Hieroglyphs 101 · Chapter 12

Reference

Egyptian scribes kept sign lists too — onomastica, they are called, catalogues of words and signs a working scribe was expected to command. This page is this course’s own: every sign taught across twelve chapters, generated from the course’s sign registry so it can never drift out of date with the lessons.

Every sign taught in 101

53 signs — counted live from the registry. The corpus rank is the sign’s occurrence rank across the annotated hieroglyphic inventories of a corpus of over 800,000 Egyptian words; smaller is commoner. Where the origin column says unclear, the course taught you the shape and its use, not a story. The set reads: all the one-consonant signs, the workhorse two- and three-consonant signs, 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’s core, the royal-name apparatus, and both signs the decipherers needed for foreign names — enough to read names, titles, family lines, offering formulae, and the two most famous cartouchesthe rope ring drawn around a royal name in Egyptian writing in the world.

Conventions used in this course

• Transliterationthe sign-by-sign rendering of ancient writing in modern letters, so every sign stays accountable is the Egyptological (Leiden) convention: ꜣ ꜥ ḥ ḫ ẖ š ṯ ḏ, printed in italics. The corpora’s ASCII (MdC) spellings — anx for ꜥnḫ — appear only when quoting raw corpus data.
• Vowels are not written. Renderings like “Amun” or “hotep” are conventional pronunciations, not readings; chapter 03 carries the full warning.
• Sign order and layout. This course prints signs in a single left-to-right line. Real inscriptions stack signs into balanced blocks and run in either direction (or in columns); chapter 11’s compass rule — read into the faces — finds the true order on any wall. Stacking is shown in figures where it matters, never silently.
• ▢ stands for a sign not yet taught — a placeholder in the course, never a gap in the original.
• ClassifiersEgyptology's name for a determinative — the silent sign closing a word to say what kind of thing it is: person, speech, plural, idea (determinativesa silent sign at the end (in cuneiform, often the front) of a word that classifies it — person, god, place, motion — never pronounced) are unpronounced and close their word; suffix pronounsa mini-pronoun glued to the end of a word — "his", "your", "hers" as a single sign are joined with ≡; editors’ brackets in transliterationthe sign-by-sign rendering of ancient writing in modern letters, so every sign stays accountable mark restored text.
• Citations: every ancient text on this site carries its Nabu URN, its source collection, and its license class. Follow the URN and you reach the monument.

Further study

• James P. Allen, Middle Egyptian (Cambridge) — the standard teaching grammar; this course cites it throughout.
• Alan Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar — the classic reference, home of the sign list whose codes (G17, N35 …) this course uses.
• The open corpus this course reads from: the Berlin- Brandenburg Academy’s Egyptian text corpora (the digital heirs of the Wörterbuch project), reachable with per-passage licenses through the Nabu library.
• Next in this school: 102 · Middle Egyptian is open — connected prose, verbs in their tenses, the tales themselves. Your fifty-three signs are its assumed inventory.

Sources and licenses

Original prose on this page and throughout the course is CC BY-SA 4.0. The ancient texts quoted in chapters 05–11 come from the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy corpora and the Leipzig literary corpus via Nabu (license class: attribution), cited in place with URNs; the Rosetta and Philae cartouchesthe rope ring drawn around a royal name in Egyptian writing are museum exhibits cited to their objects.