Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs

This is one of those basic books that used to be placed in elementary school libraries so that they could be found by elementary school children. Published in 2012, it references a website, facthound.com, suitable for children, that is no longer in existence, although the maintainers of the site were conscientious enough to hold on to the domain name and leave a place holder page. It engages in a bit of historical misdirection, usual for someone writing a book for children who has learned only the bare minimum about the subject. It mistranslates "hieroglyphs" as "God's Words"; "sacred carvings" is much closer to the Greek and more generally correct. The design is busy and a bit ugly, but I think the drawings of the cartouches are all show more correct. The photographs of the Coptic manuscript and the vases are both interesting; the Coptic manuscript is pleasing to the eye.

The book has one really unfortunate typo, "phonograph" is substituted for "phonogram" in a few sentences. show less

This is an information-filled introduction to ancient Egyptian writing, mainly hieroglyphs. It gives information with pictures, but it also gives definitions for vocabulary that might be new to a young reader (along with a glossary of those words in back), examples from actual artifacts, a timeline, and charts of both the alphabet and numbers. As someone who was always interested in ancient Egypt, I wish this book had been around when I was a kid. This would be great to introduce interested kids to ancient Egyptian writing.