A Child's History of the World

by V. M. Hillyer

The Egyptians did not write with letters like ours, however, but with signs that looked like little pictures, a lion, a spear, a bird, a whip. This picture-writing was called hieroglyphics—see if you can say “Hi-e-ro-glyph-ics.” Perhaps you have seen, in the puzzle sections of a newspaper, stories written in pictures for you to guess the meaning. Well, hieroglyphics were something like that.

Here is the name of an Egyptian queen, whom you will hear about later—written in hieroglyphics; her name you would never guess from this funny writing. It is “Cleopatra.”

Cleopatra in hieroglyphic
writing.

A king’s or queen’s name always had a line drawn around it, like the one you see around the above name in order to mark it more prominently and give it more importance. It was something like the square or circle your mother may put around her initials or monogram on her letter-paper.

But there was no paper in those days and so the Egyptians wrote on the leaves of a plant called papyrus that grew in the water. It is from this name “papyrus” that we get the name “paper.” Can you see that “paper” and “papyrus” look and sound something alike? The Egyptians’ books were written by hand, of course, but they had no pencils nor pens nor ink to write with. For a pen they used a reed, split at the end, and for ink a mixture of water and soot.

Their books were not made of separate pages like our books, but from a long sheet of papyrus-leaves pasted together. This was rolled up to form what was called a scroll, something like a roll of wall-paper, and was read as it was unrolled.

Stories of their kings and battles and great events in their history they used to write on the walls of their buildings and monuments. This writing they carved into the stone, so that it would last much longer than that on the papyrus-leaves.

All the old Egyptians, who wrote in hieroglyphics and knew how to read this writing, had died long since, and for a great many years no one knew what such writing meant. But a little over a hundred years ago a man found out by accident how to read and understand hieroglyphics once again. This is the way he happened to do so.

The Nile separates into different streams before it flows into the Mediterranean Sea. These separate streams are called mouths and one of these mouths has been given the name “Rosetta.”