The keyboard automatically types in transliteration using the Manuel de Codage (MdC) standard transliteration system.

Hieroglyphs using Gardiner's Sign List numbers.

Hieroglyphs using the Manuel de Codage standard.

Transliteration using the Manuel de Codage standard.

The Hieroglyphic keyboard allows you to type Ancient Egyptian in three ways: It allows you to type hundreds of hieroglyphs in all of those situations and more.

The new Hieroglyphic keyboard fills that gap. There was no easy way to type hieroglyphs in, say, an email, a website, a Word document, an Excel spreadsheet, or an Adobe document. Because of the size and scope of the task, until now the two primary ways to work with hieroglyphs on computers were a) as images or b) in dedicated hieroglyphic text-editors. Cutting-edge Keyboardĭesigning a method to type Ancient Egyptian on computers is no easy task, made all the harder by the fact that the Unicode standard didn't admit hieroglyphs until October 2010, in version 6.0. For example, the word 'birds' can be written, which is made up of the signs for the sounds in the word birds ( = ꜣpdw), together with the marker for bird ( ) and the marker for plural ( ). In an effort to make writing aesthetically more beautiful and reading clearer(!), scribes would combine and repeat sound, word, and marker signs to create redundancies when making a word. Some signs indicate sounds (like for the 'ch' in loch), some signs indicate entire words (like for 'flamingo'), some signs explain the reading of other signs (like to mark a word feminine), and most signs can be read in more than one way.

The Ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphs somewhat similarly to modern Japanese. They could be written left-to-right (like English), right-to-left (like Hebrew), or top-to-bottom (like Mongolian), with reading direction indicated by the direction of the faces (you read into the faces, as if conversing with them). For most of their long history, hieroglyphs were usually used for monumental writing and inscriptions. Christian Casey's Unicode Hieroglyphic keyboard allows you to type Ancient Egyptian on the web and in any application with full Unicode support.Īncient Egyptian hieroglyphs have a history of use spanning some 4,000 years, from the late Roman empire back to the 3rd millennium BC, which means they share the distinction with Sumerian cuneiform of being older than any other known writing system. Have you ever wanted to type in Egyptian hieroglyphs? Today we've released a keyboard which will let you do just that.

Write in hieroglyphics using keyboard