Hieroglyphs 102 · Chapter 00

Orientation: the road to reading

Welcome back to the Egyptian school. You arrive with 101’s fifty-three signs, its conventions, and its habits — and this course assumes all of them without apology. 102 is a different kind of course: a literacy track, the same design as the cuneiform school’s 102. Fewer grand tours, more mileage. Each chapter grows your inventory by a computed batch, adds exactly as much Middle Egyptian grammar as its readings demand, and puts real lines in front of you — from tales, from doctors’ prescriptions, from temple walls.

Two signs to start

Draw each five times, as always — sky above, land below. The habit survives the course change.

The marks, refreshed in one breath

101’s orientation primer already taught every mark this track uses: the Leiden letters (ꜣ ꜥ ḥ ḫ ẖ š ṯ ḏ), the no-vowels rule and the “insert an e” habit for saying words aloud, the ≡ that joins a suffix to its word (zꜣ≡f, “his son” — the corpora print it =), the editors’ dot (msi̯) and comma (zꜣ,t). Flip back there whenever a mark looks unfamiliar; nothing new is sprung on you here. One promise for this track: when a verb starts carrying those suffixes — and in Middle Egyptian they carry the whole story — chapter 02 slows down and takes the machinery apart properly.

The road, measured

101’s Reference explained how the teaching order is computed — corpus frequency over the aes corpus’s own sign-by-sign annotations. In this course that machinery runs in the open: each chapter’s batch comes out of the computation, and next to each chapter below is the share of all sign-occurrences in the corpus that your inventory will then read.¹ Watch the number climb — and notice where it starts:

Seventy-one percent before this course begins: that is what teaching the commonest signs first buys. The track ahead is not about raw coverage anymore — it is about turning coverage into sentences.

Your first readings of the track

From the Late Period’s historical inscriptions, a god’s own boast — and your new sky-sign closing its own word:

Piece by piece:

• jnk — “I”: the independent pronoun, here in a compressed spelling the corpus records — the pot 𓏌W24 · nw · round pot — nw and basket 𓎡V31 · k · basket with handle carrying its n and k. Egyptian says “I am X” by putting jnk first and X after it, nothing else needed — a whole sentence type the very next chapter opens properly.
• nb — “lord”: 101’s basket 𓎟V30 · nb · wicker basket — lord; every, exactly as in every “lord of” title you read there.
• p,t — “the sky”: p 𓊪Q3 · p · reed mat or stool and t 𓏏X1 · t · loaf of bread spell the sound, and then your new 𓇯N1 · pt · sky stands at the end — the sky-slab closing the word sky, sound-signs below, the thing itself above, the whole system of 101 in one word.

And from the other end of the cosmos — the court of Akhenaten at Amarna, where this is what one did before the king:

• sn — “to kiss”: spelled s 𓊃O34 · z · door bolt, n 𓈖N35 · n · ripple of water, with a t 𓏏X1 · t · loaf of bread trailing on this form; kissing the ground is what an official’s day at court began with.
• tꜣ — “the earth”: your new land-sign, alone, carrying the whole word.
• n — “for”: the little preposition, 101’s water-ripple.
• nb-tꜣ,wj — “the Lord of the Two Lands”: the basket again, and 𓇿N17 · tꜣ · flat strip of land again — the royal title that names Upper and Lower Egypt in one breath. One line, and your land-sign has already worked twice.

Lord of the sky; lord of the two lands. Two new signs, and the whole vertical axis of the Egyptian world — what the gods hold and what the king holds — is yours to read.

How this course works

• Batches are computed, not curated by whim — and 101’s Reference still holds every sign’s data.
• Grammar arrives in bites, only when a reading needs it. The full grammar lives in the standard references (this track leans on James P. Allen’s Middle Egyptian, cited once here for the whole course).²
• Readings are real, cited, license-checked, and rendered in full hieroglyphs the moment the inventory allows — the ▢ boxes of 101 are already rare here, because 101 did its job.

Next: the shortest sentence in Egyptian — and what Ptahhotep meant when he said “it is water.”