The Hieroglyphs School

Egyptian writing is the second great logophonetic tradition Edubba will teach, and like cuneiform it is not one script but a sequence: hieroglyphs proper, the cursive hieraticthe fast cursive everyday form of Egyptian writing, done with brush and ink hand, demoticthe even faster successor of hieratic, used for daily business in later Egypt, and Egyptian’s own Coptic afterlife. This school will be built the same way as the others — a foundations course on how the writing system works, then a literacy track that takes a reader toward genuine reading of real Egyptian texts, with further courses for the tradition’s later phases. As with every Edubba school, the goal is not facts about the script but the ability to read it.

Course catalog

• 101 · Foundations — open: complete, thirteen chapters live. How Egyptian hieroglyphic writing works as a system: media and origins, uniliteralsa sound-sign spelling exactly one consonant, biliteralsa sound-sign spelling a fixed pair of consonants at once and phonetic complementsa sound-sign that repeats part of a neighboring sign's value — spelling belt-and-suspenders, for the reader's safety, the classifierEgyptology's name for a determinative — the silent sign closing a word to say what kind of thing it is: person, speech, plural, idea system, the culture words, real royal names in cartouchesthe rope ring drawn around a royal name in Egyptian writing — and the Rosetta decipherment told with Ptolemy and Cleopatra read sign by sign. Prerequisite for everything below.
• 102 · Middle Egyptian — open: seven chapters live. The literacy track: the sign inventory grown in computed order past seventy signs, Middle Egyptian’s three sentence types and the suffix conjugation in reading-sized bites, and real lines from the classics — Khufu’s court, the Doomed Prince, Piye’s stela, the doctors’ papyri, Neferti, Wenamun.
• 2xx · The wider Egyptian world — planned. Further courses across the tradition’s later phases:
  • Hieraticthe fast cursive everyday form of Egyptian writing, done with brush and ink — planned.
  • Demoticthe even faster successor of hieratic, used for daily business in later Egypt — planned.
  • Coptic — planned.
  • Ptolemaic — planned.

Addenda — the school’s shelf

Outside the numbered sequence, the Addenda collect materials that serve every course and belong to none — starting with the Egyptian glossary, every hieroglyph-specific term in one plain sentence each.

A note on where things stand

101 is open and growing; everything below it is plan, not promise. Numbering and scope for the later courses will be firmed up as curriculum design proceeds, following the cuneiform school’s lead. If you’d like to see the wider project, go back to the map of writing; if you have thoughts, corrections, or requests for what should come first, they’re welcome on GitHub Issues.