A hieroglyph is a picture or symbol that represents a word, sound, or idea in an ancient writing system. The most famous hieroglyphs come from ancient Egypt, where scribes carved or painted these intricate symbols on temple walls, monuments, and papyrus scrolls for over 3,000 years.

Egyptian hieroglyphs included pictures of animals, people, tools, and objects. A drawing of an owl might represent a particular sound, while a picture of a walking leg could mean “to go” or “to come.” Some hieroglyphs stood for whole words, while others represented just sounds, similar to how our alphabet works. A single inscription might combine hundreds of these symbols to tell a story, record a king's achievements, or mark a tomb.

For nearly 1,500 years, no one could read hieroglyphs at all. The knowledge of how to read them had been lost. Then in 1799, soldiers in Napoleon's army discovered the Rosetta Stone in Egypt, a large rock with the same message carved in three different scripts: hieroglyphs, another Egyptian script, and ancient Greek. Since scholars could read Greek, they finally cracked the code and learned to read hieroglyphs again.

Other ancient civilizations, including the Maya and the Hittites, also used hieroglyphic writing systems. Today, when someone's handwriting is extremely messy and hard to read, people sometimes joke that it looks like hieroglyphs.