Doodling with Purpose

​​Take a second and look at the letters on this page. The A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s. Familiar, right? Maybe even invisible because you’ve seen them so many times. But here’s a wild thought: buried inside the history of those shapes is a winding, ancient path that starts not in Rome or Greece, but in Egypt.

 

Yes, the hieroglyphs you’ve been doodling throughout this book aren’t just distant relics of a dead language. They’re ancestral roots of the alphabet we use today.

This chapter traces that evolution, from Egyptian pictographs to the modern English alphabet, to show you how writing systems evolve, spread, and survive in surprising ways.

 

Writing as a Gift of the Gods

 

In ancient Egypt, writing wasn’t seen as a human invention, it was a gift from the gods. The god Thoth was credited with creating hieroglyphs, which were known to the Egyptians as medu netjer, or “words of the gods.” For thousands of years, hieroglyphs were used to record the wisdom of pharaohs, priests, engineers, and dreamers.

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“I’ll give you this pencil an paper, but the information is going to cost you.”

But as time passed, empires rose and fell. And eventually, new groups, traders, settlers, conquerors, passed through Egypt and borrowed what they saw. And among the first to do that were the Phoenicians.

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Phoenicians: The Alphabet Engineers

 

The Phoenicians were master traders and sailors based in what is now modern-day Lebanon. Around 1000 BCE, they developed a writing system that was revolutionary in its simplicity: an alphabet based on sounds. No pictures of gods, no sacred birds or eyes, just 22 characters, each standing for a single consonant.

 

But where did they get the idea?

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Many scholars believe the Phoenician alphabet was directly influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs, especially the simplified script called hieratic, which was used for daily record-keeping on papyrus. Some of the earliest known alphabetic writing (like the Proto-Sinaitic script) shows clear visual connections to Egyptian signs, just more abstract, simplified, and focused purely on phonetic sounds.

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For example:

• The hieroglyph of an ox head (𓃾) likely evolved into aleph, the Phoenician letter for “A.”

• The Egyptian house glyph (𓉐) became beth, which gave us the letter “B.”

• The camel glyph may have led to gimel, which became “G.”

In other words, the Phoenician alphabet was hieroglyph DNA, reorganized for speed, trade, and practicality.

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From Greece to Rome

 

The Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet around the 8th century BCE, making key changes along the way, most notably, the addition of vowels. Where Egyptian and Phoenician scripts focused mostly on consonants, the Greeks realized that marking vowel sounds made reading and writing more flexible and expressive.

 

They also reshaped the letters into the early forms we recognize today. Alpha, beta, gamma… you know where this is going.

 

From there, the alphabet traveled to Italy, where the Etruscans adopted it. And then, in the 7th century BCE, the Romans took hold of it and refined it into the Latin alphabet, the one we’re using right now.

 

Your letter “A”? It started as an Egyptian ox. The letter “M”? It might trace back to mem, the Phoenician water sign, which itself may have been inspired by the Egyptian water ripple glyph (𓈖).
 

The letter “R”? It connects to resh, meaning “head”, just as the Egyptian mouth glyph (𓂋) once symbolized sound and speech.

 

A Living Legacy in Your Notebook

 

So what does this mean for you, the modern scribbler, journaler, or glyph-doodler?

 

It means that every time you write in English, Spanish, French, or any language using the

Roman (Phoenician) alphabet, you’re writing with the descendants of hieroglyphs. That stylized letter on your keyboard has ancient DNA. The way you sign your name? That has echoes of scribes pressing reed pens into papyrus.

 

And when you write your name in hieroglyphs, you’re not just copying ancient shapes, you’re going back in time, participating in the lineage of writing that leads all the way to today.

 

The Loop is Closed

 

So here we are, full circle.

 

You are ready to start your journey by drawing little birds and eyes, learning that every symbol had sound and meaning. You will learn to write names, phrases, blessings. You will learn about sacred symbols, translated real inscriptions, and even explored how Egypt lives on in pop culture.

 

The writing system you use every day wouldn’t exist the way it does without hieroglyphs. They’re not some isolated system locked in a tomb. They are the roots beneath the tree of modern communication.

 

So the next time you text, type, or scribble in a notebook, remember: You are speaking with the voice of scribes. You are doodling with purpose. And you are carrying an ancient light into the modern world.

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Chapter 2: The Mystery of the Glyphs - How the Ancient Language of Egypt Was Lost for Over a Thousand Years

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The ancient Egyptians wrote everything. From tomb walls to shopping lists, tax records to sacred hymns, they recorded their lives in careful, pictorial detail. Names were preserved in royal cartouches.

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Speeches were carved into temple pillars. Love poems, prayers, laws, and even jokes were all written down in the majestic script we now call hieroglyphics.

