Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Entities Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Unicode includes a large collection of Egyptian hieroglyphs used to represent the writing system of ancient Egypt. These characters allow hieroglyphic signs to be included in modern HTML documents for educational, historical, linguistic, and scholarly purposes.

Egyptian hieroglyphs do not have named HTML character references. They can be entered directly in a UTF-8 document or represented with decimal or hexadecimal numeric character references. Because these characters are outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, a font that supports the Egyptian Hieroglyphs Unicode block is required for them to display correctly.

Egyptian Hieroglyphs

The Egyptian Hieroglyphs Unicode block begins at U+13000 and contains more than one thousand encoded signs. The following table shows representative characters from the beginning of the block.

Animal Hieroglyphs

Animals, birds, reptiles, and other living creatures appear frequently in Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. Unicode identifies the signs using standardized catalog numbers rather than assigning each character an English word or meaning.

Object & Symbol Hieroglyphs

Egyptian hieroglyphic writing also includes signs representing objects, buildings, tools, plants, natural features, and abstract concepts. The following examples show additional characters from the Unicode block.

Using Egyptian Hieroglyphs in HTML

Egyptian hieroglyphs can be represented with decimal or hexadecimal numeric character references. Their Unicode code points are greater than FFFF, but HTML uses the same character-reference syntax as it does for characters in lower Unicode ranges.

<p>&#77824; &#77825; &#77826; &#77827;</p>
<p>&#x13000; &#x13001; &#x13002; &#x13003;</p>

If the characters appear as empty boxes or replacement symbols, the browser is working with a font that does not contain the required Egyptian hieroglyph glyphs.