usually followed by the 'a' vowel in speech. We are not sure which vowels existed between the consonants, but nowadays we usually write 'a' instead of ' and 'u' for w, ,'i' for 'j' and add the 'e' vowel between the rest of the consonants.
And now a little practice:
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numbers in Egyptian hieroglyphics
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