Brief explanation of hieroglyphs

The hieroglyphic system used in ancient Egypt had between 700 and 800 basic symbols, called glyphs. This number grew in the last centuries of ancient Egyptian civilization, because of an increased interest in writing religious texts. Egyptians wrote hieroglyphs in long lines from right to left, and from top to bottom. They did not use spaces or punctuation.
Egyptian glyphs are divided into two groups: phonograms, which are glyphs that represent sounds, and ideograms, which are glyphs that represent objects or ideas. The Egyptians constructed words by using a combination of the two types of glyphs. Readers must generally use both phonograms and ideograms to determine the significance of a word or phrase.
Phonograms represented the sounds of single consonants and combinations of consonants. A phonogram that represents the two consonant sound (on the right) and (on the left) is:

The Egyptians did not write vowels, so it is impossible to know exactly how they pronounced hieroglyphic texts. When speaking, they may have expressed vowel sounds to distinguish various words that, in writing, look identical.