This article relates to ancient hieroglyphs, for the magical glyphs used by Keepers, see Glyph.
Hieroglyphs are rarely encountered in the Thief universe. Although certain Glyphs, such as the Door Glyph and the sign of the Trickster, can be considered pictograms, most are non-representative. Both the Precursors and the Kurshok used pseudo-Egyptian characters in formal writing. Precursor hieroglyphs are crude and very pictorial, like those on the TDP/TG map of Karath-din, whereas those of the Kurshok empire are more cursive and set in cartouches, as is seen on the Kurshok Tapestry.
Actual Egyptian characters are present in each writing style, but are unintelligible. These include the feather, eye, and sun symbols, as well as the characters for "t" and "r".