This paper discusses the construction principles of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs from the point of view of conceptual modeling. The paper starts with a summary of author’s previous work on the correspondence between the Entity-Relationship diagrammatic (ERD) technique and two natural languages: English and Chinese. In one previous work, the similarity between the English sentence structure/grammar and the construction blocks and rules of ERD was discovered. In another work, the similarity between the Chinese character construction methods and the ER modeling principles was also discovered. In this paper, construction methods of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph are analyzed with respect to the construction methods of Chinese characters and the conceptual modeling principles. At the end, possible applications and extensions of this research work are discussed.
Peter P. Chen