Introduction to 'Ten-minute hieroglyphs' - A free online course of mini-lessons for beginners
- Dr Sian Thomas
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Over the coming months I'll be posting a course of mini-lessons in Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs for beginners. To find out what to expect, keep reading. You might also be interested in my posts How hard is it to learn Egyptian hieroglyphs? and Top tips for learning Egyptian hieroglyphs.
What to expect
The mini-lessons will be aimed at complete beginners. I don't assume prior knowledge of Egyptian or any other ancient language. Each lesson will build on previous learning, so they should be done in order.
Learning objectives will be stated at the beginning of each lesson and the standard lesson format will be:
new learning that you can digest in about ten minutes;
one or more activities to help you consolidate your understanding.
Many of the activities will be interactive games or flashcards; the answers will be included in the activity itself. These activities will be linked from the relevant lesson and will be archived on the Ten-minute Hieroglyphs resources page. Where exercises involve independent translation, I'll post answers in the lesson following the one in which the exercises are set.
The course will focus on Middle Egyptian, which is the 'classical' phase of the Egyptian language, and the one that students usually learn first.
To get you started, I'm making the first lesson available immediately as a blog post. I'll add further lessons as time allows - hopefully every week or two. Old lessons will stay in the blog, so you can catch up on any you miss. I'm hoping at some point to move this course and other resources to a separate platform such as an app - details TBC!
The aims of the course
The aims of Ten-Minute Hieroglyphs are:
to give you a basic understanding of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system;
to introduce you to the vocabulary, grammar and syntax of the ancient Egyptian language that was written in hieroglyphs; and
to give you a foundation for more advanced study of the language.
Limitations/ What won't the course cover?
Because of the mini-lesson format, this course can't include:
detailed discussion of the history of the Egyptian language, its decipherment or finer points of grammar and syntax;
detailed discussion of the relationship between Middle Egyptian and earlier and later stages of the language;
lots of practice/ exercises/ consolidation - to achieve a good grasp of Middle Egyptian you'll need to do extra practice outside these lessons;
reading and discussion of extended Egyptian texts; and
how the spoken Egyptian language may have sounded. This is an area of study in its own right and too complex to cover here - in this reading course I will use conventional 'pronunciations' of hieroglyphs, which only distantly reflect the authentic sounds of the language (see later on transliteration).
If you want to go further and cover these areas you'll need a textbook such as Allen's Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs or Bussmann's Complete Middle Egyptian or to join a taught course.
Please note: this is a free course that I'm creating in my own time. Because of the mini-lesson format, it will inevitably proceed a lot more slowly and go into less detail than a live class and I can't give feedback on individual work (although I'll do my best to answer questions as time allows). I welcome feedback and comments, but please keep them constructive!
If you would like to follow Ten-Minute Hieroglyphs
There's no sign-up process - this is a completely free-access course and I hope that it will be a useful addition to publicly-available resources for learning hieroglyphs. You can check back regularly for new lessons or can join the mailing list (see the link at the top of this page) to be notified when a new lesson is added. I'll also post links to new lessons in my LinkedIn feed.
