Ancient Egyptians used pictures to make a phonetic alphabet as in a rebus, so that each sound could be written with a picture-word, a phonogram or pictograph. For example, a zig-zag for water came to mean the letter "n", because the Egyptian word for water started with n. This same picture became our letter 'M' in the Latin alphabet, because the Semitic word for water started with m, and Semitic workers changed the symbols to fit sounds in their own language. In the same way, our Latin letter 'N' came from the hieroglyph for snake as the word for "snake" started with n in Semitic. In Egyptian, this picture had stood for a sound like English "J" because of their word for snake. Some pictures came to represent ideas, and these are known as ideograms.
The Egyptians used between 700 or 800 pictures, or glyphs. They were written from right to left and from top to bottom. They did not use punctuation.

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