How to Read Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs

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I love the idea of a once enthusiastic and sophisticated scribe being relegated to inscribing redundant hieroglyphics thinking "I'm a poet surrounded by idiots..."

As someone who actually learned to decipher those as part of training in Egyptology and Assyriology, this is fairly accurate, although I would add the following important information to what was said. As stated, the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were in use for three millennia. Naturally, like every language, it was subjected to language drift. The way they were written, the rules of language, and even the vocabulary shifted in that time. So when translating hieroglyphics, you have to understand that scholars typically don't treat them as a single language, for it would be as nonsensical as trying to match say French with Latin. Similar but different enough to cause problems. So you separate these in Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian. Roughly, Old Egyptian is the pyramid texts (Old Kingdom). Middle Egyptian matches the apex of Egyptian culture (Middle Kingdom) coinciding with the Ramesside epoch which saw an incredibly large production of written material in hieroglyphics, and Late Egyptian pretty much what was found on the Rosetta stone and things of that era. That still covers centuries each time. But it is already more reliable and accurate than just treating the language as singular. It evolved a lot naturally, especially with external influences.

The progression of language is always an interesting matter to consider. We often take speech and a written language for granted, but it has been key to the development of civilization and more.

I remember at school we were assigned to read "The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien (which I thought was pronounced "Irr" Tolkien because of the font used to print his name!) Anyway I was intrigued by the language printed around the end sheet papers of the book, and set out to translate them. I was delighted to find that they made sense in English! I don't think I could do it today (it's been about 60 years!) but of course now I know that Professor Tolkien's mastery was not just literature but language as well. In fact I understand that he and his brother had invented worlds and languages to play with as children!

As an Egyptian Pharaoh who ruled 2 slaves and 1 palm tree at my heyday during 420 BC (and proud landowner of a 2 meter tall pyramid for 7 minutes until it was used as a nuclear testing site for the USSR), I can confirm that your video is accurate.

I’ve been learning this for two years, so proud to be able to read this. Now i can finally understand the emojis my egyptian friend sends me

I'm Egyptian, we still use words from the ancient Egyptian language in our dialect of Arabic, the most common example is the word for woman, in Arabic its "imra'ah" but in our dialect we say "set" which means woman but in the ancient Egyptian language

Chinese works like this sorta with its phonosemantic compounds. 時, 侍, and 詩 for instance all mean completely different things but are pronounced similarly to 寺

As an indonesian, i thank you for providing knowledge about the origins of our ancient script, which comes from Brahmi. And our ancient script are Kawi, Javanese, Lontara, old sundanese & Sundanese

I can finally become an archeologist without college debt

Reminds me of the little bit of Japanese I've studied: phonetic characters (two sets of them!) mixed with logographic kanji, which sometimes have the pronunciations written next to them if the kanji is thought to be too obscure.

This reminds me of a history class project we did at school back in the 1980's. We were all tasked with creating a mini newspaper from the perspective of Egyptions long ago. Everyone wrote articles in different scripts. It was a lot of fun creating our own hieroglyphics.

Just one small add on the writing sequence (from left to right (L2R) or right to left (R2L), there is also the boustrophedon way, where you alternate from one to the other each line, like a "snake". That way, it minimizes the length of your eyes reading it. Also, Egypcians could write so that 2 texts faced the center of the temple, for aesthetic reasons.

~9:55 Nfr was probably pronounced something like "Nafir" in Old Egyptian and "Nafi'" in Middle Egyptian, "Nefer" is Egyptological pronunciation. Egyptological pronunciation is not meant to be accurate, it just fills in the vowel spaces with a default "e" to make it easier to read Egyptian words out-loud without knowing how they were originally said.

I’m glad I was busy for a while so now I can come back and binge multiple videos from this channel. I love the narrator and animations. They chose interesting topics as well!

It's also important to note that not havings simbols for vowels was quite common in tge middle east. You can see it also in hebrew and arabic for example

Priceless 😂😂. I grew up on the backend of Empire. His wit, humour & charm takes me back.

This is pretty close to how Old Norse runes work as well. There was no defined spelling at first, and was pretty much sounded out, but the Futhark runes aren't meant for Norse, and because of that, spoken runes do not sound like Norse. For example, a popular variation of the runes lacked a G sound, so they just used a K. the Old Norse word for king is konungr, but if you seen it in runes, it would sound like kunukR (the R is stressed). So if you take something written in runes and SPEAK in those runes, it'll sound mostly like gibberish. Writting in Old Norse does have a few weird rules, one of which I know of is you don't write the same rune twice in a row in a word. Like the name Gunnfús in Runes would only be spelled k-u-n-f-u-s in runes. Theres no real reason we know of why they do it, but I'm willing to bet its to save time and space.

Nice look into this ancient language