Hieroglyphs 101 · Foundations

The first course of the Egyptian school. No prerequisites. By the end you will know how Egyptian hieroglyphic writing works as a system, read and write a first inventory of signs, and — the promise that matters — read real royal names and a real Egyptian formula carved four thousand years ago, in the original.

This course is about the writing system itself, not yet about the Egyptian language: the Middle Egyptian literacy track builds on it. If you have taken Cuneiform 101, you will recognize the machinery — word-signs, sound-signs, silent classifiersEgyptology's name for a determinative — the silent sign closing a word to say what kind of thing it is: person, speech, plural, idea — meeting it a second time in a second great tradition is the fastest way to see that it is not a curiosity but a design.

Chapters

0. Orientation — what this course is, and how to study
1. Stone, reed, and papyrus — the media that shaped two scripts in one
2. Pictures that talk — where Egyptian writing came from
3. How signs mean — sound-signs, word-signs, classifiersEgyptology's name for a determinative — the silent sign closing a word to say what kind of thing it is: person, speech, plural, idea
4. Your first signs — the one-consonant signs, the scribe's kit
5. Names in rings — cartouchesthe rope ring drawn around a royal name in Egyptian writing, and the names that cracked the code
6. The offering formula — Egypt's most-written sentence, whole
7. Two sounds in one sign — biliteralsa sound-sign spelling a fixed pair of consonants at once, the script's shortcut layer
8. Born of, son of — phonetic complementsa sound-sign that repeats part of a neighboring sign's value — spelling belt-and-suspenders, for the reader's safety, and tomb-wall family trees
9. The signs that say nothing — 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
10. Life, beauty, becoming — ankh, nefer, the scarab, the god-flag
11. The stone that talked — Rosetta, Champollion, the compass rule
12. Reference — every sign taught, conventions, further study

The course is complete — twelve chapters. Numbers, gods’ names in depth, and the hieraticthe fast cursive everyday form of Egyptian writing, done with brush and ink–demoticthe even faster successor of hieratic, used for daily business in later Egypt–Coptic line continue in this school’s later courses. Corrections are welcome in GitHub Issues.