Hieroglyphs 101 · Chapter 04

Your first signs

The scribe’s kit is twenty-six signs, each reading a single consonant — together the closest thing Egyptian has to an alphabet, except that it isn’t quite one. No vowels are written. One sign, one consonant, and the reader supplies the rest, the way a shorthand note supplies the words a stenographer never wrote in full. Five of the twenty-six are already yours — the owl, the ripple, and the mouth from chapter 00, the reed from chapter 01, the jar stand from chapter 02. This chapter hands you the remaining twenty-one, and then has you sound out real words with the full kit.¹

Why these twenty-six

Edubba picks a chapter’s opening signs by two rules, applied together: how often a reading actually occurs in the corpus, and how simple the shape is to draw. For the uniliteralsa sound-sign spelling exactly one consonant the two rules barely need reconciling — they were already going to agree, because a sound that every word needs (a consonant) is a sound every scribe wrote constantly, and scribes who write a shape daily for forty years wear it down to its simplest form. Four thousand years of Egyptian schooling reached the same twenty-six signs by trial, tablet after tablet; our reading corpus, counted sign by sign, reaches them again by arithmetic. 𓏏X1 · t · loaf of bread, the loaf of bread that reads t and opens this chapter’s first tier, is the single most frequent sign in the whole corpus; your 𓈖N35 · n · ripple of water and 𓂋D21 · r · mouth from chapter 00 sit second and third. Fifteen of the twenty-six are in the corpus’s top twenty signs overall — not a coincidence, a consequence.

Simple shapes first

Six signs that are mostly lines, curves, and one bolt-shape — draw them and you will see there is barely anything to get wrong.

Write all six. 𓏏X1 · t · loaf of bread is one curved stroke closed by a flat base; 𓊃O34 · z · door bolt is a bar with an upright tick. The last one, 𓐍AA1 · ḫ · sieve? placenta?, keeps its exact ancient identity honestly unsettled — Egyptologists still argue whether the shape started as a sieve or a placenta — but its shape and reading are not in doubt at all, which is the sign of a script secure in its writing even where its pictures are not.

Signs with something alive in them

Six signs whose shapes are unmistakably a creature or a body part — the eye does the memorizing here.

Write all six. 𓄿G1 · ꜣ · Egyptian vulture’s vulture keeps its wing and its raised head; 𓆑I9 · f · horned viper’s viper is a single looping line with a triangular head — the sign you will meet most of all, for reasons that come at the end of this chapter.

The rest of the kit

Nine more: everyday objects, a scrap of landscape, and two marks that come from grammar rather than a picture at all. No less essential for arriving last.

Write all nine, then read back the full kit of twenty-six — these and your five veterans — in random order, aloud, before you go on.

How the simple ones are drawn

Every sign in this chapter has a fixed, simple scheme — the same handful of strokes, in the same order, every time. Here is that scheme for four of the plainest shapes:

Words you can already read

Twenty-six signs are enough, right now, for real Egyptian words — short ones, honestly, but genuine and heavily attested:

That last word, jw, deserves its promised demonstration, because nothing like it exists in English. Egyptian opens a plain statement of fact with a little marker word — roughly the “it is so that…” buried inside English “he is in the house”. With chapter 03’s house you can watch it work, in the textbook sentence every Egyptian grammar reaches for first:

Notice what kind of words the attested list gives you: particlesa small function word that frames or flavors a sentence without naming any thing or action, pronouns, a demonstrative, a little verb of speaking. Honest reason: a real content word — a noun, most verbs — usually carries an extra sign or two you have not met yet, so the words the corpus lets you read whole, this early, tend to be its smallest grammatical joints. That is not a weakness of this chapter; it is exactly how much weight twenty-six sounds can carry on their own.

The sign that ends a word

One sign from this chapter dwarfs every other reading in the corpus: 𓆑I9 · f · horned viper, the horned viper, spelling f. Written alone at the end of a word it is not the consonant f in isolation — it is the suffix pronoun “he” or “his”: 13,964 attestations, the most frequent uniliterala sound-sign spelling exactly one consonant spelling in the corpus by a wide margin. 𓎡V31 · k · basket with handle, the basket, does the same job for “you” or “your”; 𓋴S29 · s · folded cloth, the folded cloth, for “she” or “hers”. A single viper sitting at the end of a word you are sounding out is not decoration — it is somebody’s “his”. The full grammar of these pronouns belongs to the literacy track ahead; here, it is enough to recognize the payoff a single sign can carry.

Two honest notes

No vowels are written. Egyptian spelling gives you consonants only; Egyptologists insert an e between them purely so the word can be said aloud — ḏd is pronounced “djed” by convention, not because any ancient scribe wrote a vowel there. Treat every vocalization in this course as a modern reading aid, not a fact about ancient speech.

Two signs share a sound, twice over. 𓅱G43 · w · quail chick and 𓏲Z7 · w · coil (cursive quail chick) both read w — the quail chick and a cursive shorthand of the very same chick, drawn fast until it became its own sign. 𓊃O34 · z · door bolt and 𓋴S29 · s · folded cloth both once read distinct sounds, z and s, that later Egyptian let merge; this course keeps both spellings apart because the sign lists do, and because you will meet both in real texts.

Drill before you go on

1. Draw each tier from memory: the six simple shapes, the six living creatures, the nine objects and marks — then the five veterans from chapters 00-02.
2. Write 𓆓I10 · ḏ · cobra at rest𓂧D46 · d · hand, 𓊪Q3 · p · reed mat or stool𓈖N35 · n · ripple of water, and 𓎛V28 · ḥ · twisted wick𓈖N35 · n · ripple of water𓂝D36 · ꜥ · forearm without looking at the tables.
3. Read 𓊪Q3 · p · reed mat or stool𓈖N35 · n · ripple of water, 𓇋M17 · j · flowering reed𓅓G17 · m · owl, and 𓏏X1 · t · loaf of bread𓄿G1 · ꜣ · Egyptian vulture cold, aloud, no hesitation.
4. Anything shaky — five more repetitions. Chapter 05 assumes all twenty-six.

Next: names in rings — the cartouchethe rope ring drawn around a royal name in Egyptian writing, and real kings read by name.