The famed Egyptologist McGriff
Deciphered an odd hieroglyph,
That depicted the ass
Of a man passing gas,
Which, thankfully, was not scratch-and-sniff!
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics make up a writing system that uses a pictographic alphabet of between 700 and 800 symbols to represent consonantal sounds, as well as abstract concepts. Hieroglyphic writing dates back to 3,000 B.C., but all knowledge of the glyphs’ meanings was lost by 392 A.D. Not until 1799 was it possible to decipher the language, when a French soldier found the famous Rosetta Stone, which conveniently has the same text written in hieroglyphics, demotic—sort of a cursive form of hieroglyphics—and ancient Greek.
