Emojis are not the new hieroglyphs

We've all heard this claim: “Emojis are the modern hieroglyphs!" It's catchy, it's everywhere, and it's completely wrong.

Yes, both use pictures. Yes, both communicate. But that's where the similarities end.

Hieroglyphs were profoundly sacred. The Egyptians called them "medu netjer" – "the words of the gods." These weren't casual markings but divine script that mediated between humans and the cosmic order. They adorned temple walls, royal tombs, and ritual objects, carrying spells that would ensure immortality and texts that maintained universal harmony. As Egyptologist Jan Assmann argues, hieroglyphs weren't just a writing system but a cosmological force that helped maintain Ma'at – the fundamental order of the universe.

Emojis? They're used to react to social media posts. One system recorded the divine utterances that sustained creation; the other helps you avoid typing "thanks" after someone sends you meeting notes.

Emojis, or emoticons as their name reveals, were created specifically to express emotions – yet what they actually do is restrict the rich and wide gamut of human emotional experience to a handful of basic, unnuanced, and ultimately misleading representations. The complex interplay of joy tinged with melancholy, or anticipation mixed with anxiety, gets flattened into a yellow circle with a simplistic expression. Human emotions are culturally shaped, contextual experiences with infinite variations. Emojis don’t capture this complexity – they impoverish it, training us to think of emotions as standardized, isolated units rather than the fluid, overlapping states they truly are.

Hieroglyphs formed a complete language system. They weren't just pictures – they represented sounds, words, and grammatical elements. As Egyptologist James P. Allen notes in his Middle Egyptian grammar, hieroglyphs functioned as phonograms, ideograms, and determinatives in a sophisticated writing system that could express any concept.

Emojis can't do that. They can't replace language – they need it. Try writing an email using only emojis. You can't. They support our words; they don't replace them.

Hieroglyphs were complex and perspectival. They could be read from multiple directions and combined to create new meanings. They added information rather than reducing it. Emojis do the opposite – they simplify and flatten. They reduce complex emotions to cartoon faces.

The ancient scribe spent years mastering hieroglyphs. As Egyptologists explain, literacy was limited to perhaps 1% of the population. Today, my teenager sends me emojis without thinking twice.

Hieroglyphs evolved over 3,000 years, adapting to express increasingly complex ideas. They weren't static. Linguist Orly Goldwasser has demonstrated how hieroglyphs developed from pictographic origins into a sophisticated system that could express abstract concepts and philosophical ideas.

Emojis, despite their growing number and ubiquity, remain fundamentally limited. They can't build sentences, create literature, or record history. They're emotional punctuation marks, not a writing system.

So next time someone claims emojis are the new hieroglyphs, send them this: 🙄📚👎

The ancient Egyptians would understand none of it – and that's precisely the point.