The House of the Net: The Magical Symbolism of the Hieroglyphs

When Jean-François Champollion rediscovered how to translate the Egyptian hieroglyphs in the early nineteenth century he described them as "....a complex system, a writing that is figurative, symbolic, and phonetic all within the same text, a single sentence, I would even say a single word." Since then, although his discoveries have led to the translation of most of the ancient Egyptian texts, the emphasis in modern scholarship is to regard the hieroglyphs purely as sounds and to disregard ...