But then, something strange happened.

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Despite being one of the most enduring writing systems in human history, used for over 3,000 years, Egyptian hieroglyphs suddenly disappeared. Not from monuments, of course. The glyphs remained carved into stone, perfectly legible and intact. But their meaning… was forgotten.

 

For more than 1,400 years, not a single person on Earth could read them.

 

The Silence of a Civilization

 

The fall of ancient Egyptian literacy didn’t happen overnight. As Egypt became absorbed into the Greek-speaking world under the Ptolemies, and later into the Roman Empire, its own native writing system gradually faded into the background. By the 4th century CE, hieroglyphs had become associated almost exclusively with pagan temples and rituals. As Christianity spread through the region, those temples were closed, and with them, the last schools of scribal training vanished.

 

The final known hieroglyphic inscription was carved at the Temple of Philae in 394 CE. It was a short, reverent message to the gods, nothing out of the ordinary. But it would become the last time a hieroglyph was written by someone who actually understood what it meant.

 

After that, silence.

 

Generations passed. Egypt changed hands many times, Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman, and eventually European powers all left their mark. Tourists and conquerors alike stood in awe of the monuments, but no one could read the stories carved into them. The language of the pharaohs, the priests, and the people had gone dark.

 

Imagine discovering the Library of Alexandria but not knowing how to read. That’s what Egypt had become: a monumental bookshelf of unreadable knowledge.

A Language Locked in Stone

 

People in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance didn’t stop looking at hieroglyphs, but they misunderstood them completely. Lacking any key to decipher them, scholars invented interpretations based more on mysticism than linguistics. Many believed the glyphs were magical symbols, alchemical signs, astrological diagrams, or spiritual metaphors. They were treated like the runes of a lost civilization rather than components of a real language.

 

Some thought each hieroglyph stood for a full idea or moral principle. A lion symbolized strength. An eye represented God. A falcon meant divine protection. To a point, these associations weren’t entirely wrong, but they were missing the crucial piece: the sounds. The phonetics. The grammar. The sentence structure.

 

They didn’t understand that hieroglyphs could be read.

 

 

By the end of this book you will be able to read this! Cool huh?

Misguided Guesswork and Missed Clues

 

Even brilliant minds got it wrong. Renaissance thinkers such as Athanasius Kircher, a German Jesuit scholar, devoted years to studying the inscriptions. He compiled dictionaries of supposed meanings and wrote elaborate interpretations. But his work was mostly fantasy, layering Christian symbolism over ancient Egyptian concepts he didn’t understand. He saw hieroglyphs not as letters, but as allegories.

 

The problem was that almost no one imagined hieroglyphs as a structured written language. They seemed too beautiful, too artistic, too symbolic to be phonetic. The idea that an owl could stand for “m,” or that a seated man could represent the sound “z,” didn’t occur to most scholars of the time.

 

Meanwhile, thousands of glyphs remained frozen in time, etched into temples, painted onto papyri, carved into the stone sarcophagi of long-dead kings. The words were right there. But the world had lost the instructions on how to read them.

 

A Puzzle Waiting to Be Solved

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The truth is, the writing system itself had worked too well. Hieroglyphs weren’t just sounds or letters. They were:

• Phonetic signs (like an alphabet)

• Symbols (like emojis)

• Determinatives (like hashtags to add meaning)

• Layout-based art (with direction and balance)

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Without context, it was impossible to tell where one word ended and another began. Vowels weren’t written. Word order changed based on artistic flow. And sacred traditions like honorific transposition meant names of gods or royalty were often placed out of grammatical order, making things even more confusing.

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Trying to read hieroglyphs without guidance was like trying to play a video game with no tutorial, no manual, and the buttons scrambled on purpose.

The Echo of the Ancients

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And yet… the monuments still stood. The Valley of the Kings. The temples at Karnak, Luxor, and Abu Simbel. The pyramid texts. The walls of tombs covered in prayer, poetry, and precise rows of silent symbols. They hadn’t been destroyed, they’d simply waited.

 

People continued to sketch hieroglyphs in travel journals. Artists copied them onto canvases. Some wealthy collectors even brought obelisks and statues back to Europe. But the inscriptions on those artifacts were treated like decoration, not language. Without a cipher, they were no more readable than a lock without a key.

 

But the key was coming.

 

And it would arrive, fittingly, through an invasion.

 

Coming Up Next…

 

In  Chapter 3 Napoleon arrives in Egypt, not just with soldiers, but with scholars, and he accidentally kicks off the rebirth of Egyptology. We’ll meet the French thinkers who gave the glyphs their first modern name, “cartouches,” because they looked like bullet casings, and we’ll watch as the West starts to look at hieroglyphs not as mystery symbols, but as something that could be cracked.

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