A sacred character; a character in picture writing,
   as of the ancient Egyptians, Mexicans, etc. Specifically, in the
   plural, the picture writing of the ancient Egyptian priests. It is made
   up of three, or, as some say, four classes of characters: first, the
   hieroglyphic proper, or figurative, in which the representation of the
   object conveys the idea of the object itself; second, the ideographic,
   consisting of symbols representing ideas, not sounds, as an ostrich
   feather is a symbol of truth; third, the phonetic, consisting of
   symbols employed as syllables of a word, or as letters of the alphabet,
   having a certain sound, as a hawk represented the vowel a.