Write your name in hieroglyphs

Type your name below. The tool breaks it into sounds and writes each one with an Egyptian sign that stands for a single consonant — the way Egyptologists spell foreign names in hieroglyphs. It is a sound spelling, not a translation: the signs say how your name sounds, not what it means.

This is a simplified spelling. Egyptian writing left out most vowels; we keep them so you can recognise your name. A scribe would have picked his signs differently, and a cartouche was reserved for kings and queens — here it is simply a frame.

• Vowels: a → vulture, i and e → reed, o and u → quail chick, y → two reeds. Late scribes wrote foreign vowels with exactly these signs.
• Latin letters are read the English way: sh → pool, ch → tethering rope, kh → placenta, j and dj → cobra, th → bread, ph and v → horned viper, x → basket and cloth (k + s), c → basket before a, o, u and cloth before e, i, y.
• Cyrillic letters: ш → pool, ч → rope, х → placenta, ж and дж → cobra, ц → bread and cloth, щ → pool and rope; я, ю, ё → two reeds plus a vowel; ь and ъ are skipped.
• Ukrainian: on the Ukrainian page, or when a name contains і, ї, є or ґ, г is read as h (reed shelter) and и as y (two reeds), as in Ukrainian passports.
• L → lion. Egyptian had no l. For Greek names such as Ptolemy and Cleopatra scribes used the lying lion.
• Doubled letters merge: Anna → a-n-a. Spaces and punctuation are ignored, and a cartouche holds up to 20 signs.

Three signs of the old “alphabet” never appear in your name: the forearm (ʿ, a throaty sound like the Arabic ayin), the twisted wick (ḥ, a breathy h) and the animal’s belly (ẖ, a softer kh). English and Slavic names simply have no such sounds.

Hieroglyphs were never an alphabet. They mix three kinds of signs. Some stand for a whole word: a sun disc means “sun”, a house plan means “house”. Others stand for sounds — one, two or three consonants. The rest, determinatives, are not read at all: they show what kind of word you are looking at.

The Egyptian word for cat is a good example. It is written owl (m) + reed (i) + quail chick (w) — “miw”, a cat’s own sound — and then a little picture of a cat that is not pronounced. The cat at the end tells the reader that “miw” here is the animal.

Classical Middle Egyptian used around 750 signs; in the temples of the Ptolemaic period their number grew into the thousands. Vowels were not written, so nobody knows exactly how most words sounded. Texts ran in rows or columns, usually from right to left, and the animals and people always face the beginning of the line — that is how you tell the direction.

The oldest hieroglyphs we know are labels from a tomb at Abydos, about 3200 BC. The last dated inscription was carved at Philae in AD 394. After that nobody could read the script for fourteen centuries.

A cartouche is an oval of rope with a knot at one end, drawn around a royal name. The Egyptians called it “shenu”, from the word for “to encircle”: it grew out of the round shen ring, a sign of protection and eternity, stretched to fit a long name. Kings used it from about 2600 BC, at the turn of the 3rd and 4th Dynasties.

A pharaoh had five names, and two of them went into cartouches: the throne name and the birth name. Queens and some royal children got cartouches too; ordinary Egyptians never did. The word itself is French — scholars of Napoleon’s expedition of 1798–1801 thought the oval looked like a gun cartridge (Livius).

Names in cartouches were the key to the script. The Rosetta Stone, found in 1799, carries one decree of 196 BC in hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek. The Greek text names King Ptolemy, and the English scholar Thomas Young worked out that the cartouche in the hieroglyphic part held the same name.

Then came a second name. William Bankes brought an obelisk from Philae to his house in Dorset: its base carried a Greek inscription mentioning Cleopatra, and the shaft had a cartouche to match. Jean-François Champollion compared the two names sign by sign. The stool (p), the lion (l), the reed and the rope loop stood in the places where Ptolemaios and Kleopatra share sounds. But t was a loaf of bread in Ptolemy and a hand in Cleopatra — so two different signs could write the same sound.

From these comparisons Champollion built a list of sound signs and presented it in Paris on 27 September 1822, in his letter to Bon-Joseph Dacier. The decisive step came when the same signs read native Egyptian names too — Ramesses, Thutmose. Hieroglyphs were not just symbols: they wrote sounds.

Real spellings: Ptolemy is p-t-w-l-m-y-s, and Cleopatra is q-l-i-w-p-a-d-r-a-t, ending with signs that mark a woman’s name. Type Cleopatra into the tool above and compare: our version uses a basket for C and a loaf for T, where the scribe chose a hill (q) and a hand (d).