HIEROGLYPHICS
This term refers to the characters used in Egyptian monuments and documents. In their archaic form (that found in monuments) and in the hieratic style, they are pictograms, in which most of the characters represent animals, birds, the human figure, or familiar objects, which at first represented the objects drawn, and to which ideas and sounds were later assigned.
There was also a simplified form, used later for use in popular correspondence, and called demotic.
The scholar who managed to unravel the meaning of hieroglyphs, Champollion, discovered 864 different characters.
The feat of deciphering the Egyptian language was achieved thanks to the discovery of the Rosetta stone, which gave the same text in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek script.