I still have a bit of a hard time getting my head around how they get from hieroglyphs to the spoken word.
I did some further research and found:
"Hieroglyphs are written in rows or columns and can be read from left to right or from right to left. You can distinguish the direction in which the text is to be read because the human or animal figures always face towards the beginning of the line."
and
"Hieroglyphs are a writing system, and they were used to write a language called Egyptian. You can speak Egyptian, but you cannot speak hieroglyphs. The image above is a word puzzle called a rebus, where pictures stand for words that when put together make a sentence. ... You've “translated†English hieroglyphs."