The hieroglyphics in this film that I've analyzed as the Engineer's "standard orthography" are most evocative on Sumerian cuneiform, but not very similar to it structurally from all I can tell. They're more like a hybrid between cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics. And, it seems most likely to me that the writing is alphabetic.
For example, using a certain amount of assumptions about the glyphs being "featural" (that is, positional variations, dots constantly providing palatalization, etc.) it is possible to map the writing (logically) to an alphabetic system. The glyphs repeat often enough to do this.
I am NOT saying that what you see below in this image is likely HOW the sound actually map, but in this theoretical exercise, I've come to believe that this is probably a lightly mixed system in which MOST of the glyphs are alphabetic or at least syllabic. It COULD work this way and not be too far fetched. This system is NOT like Sumerian in the way it WORKs. There are not enough glyphs for that. It may more closely mirror Egyptian, but I think it most likely that it's simply "gibberish" created by the art department.
In this mapping the apostrophe ( ’ ) is theorized as an epenthetic schwa, commonly written as an upside down "e".
[img]http://masempul.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/text-analysis.jpg[/img]
Both Sumerian and Egyptian are fairly well understood in Academia at this point. Online dictionaries for both are readily available to the public.
The writing on the urns is completely different and that leads me to believe that it may be conceived in the film as "alien" to the Engineers or at least from a subset of the Engineer culture.
