The Golden Mask of King Tut The Code. Jesús Ariel Aguirre

       Bilíters : they are equivalent to two consonants and are the most abundant.

       Trilíteros : which have a value of three letters.

       Quadriliters : signs that represent a group of four consonants.

      They are very rare.

      It can be an ideographic sign or a pictogram: it is a sign that is inserted at the end of a word to clarify its meaning (if the word has several meanings) or that acts as a determinative to give information about what it is about (for example, a circle with a cross is the determinative of “place, city, region”, so the name that precedes it is the name of a place). A “simple” way to start reading hieroglyphs is to know these determinatives, which are the ones that separate words.

      Ideograms:

       These are signs that do not correspond to a sound but to a word.

       When the ideogram represents the image of its own object it becomes a pictogram.

       Many phonograms are converted to ideograms by placing a vertical stroke on them. The vertical line indicates that the sign is not phonetic but must be interpreted in its real meaning as a word.

      Determinants or determinatives:

       These are signs without phonetic value that are normally placed at the end of a word to indicate the semantic class to which it belongs. Thus the name of a person followed a

      Determinative of man , woman , or child

      that of a tree that of a tree ; after an abstract concept we can find the sign that determines it, or for water or actions connected with it. Thus, we have a long list of signs, some are the same that on other occasions function as phonograms, which in certain cases function as determinants of a term.

       They may or may not appear, but if they appear it is important to locate them as they are neither transliterated nor translated.

       Sometimes they are essential to determine the meaning of the word:

       Phonetic complements

      Sometimes some biliterate, triliterate, and quadrilateral signs are complemented by monolithic signs. These signs reiterate phonemes already included in the sign with which they go and are not transliterated (they are the signs marked by an asterisk):

      As a consequence of the use of phonetic complements, it turns out that the same word can be written in different ways using one number or another of signs depending on the taste of the scribe or, many times, on the available space:

      For this reason, and as a practical matter, we will point out that, when using the Egyptian hieroglyphic dictionaries, we will look for the words not by the signs but by the transliteration which is really what we have to verify that they coincide, although the signs with which they have The word has been written are different from those found in the dictionary. Hence, it is absolutely essential to carry out a correct transliteration of the signs.

       The honorific anteposition

      Sometimes the writing order of the signs is reversed. It usually happens in the case of mentioning deities that, for a matter of respect and deference, are never placed at the end. It is very common to find this honorific prefix in the royal cartridges that contain the name given to the pharaoh when he ascended to the throne since it is almost always composed with the name of the god Ra.

      Although actually the order in which r` + nfr + k3 appear. The same happens in the rest of the cartridges with real names:

      The hieroglyphs can be written in any direction: horizontally, from left to right or right to left, or vertically, also in both directions. The direction of the figures indicates the reading direction. The scribe usually looks for the most harmonious arrangement of the signs, which are inscribed in squares, ideal units that divide the available space. The signs occupy a quarter, a third, a half or all of these squares depending on their morphology and environment.

      There are no periods or commas. Also no separation between words and phrases. One way to know where a word begins or ends is to locate the determinative, a sign that indicates its semantic function, such as the one that indicates movement, represented by two legs in a walking attitude; the one that determines a violent action, represented by an armed arm, or the one that indicates an abstract concept, a rolled papyrus. Some signs, such as those representing R or T, may appear as phonetic complements, to emphasize or make a text more explicit. The Egyptian alphabet is made up of 28 consonants.

      Although attempts have been made to reconstruct the phonetics of hieroglyphics from the sounds of Coptic, we do not know what the language of the ancient Egyptians actually sounded like. We can read it, but not speak it. As a convention, in transcriptions the spaces between consonants are usually filled with the vowels “e” and “o” written in lowercase (in the transliterations used by Egyptologists and philologists, special characters are used .

      The first thing we have to be clear about when starting to read hieroglyphs is that, unlike our alphabet, in hieroglyphic writing a drawing